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Singer/songwriter Bob Gibson was a defining figure in the folk music revival starting in the late 1950s, but a crushing dependence on heroin and other drugs sank his career, his marriage and many of his long-time friendships.Gibson — who wrote songs like “Abilene” and “There's a Meeting Here Tonight” that were performed by artists such as Peter, Paul and Mary, The Limeliters and Simon and Garfunkel, as well as The Byrds, The Smothers Brothers and others — hit rock bottom in the late '60s.The Road Down“I left the business in '66,” Gibson wrote in his autobiography, I Come for to Sing. “It seemed to me working in clubs, being on the road, being in show business and around musicians caused me to use drugs. I thought if I got away from that, everything would be fine.”To that end, he spent almost three years in a country hideaway with his young family trying to get clean, but ultimately, he wrote, the hiatus failed its mission.The early 1970s found Gibson relocating again, this time to the West Coast, commuting for occasional gigs in clubs in Chicago and Los Angeles. “I was just hanging in,” he wrote, “doing the same set of songs, and I wasn't writing or learning.”Enter ShelBut then he reconnected with an old friend — writer/artist Shel Silverstein — who helped “in jarring me out of this,” Gibson said. “Shel would come up there and we'd write songs.”Meanwhile, what he called “a classic music business snafu” torpedoed his last major label release, so in 1974 — re-energized by the songs he had written with Shel — Gibson started one of the country's first-ever artist-owned record companies. In those days, his new Legend Enterprises label was a novel approach to making records.Bob's Funky In The Country was its first release, recorded live at the legendary Amazingrace Coffeehouse in Evanston, Ill., near Chicago.Buoyed by a rave review in Billboard magazine, the album gave the fledgling label a fine start, but it was quickly undermined by Gibson himself: The first stop on the road to promote his new album was a few months in rehab. By the time Bob was ready to travel again, the momentum had moved on.The SongA highlight of that lovely album — “Two Nineteen Blues” — is built around Gibson's imaginative reworking of several long-standing blues motifs.His chorus (“I'm going down to the river / Gonna take along my rocking chair”) comes from well-known versions of “Trouble in Mind” as sung by everyone from folkie Cisco Houston to soulful Sam Cooke to country's Johnny Cash.And the song's hook (“Gonna lay my head down on some lonesome railroad line / And let the two-nineteen come along and pacify my mind”) has even deeper blues roots.No less an authority than the great Jelly Roll Morton said “Mamie's Blues” — from which the line comes — was “no doubt the first blues I heard in my life. Mamie Desdunes, this was her favorite blues. She hardly could play anything else more, but she really could play this number.”Desdunes (sometimes written Desdoumes) was a well-known singer and pianist in “The District,” as New Orleanians called the area now generally remembered as “Storyville.”What's in a Name?Blues historian Elijah Wald notes the old song's title is often given as “2:19 Blues,” as if referring to a train time; however, jazz historian Charles Edward Smith recalled Morton explaining that the 219 was the train that “took the gals out on the T&P (Texas and Pacific railroad) to the sporting houses on the Texas side of the circuit.”Despite all its lyrical borrowings from blues antiquity, “Two Nineteen Blues” is unmistakably a Bob Gibson creation. He brought to it a completely new melody and fresh lyrics brimming with his trademark sass and winking understatement. For example, Bob sealed the deal in a final verse that finds his antagonist in a small-town jail, where: I hit the judge and I run like hell And the sheriff he's still askin' ‘round ‘bout me.Our Take on the TuneFor folks who know The Flood only from its studio albums, this is the first tune they may have ever heard from the band.That's because this rollicking composition was what the guys played on the opening track of their very first commercial album nearly a quarter of a century ago now. And speaking of names, because of a design error, the song was erroneously listed on that inaugural album as “Rocking Chair,” a name it has retained in the Floodisphere ever since.A lot changes in a band over the decades, but good old tunes — under whatever name — are like cherished letters from home. Here's a version from a recent rehearsal. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

