The Lion Sleeps Tonight

SteynonLine ^ | May 26, 2024 | Mark Steyn

[Twotone]

Every generation has a sleeping lion just waiting to wake and roar up the charts. In the early Eighties "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" got to Number One in Britain for Tight Fit. Can't quite place Tight Fit? It sounds like a vaguely parodic name for a boy band, but in fact they were a coed combo - one boy, two girls, a male model and two female dancers, hired as a photogenic front after the record had already been made. The girls had failed to make the cut at an audition for the more successfully contrived group, Bucks Fizz, and were shortly booted out of Tight Fit, too. But for a few weeks in 1982 on the BBC's "Top Of The Pops" they did well enough moving about in synchronized "Wimowehs" while the male model mouthed to a vocal track actually sung by a guy from the band City Boy:

The bottom inevitably drops out of the Tight Fits of the music biz, but "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" roars on regardless. It's one of the biggest songs ever about a lion, apart from the Oscar-winning "Born Free" and the Eagles' "You can't hide those lion eyes". "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" has been a hit in every medium - on movie screens all over the world, in Disney's The Lion King, and then on Broadway, in the stage version. Before Tight Fit, it was a Billboard Number Three for Robert John in the Seventies, a Number One for the Tokens in the Sixties; under the title "Wimoweh", it was a hit for the Weavers in the Fifties, and in the Forties, as "Mbube"... Ah, but that's where the story gets murkier.

Who wrote those words about the mighty jungle? It was a guy called George Weiss...

[TChad]

That's a great insight into the "authenticity" of the folk boom: the most famous Zulu word on the planet was invented by a New York socialist in 1951:

Steyn on a roll.

[jocon307]

I love these “the story behind the song” pieces, and this one may be the most interesting one I’ve read.

I don’t remember the song being used in the Lion King, but it’s possible I never did see that movie.

A bit disappointed in Seeger, he is my fave commie, but there you go, he’s a commie!

[packagingguy]

Is it a take on “Run Johnny Run”?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=drRzgkI6Qm8&pp=ygUOcnVuIGpvaG5ueSBydW4%3D

[Keyhopper]

Watch the Pina colada song on YouTube. The guy looks like he’s having an epilitc fiy

[Beowulf9]

No, lol.