We look at songs from a few of the major protest movements in our lifetime – racism, Vietnam, Ireland, Margaret Thatcher! From Woody Guthrie, through Springsteen and Dylan, to racism and Vietnam and the UK's  Margaret Thatcher, to present-day Australia, we look at some of the great protest songs.  Some of the stories behind those songs will take your breath away.   Our “Album You Must Hear before You Die” this time is Talking Heads' awesome “Remain in Light” from 1980.  This album has been hailed as Talking Heads' greatest statement, the last and most accomplished of the trio of albums they recorded with Brian Eno (another of our idols). Seemingly timed to coincide with our review, the live movie “Stop Making Sense” has been completely restored and is in 4K on the big screen - 40 years on!  We also talk about how Ed Kuepper achieves such a big sound in concert using a special edition Fender Stratocaster. There's sure to be stuff you didn't know here!  References:  Ed Kuepper, Fender FSR Stratocaster X, Talking Heads, “Remain in Light”, Brian Eno, “Once in a Lifetime”, “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts”, USA – Vietnam, Women's & Black rights, Woody Guthrie, Springsteen, Cisco Houston, Bob Dylan, “Hurricane”, “Eve of Destruction”, Barry McGuire, “A Change is Gonna come”, Sam Cooke, “People Get Ready”, Curtis Mayfield, Rod Stewart & Jeff Beck, “Strange Fruit”, Billie Holliday, James Brown, Stevie Wonder, Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five, NWA, Public Enemy, Buffalo Springfield / Steve Stills & Neil Young, “I Feel Like I'm fixin' to die Rag”, Country Joe and the Fish, Edwin Starr, Give Peace a Chance, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, Aretha Franklin, The Smiths, Billy Bragg, Elvis Costello, Robert Wyatt, The Cranberries, Midnight Oil, Goanna, Warumpi Band, Archie Roach Protest Playlist18,000 sing TotoKiss mass Russian GroupSmells Like Teen Spirit We Will Rick You

This podcast chronicles of some of the rock, roots and blues events that occurred in the month of Oct in years gone by. Playlist: Artist - Track. 1 Ma Rainey - See See Rider Blues. 2 The Animals - CC Rider. 3 Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels - CC Rider. 4 Old Crow Medicine Show - CC Rider. 5 Victoria Spivey - Blood Thirsty Blues. 6 Bill Doggett - Wild Oats. 7 Louis Jordan & His Tympany Five - Is You Is Or Is You Ain't Ma Baby. 8 The Who - My Generation. 9 Madness - One Step Beyond. 10 Big Joe Williams - Baby Please Don't Go. 11 Chuck Berry - Little Queenie. 12 Jefferson Airplane - Somebody To Love. 19 Son House - Levee Camp Blues 20 Skip James - Crow Jane 21 Fats Domino - Blue Monday. 22 Sister Rosetta Tharpe - Didn't It Rain. 23 Canned Heat - Rollin' and Tumblin'. 24 Lou Reed - Walk On The Wild Side. 25 Cream - White Room. 26 Janis Joplin, Big Brother & The Holding Company - Piece Of My Heart. 27 Tom Petty - Free Fallin'. 28 This Mortal Coil - Mr. Somewhere. 29 Woody Guthrie with Cisco Houston & Sonny Terry - Hard Travelin'. 30 Tony Joe White - Hoochie Woman. 31 Jerry Jeff Walker - Hill Country Rain. 32 Nelson Riddle & His Orchestra - Theme From Route 66. 33 Marianne Faithfull - Sister Morphine. 34 Blind Lemon Jefferson - That Crawlin' Baby Blues. 35 Lonnie Johnson - Hot Fingers. Size: 203 MB (213,595,505 bytes) Duration: 1:28:58

March in Rock, Roots and Blues History. PLAYLIST: ARTIST - TRACK. 1 Jo Jo Zep & the Falcons - Security. 2 Renee Geyer - It' s A Man' s Man' s Man' s World. 3 Johnny London - Drivin' Slow. 4 Elvis Presley - Blue Hawaii. 5 Pink Floyd - Breathe. 6 Bo Diddley - Bo Diddley. 7 Jackie Brenston & his Delta Cats - Rocket 88. 8 The Rolling Stones - Ruby Tuesday. 9 Patsy Cline - I Fall To Pieces. 10 Little Charlie & The Nightcats - So Good. 11 Ike & Tina Turner - River Deep Mountain High. 12 Skip James - Crow Jane. 13 Lavern Baker - Jim Dandy. 14 Woody Guthrie with Cisco Houston and Sonny Terry - Hard Travelin' . 15 The Velvet Underground - I' m Waiting For The Man. 16 Otis Redding - The Dock Of The Bay. 17 The Blues Brothers - Peter Gunn Theme. 18 The Blues Brothers - Theme From Rawhide. 19 T Bone Walker - Don' t Leave Me Baby. 20 Dick Dale & His Del-Tones - Misirlou. 21 Chuck Berry - Maybellene. 22 Duane Allman - Goin' Down Slow. 23 The Yardbirds - For Your Love. 24 Roxy Music - Love Is The Drug. Size: 122 MB (127,941,269 bytes) Duration: 0:53:16

More than a hundred years ago, musicologist John Lomax recorded an African American woman named "Dink" singing a song as she washed her man's clothes in a Texas work camp on the banks of the Brazos River near Houston.Lomax and his son, Alan, were the first to publish it, including it in American Ballads and Folk Songs, which Macmillan brought out in 1934.A decade later, the great Josh White put the song on his first album. Since then, it has been recorded by scores of performers — Pete Seeger and Cisco Houston, Bob Dylan and Fred Neil — sometimes as "Fare Thee Well," but most often simply as "Dink's Song."Now flash forward three quarters of a century and a highlight of Joel and Ethan Coen's extraordinary 2013 film “Inside Llewyn Davis,” set in one winter's week in 1961 Greenwich Village, is Oscar Isaac, in the title role, performing a moody rendition of the same tune.That moment especially resonates with all us folk music lovers, because most of us learned the song from a 1960s recording by the late folk genius Dave Van Ronk, whose work seems to have inspired the Coens' film in the first place. Dear Dave. They didn't call him “the mayor of MacDougal Street” for nothing.Our Take on the TuneHave you ever notice the magic in folk melodies, that they are both ancient and stunningly contemporary at the same time?And the magic doesn't end there. Besides their wonderful timelessness, these well-worn melodies also are almost universal in their emotional appeal.This song has floated around the Floodisphere for many years, but it didn't really take flight until Vanessa came along to blend it with a soulful Old World aire, and then Randy stepped up to take the lead on the vocals. Here, with pensive soloing by Dan and Sam, is our merging of the thoroughly American “Dink's Song” and the lovely Scottish “Loch Lomond.” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

Episode XXXII was cobbled together on my travels around the USA and is now online - featuring new songs and interviews with Andy the Doorbum and others as well as numerous iterations of the tune The Girl I left Behind Me by The Pogues the Skillet Lickers, Sweeney's Men, Seán MacDonnchadha, Cisco Houston and more, some songs from the South East of Ireland, a song in a dead Irish language, as well as some murderous transatlantic fun. ***Note - because of the limited nature of my resources while travelling the audio quality of this episode is not as good as that of others. I also seem to have become confused about the nature of concepts relating to past, present and future. Please excuse these inconsistencies and have confidence that both my audio and neurological hardware will be back to their normal state next month!*** https://campsite.bio/firedrawnear #firedrawnear #endlessdescentofthetraditionaryweirdo Tracklist: Sweeney's Men – Waxie's Dargle The Skillet Lickers – The Girl I left Behind Me CPNPC – The Girl I Left Behind Me Sean MacDonnachadha – An Spailpín Fánach The Pogues – The Rare Ould Mountain Dew Cisco Houston – Mysteries of a Hobo's Life Seán Óg Ó Tuama - Wexford Mummers Song Paddy Berry – The Forth Men and Bargy Men Elspeth Ann – Mercy Me Lloyd Chandler – A Conversation with Death Dellie Norton – Young Emily Maggie Murphy – Young Edmund Andy the Doorbum – The Unquiet Grave campsite.bio/firedrawnear

Jerome presents March events in rock, roots and blues history. Playlist: Artist - Tracks. 1 Jo Jo Zep and the Falcons - Security. 2 Renee Geyer - Its A Mans Mans Mans World. 3 Johnny London - Drivin Slow. 4 Elvis Presley - Blue Hawaii. 5 Pink Floyd - Breathe. 6 Bo Diddley - Bo Diddley. 7 Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats - Rocket 88. 8 The Rolling Stones - Ruby Tuesday. 9 Patsy Cline - I Fall To Pieces. 10 Little Charlie and The Nightcats - So Good. 11 Ike And Tina Turner - River Deep Mountain High. 12 Skip James - Crow Jane. 13 Lavern Baker - Jim Dandy. 14 Woody Guthrie with Cisco Houston and Sonny Terry - Hard Travelin. 15 The Velvet Underground - Im Waiting For The Man. 16 Otis Redding - The Dock Of The Bay. 17 Blues Brothers - Peter Gunn Theme. 18 Blues Brothers - Theme From Rawhide. 19 T Bone Walker - Dont Leave Me Baby. 20 Dick Dale and His Del Tones - Misirlou. 21 Chuck Berry - Maybellene. 22 Duane Allman - Goin Down Slow. 23 The Yardbirds - For Your Love. 24 Roxy Music - Love Is The Drug. Size: 122 MB (127,941,269 bytes). Duration: 00:53:16

En el acto de Proclamación del Presidente de los Estados Unidos de Norteamérica siempre ha habido música de destacados artistas. En 2021, con Joe Biden, ha actuado, entre otros, Jennifer López que hizo una brillante interpretación del tema "This Land is Your Land" escrita por Woody Guthrie. Oimos su versión y la original de hace siete u ocho décadas. Tras ella terminamos nuestra serie, "Folk & Blues Story" Volumen 3: B4–Lightnin' Hopkins: Long Gone Like The Turkey Through The Corn B5–Leadbelly: Blackbetty B6–Leadbelly: Yellow Woman's Door Bells B7–Woody Guthrie: John Henry "Folk & Blues Story" fue un encargo realizado por Joaquín Diaz. Carlos Guitart le sugirió dos artistas comerciales ajenos a ella: Ray Charles y John Lee Hooker. Joaquin aceptó pidiendo a cambio que le dejara hacer un elepé solo de Folk. Lo hizo y lo repasamos. Se llamó "Pioneros del Folk Song", acople hecho especialmente por Joaquín Diaz para Movieplay en 1970 con tres discos de Folkways: "Cowboy Songs", "Lonesome Valley" y "American Work Songs. Fue uno de los primeros discos del sello Folkways editado en España y el primero autóctono. A1.- Pete Seeger, Bess Lomax, Tom Glazer, Butch Hawes: Down In The Valley (Bess Lomax era hermana de Alan Lomax (hijo) y mujer de Butch Hawes) A2.- Pete Seeger Group: Black Eyed Suzie A3.- Butch Hawes and Group: Arthritis Blues A4.- Cisco Houston: The Rambler B2.- Cisco Houston: On Top Of Old Smoky B3.- Cisco Houston & Woody Guthrie: Sowing On The Mountain B4.- Pete Seeger: The Erie Canal B5.- Woody Guthrie and Group: Cowboy Waltz (instrumental) B8.- Pete Seeger: Gee, But I Want To Go Home Mañana celebraremos el 75 cumpleaños de Carlos Cano, recuperando su concierto en el Encuentro de Jóvenes Intérpretes de Jaén 1987. Escuchar audio

Año 1970. En España no sabemos casi nada de Folk y Blues. Algunos aficionados pioneros sí, pero la mayoría no. Carlos Guitart (bajista de Los Sonor) es entonces director artístico de Movieplay. Parece que en el MIDEM de Cannes del año anterior entra en contacto con un subsello de Barclay llamado BYG orientado al jazz, la vanguardia (Actuel) y las ediciones más alternativas, menos comerciales y por tanto más asequibles, entre ellas el folk y el blues. Guitart compra los derechos de Folk & Blues Story, proyecto de Jacques Barsamian, y le encarga la edición a Joaquín Díaz. Se publican tres volúmenes, de los cuales hoy repasamos el segundo. Ayer al revisar el primer volumen nos tropezamos con dos temas de Ray Charles. Joaquín Díaz no estuvo por la labor de que quitaran el espacio de Cisco Houston en la edición original, pero Guitart consideró que sí, que así daba un toque más atractivo para los jóvenes; incluso puso su nombre en portada en primer lugar, aunque no hubiera más temas. En el volumen 2 hizo lo mismo con John Lee Hooker. En este volumen 3 no he detectado ningún cambio. Volumen 2: B4–Big Bill Broonzy: See See Rider B5–Pete Seeger: The Greenland Fisheries B6–Pete Seeger: Winns Boro Cotton Mill Blues B7–Sonny Terry: Long John Volumen 3: A1–Lightnin' Hopkins: Long Time A2–Lightnin' Hopkins: Rainy Day Blues A3–Josh White: Git along home Cindy A4–Josh White: So Soon A5–Big Bill Broonzy: Feelin' Lowdown A6–Big Bill Broonzy: All I Got Belongs To You A7–Pete Seeger: Road to Eilat A8–Cisco Houston: Ezekiel Saw The Wheel B1–Sonny Terry: Lost John B2–Sonny Terry: Chain Gang Blues B3–Lightnin' Hopkins: Baby B4–Lightnin' Hopkins: Long Gone Like The Turkey Through The Corn (Habrá un cuarto capitulo, mañana) Escuchar audio

Año 1970. En España no sabemos casi nada de Folk y Blues. Algunos aficionados pioneros sí, pero la mayoria no. Carlos Guitart (bajista de Los Sonor) es entonces director artístico de Movieplay. Parece que en el MIDEM de Cannes del año anterior entra en contacto con un subsello de Barclay llamado BYG orientado al jazz, la vanguardia (Actuel) y las ediciones más alternativas, menos comerciales y por tanto más asequibles, entre ellas el folk y el blues. Guitart compra los derechos de Folk & Blues Story y le encarga la edición a Joaquín Díaz. Se publican tres volúmenes, de los cuales hoy repasamos el segundo. Ayer al revisar el primer volumen nos tropezamos con dos temas de Ray Charles. Joaquín Díaz no estuvo por la labor de que quitaran el espacio de Cisco Houston en la edición original, pero Guitart consideró que sí, que así daba un toque más atractivo para los jóvenes; incluso puso su nombre en portada en primer lugar aunque no hubiera más temas. En este volumen 2 hace lo mismo con John Lee Hooker quitando dos blues de Lightning Hopkins. B7–Big Bill Broonzy: Sixteen tons Volumen 2: A1–Woody Gutherie: Pretty Boy Floyd A2–Woody Gutherie: Poor Boy A3–Cisco Houston: The Golden Vanity A4–Cisco Houston: Cumberland Gap A5–Josh White: Bon Bon's A6–Josh White: What I Want From You A7–Leadbelly: Burrow Love' Go B1-John Lee Hooker: It Hurts me so B2-John Lee Hooker: Tease your Daddy B3–Big Bill Broonzy: Ridin' On Down B4–Big Bill Broonzy: See See Rider El finde no os perdáis Discópolis Jazz a la misma hora. Mañana con Ramón Leal en 1982 y el domingo con Ernesto Aurignac tocando en un establo de Austria el verano pasado. Escuchar audio

Hace 20 años que salió a la venta la banda sonora de una película tan determinante como O Brother, Where Art Thou?. Comenzando el siglo XXI, la producción de T Bone Burnett consiguió seis premios Grammy en su edición anual número 44, entre ellas, mejor álbum del año y mejor recopilación para una banda sonora. El tema central de aquella cinta, “I Am A Man Of Constant Sorrow”, se grabó originalmente 80 años antes, en 1922, y nunca hubiera trascendido de esta manera si los hermanos Ethan y Joel Cohen no lo hubieran incluido en la banda sonora de la película O Brother, Where Art Thou?, que protagonizaron George Clooney y John Turturro en 2000. La voz de Dan Tyminski, miembro de la Union Station de Alison Krauss, completó el cuadro. El resultado fueron ventas superiores a siete millones de copias de su banda sonora, ganando multitud de premios. Pero por encima de todo ello, protagonizó un renacimiento del bluegrass que nadie podía prever. Vienen desde Front Royal, en Virginia, y se llaman Scythian, aunque se iniciaron hace una docena de años en la universidad, cuando tocaban música celta por las calles de Washington DC. La base del cuarteto son los hermanos Alexander y Danylo Fedoryka, hijos de inmigrantes ucranianos, entusiasmados por recuperar la old time music, que siempre ha sido good time music, sin pararse en fronteras geográficas. Es la música que se baila en los graneros cada fin de semana. "Galway City", que forma parte de su nuevo álbum, Roots & Stones, tiene que ver con esa ciudad de la Costa oeste de Irlanda, sus rincones, sus paisajes y, como no, sus pubs. Es una forma de volver a los días felices compartidos con amigos, como ellos mismos han hecho en los últimos siete años, en los que organizan un viaje anual con sus seguidores. Una canción que te pone una pinta en la mano. Cuando Sturgill Simpson se recuperaba del coronavirus en la primera ola de la pandemia empezó a pensar en filtrar a través del bluegrass algunas de las canciones que ha repartido por sus diferentes álbumes, tanto en solitario como formando parte de Sunday Valley, su primitiva banda. Junto a los mejores instrumentistas del género se recluyó en los Butcher Shoppe Studios de Nashville y nos sorprendió a todos con el álbum Cuttin ’Grass Vol 1 - The Butcher Shoppe Sessions, que ha dejado obras de arte como “I Don’t Mind”, un tema que si nadie lo remedia es la mejor canción del año. Arm in Arm ha sido la última apuesta de Steep Canyon Rangers, la banda de North Carolina que en este siglo XXI que va a cumplir sus primeras dos décadas ha dado muestras de la evolución exponencial del bluegrass. "Every River" es la fusión perfecta del bluegrass y el góspel que la banda de Carolina del Norte ha utilizado para animarnos a enfrentarnos a los desafíos del presente con una nota de esperanza. Un disco grabado en los estudios Southern Ground de Nashville, producido junto a Brandon Bell y en el que mantienen el respeto y la veneración por las tradiciones del bluegrass sin dejar de explorar nuevos caminos, como ocurre en “A Body Like Your”. Cuando tanto echamos de menos aquellos conciertos en que nos encontrábamos y compartimos experiencias entrañables, no está de más recuperar momentos como el MerleFest, celebrado en la primavera del pasado 2019 en Wilkesboro, North Carolina, con Steep Canyon Rangers como uno de sus protagonistas, como nativos del estado. Allí rindieron homenaje a James Taylor, un bastión fundamental de la música más enraizada, recuperando “Sweet Baby James”, aquella canción mágica que nombró el segundo LP en solitario del bostoniano y que él dedicó a su sobrino James, hijo de su hermano Alex. El músico de Boston acaba de publicar un EP con tres canciones grabadas durante las sesiones de American Standard, su último álbum de primeros de este 2020. Un disco muy entrañable que tiene continuación con esos tres estándar que eran inéditos hasta ahora en su voz. Ha escogido, "Never Never Land" de Peter Pan, para dar título al EP se ha fijado a El Mago de Oz y su inolvidable “Over The Rainbow”, y también ha elegido “I’ve Grown Accustomed To Her Face” de My Fair Lady que cantaba Rex Harrison en el musical que protagonizó junto a Julie Andrews basado en el Pygmalion de Bernard Shaw. Es una forma de reinventar canciones inmortales que han sobrevivido a lo largo del tiempo y que se han ido transmitiendo a través de distintas generaciones. Tiene 24 años y un espectro sonoro que puede abarcar desde Neil Young a Bob Dylan con algunos tintes de Paul Simon. Así podemos escuchar a Zach Bryan en “Traveling Man”, un tema propio de su EP Quiet, Heavy Dreams en el que revela su interés por contar las formas de vida sencilla de la clase trabajadora en el campo de su pequeña ciudad natal de Oologah, en Oklahoma. Era el nombre de Nube Negra, jefe Cherokee que habitó la zona con su tribu hasta la llegada del ferrocarril. Zach Bryan es un okie sencillo que aprendió a tocar la guitarra que le regalaron su padre y su abuelo y a componer canciones con tonalidades que provienen del hillbilly, el folk y el blues. Tras regresar del ejército empezó a subir canciones a YouTube, el año pasado lanzó su álbum DeAnn, grabado en su propio granero, y ahora sigue manteniendo esos sueños tranquilos y potentes. No podemos dejar pasar de largo a Sister Sadie, elegidas como Grupo Vocal y Artista del Año por la International Bluegrass Music Association, siendo el primer grupo femenino que se lleva este último premio, el más importante del género. Curiosamente el nombre es el de un estándar del jazz de Horace Silver. Compartiendo un rico espacio que tiene sus raíces en los sonidos de los Apalaches de Mother Maybelle Carter, aunque los hombres han acaparado casi siempre sus caminos, Deanie Richardson, Gena Britt, Tina Adair y Dale Ann Bradley ya han mostrado su categoría en proyectos independientes en solitario. Sister Sadie II nos regaló momentos tan magníficos como “900 Miles”, una legendaria canción popular de cowboys que grabó Cisco Houston y versionó Odetta a principios de los 60. Tina Adair se inspiró precisamente en ella para interpretarla ahora. En el verano de 1971, Joni Mitchell incluyó en su álbum Blue una obra maestra en forma de canción navideña llamada "River", con una introducción al piano del popular “Jingle Bells”. En realidad, está basada en la ruptura de la artista canadiense con Graham Nash, con quien mantuvo una relación amorosa entre 1968 y 1970. Era un intento de superar los profundos vínculos emocionales que sin duda mantuvieron, aunque cuando la compuso ya era novia de James Taylor. Ahora ha sido recreada por una de sus seguidoras más fieles, Margo Price, de esta manera tan solemne. Coincide con la edición de su álbum 'Perfectly Imperfect at The Ryman, que anticipamos en TOMA UNO la pasada primavera, cuando lo publicó digitalmente para apoyar al Fondo de Ayuda MusiCares COVID-19. Perfectly Imperfect at the Ryman es una colección de canciones grabadas por Margo Price durante las tres noches de conciertos en el Ryman Auditorium de Nashville en la primavera de 2018. Para ello contó con invitados como Jack White, Emmylou Harris y Sturgill Simpson, que produjo el nuevo álbum de estudio de la artista de Aledo, en Illinois, That’s How Rumors Get Started. Entre las 11 canciones allí incluidas y que han visto la luz en formato físico ayer mismo, se incluye la inédita “Revelations”, que compuso con su marido Jeremy Ivey, a quien encontramos apoyándola en la guitarra acústica y la voz, además de contar con el simple arrope de dos violines y un chelo. Trata sobre un Jesús con resaca tras salir del sepulcro. Cuando escuchamos a Devin Tuel en “Even Peace”, una de las piezas deliciosas del nuevo álbum de Native Harrow, Closeness, no podemos dejar de pensar en las tonalidades vocales siempre perfectas y sedosas de la Joan Baez del Greenwich Village neoyorquino, con lo que podemos unir las dos costas de Estados Unidos en la década de los 60 gracias a otros apuntes que nos llevan a las colinas de Laurel Canyon y rememoran a Joni Mitchell. Les esperábamos este pasado mes de Junio, pero la pandemia evitó que la frescura de su música iluminara el comienzo del verano. Hemos venido siguiendo a Juana Everett desde que la conocimos como T-Juana y hoy cerramos TOMA UNO con "Drifter of Love", un anticipo desde la californiana Glendale de un proyecto que supondrá su primer álbum, Move On, tras su marcha a Los Angeles, donde ha afianzado sus formas bajo las notas de un dominante folk-rock que arropa sus experiencias personales transformadas en nuevas canciones. Sabemos que ha sido un largo recorrido que ahora deja fluir con mucha más frescura una honesta emotividad. Escuchar audio

Episode ninety-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" by The Tokens, and at a seventy-year-long story of powerful people repeatedly ripping off less powerful people, then themselves being ripped off in turn by more powerful people, and at how racism meant that a song that earned fifteen million dollars for other people paid its composer ten shillings. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.   Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Tossin' and Turnin'" by Bobby Lewis.   Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/   ----more----   ERRATUM: I say “Picture in Your Wallet” when I mean “Picture in My Wallet”.   Resources   As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.    Rian Malan's 2000 article on Solomon Linda and The Lion Sleeps Tonight can be found here.   This 2019 article brings the story of the legal disputes up to date.   The information about isicathamiya comes from Nightsong: Performance, Power and Practice in South Africa by Veit Erlmann.   This collection of early isicathamiya and Mbube music includes several tracks by the Evening Birds.   Information on Pete Seeger and the Weavers primarily comes from Pete Seeger vs. The Un-Americans: A Tale of the Blacklist by Edward Renehan.   This collection has everything the Weavers recorded before their first split.   This is the record of one of the legal actions taken during Weiss' dispute with Folkways in the late eighties and early nineties.   Information on the Tokens came from This is My Story.   There are, surprisingly, no budget compilations of the Tokens' music, but this best-of has everything you need.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?   Transcript   Today we're going to look at a song that became a worldwide hit in multiple versions, and which I can guarantee everyone listening to this podcast has heard many times. A song that has been recorded by REM, that featured in a Disney musical, and which can be traced back from a white doo-wop group through a group of Communist folk singers to a man who was exploited by racist South African society -- a man who invented an entire genre of music, which got named after his most famous song, but who never saw any of the millions that his song earned for others, and died in poverty. We're going to look at the story of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight":   [Excerpt: The Tokens, "The Lion Sleeps Tonight"]   The story of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" is a story that goes back to 1939, when a singer called Solomon Linda was performing in South Africa. Linda was a Zulu, and thus in the racist regime of South Africa was largely without rights. Linda was, in the thirties and forties, probably the single most important performer in South Africa. He was the leader of a vocal group called the Evening Birds, who were the most popular isicathamiya group in South Africa.   Isicathamiya -- and I hope I'm pronouncing that right -- was a form of music which has a lot of parallels to some of the American vocal group music we've looked at, largely because it comes from some of the same roots. I don't pretend to be an expert on the music by any means -- I'll put a link on the podcast webpage to a book which has far more information about this -- but as best I understand it, it's a music created when rural black people were forcibly displaced in the late nineteenth century and forced to find work in the city.   Those people combined elements of traditional Zulu music with two more Western elements. The first was the religious music that they heard from Church missions, and the second was American minstrel songs, heard from troupes of minstrels that toured the country, especially a black performer named Orpheus McAdoo, who led a troupe of minstrel and gospel performers who toured South Africa a lot in the late nineteenth century.   This new style of music was usually performed a capella, though sometimes there might be a single instrument added, and it gained a relatively formalised structure -- it would almost always have very specific parts based on European choral music, with parts for a tenor, a soprano, an alto, and a bass, in strict four-part harmony -- though the soprano and alto parts would be sung in falsetto by men. It would usually be based around the same I, IV, and V chords that most Western popular music was based on, and the Zulu language would often be distorted to fit Western metres, though the music was still more freeform than most of the Western music of the time.   This music started to be recorded in around 1930, and you can get an idea of the stylistic range from two examples. Here's "Umteto we Land Act" by Caluza's Double Quartet:   [Excerpt, "Umteto We Land Act", Caluza's Double Quartet"]   While here's the Bantu Glee Singers, singing "Jim Takata Kanjani":   [Excerpt: The Bantu Glee Singers, "Jim Takata Kanjani"]   Solomon Linda's group, the Evening Birds, sang in this style, but incorporated a number of innovations. One was that they dressed differently -- they wore matching striped suits, rather than the baggy trousers that the older groups wore -- but also, they had extra bass singers. Up until this point, there would be four singers or multiples of four, with one singer singing each part. The Evening Birds, at Linda's instigation, had a much thicker bass part, and in some ways prefigured the sound of doo-wop that would take over in America twenty years later.   Their music was often political -- while the South African regime was horribly oppressive in the thirties, it wasn't as oppressive as it later became, and a certain amount of criticism of the government was allowed in ways it wouldn't be in future decades.   At the time, the main way in which this music would be performed was at contests with several groups, most of whom would be performing the same repertoire. An audience member would offer to pay one of the groups a few pennies to start singing -- and then another audience member, when they got bored with the first group, would offer that group some more money to stop singing, before someone else offered another group some money. The Evening Birds quickly became the centre of this scene, and between 1933 and 1948, when they split, they were the most popular group around. As with many of the doo-wop groups they so resembled, they had a revolving lineup with members coming and going, and joining other groups like the Crocodiles and the Dundee Wandering Singers. There was even a second group called the Evening Birds, with a singer who sounded like Linda, and who had a long-running feud with Linda's group.   But it wasn't this popularity that got the Evening Birds recorded. It was because Solomon Linda got a day job packing records for Gallo Records, the only record label in South Africa, which owned the only recording studio in sub-Saharan Africa. While he was working in their factory, packing records, he managed to get the group signed to make some records themselves. In the group's second session, they recorded a song that Linda had written, called "Mbube", which means "lion", and was about hunting the lions that would feed on his family's cattle when he was growing up:   [Excerpt: Solomon Linda and the Evening Birds, "Mbube"]   There's some dispute as to whether Linda wrote the whole song, or whether it's based on a traditional Zulu song -- I tend to fall on the side of Linda having written the whole thing, because very often when people say something is based on a traditional song, what they actually mean is "I don't believe that an uneducated or black person can have written a whole song".   But whatever the circumstances of most of the composition, one thing is definitely known – Linda was the one who came up with this falsetto melody:   [Excerpt: Solomon Linda and the Evening Birds, "Mbube"]   The song became massively, massively popular -- so popular that eventually the master copy of the record disintegrated, as they'd pressed so many copies from it. It gave its name to a whole genre of music -- in the same way that late fifties American vocal groups are doo-wop groups, South African groups like Ladysmith Black Mambazo are, more than eighty years later, still known as "mbube groups".   Linda and the Evening Birds would make many more records, like "Anodu Gonda":   [Excerpt: Solomon Linda and the Evening Birds, "Anodu Gonda"]   But it was "Mbube" that was their biggest hit. It sold a hundred thousand copies on Gallo Records -- and earned Solomon Linda, its writer and lead singer, ten shillings. The South African government at the time estimated that a black family could survive on thirty-seven shillings and sixpence a week. So for writing the most famous melody ever to come out of Africa, Linda got a quarter of a week's poverty-level wages. When Linda died in 1962, he had a hundred rand -- equivalent then to fifty British pounds -- in his bank account. He was buried in an unmarked grave.   And, a little over a year before his death, his song had become an international number one hit record. To see why, we have to go back to 1952, and a folk group called the Weavers.   Pete Seeger, the most important member of the Weavers, is a figure who is hugely important in the history of the folk music rebirth of the 1960s. Like most of the white folk singers of the period, he had an incredibly privileged background -- he had attended Harvard as a classmate of John F Kennedy -- but he also had very strong socialist principles. He had been friends with both Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly in the forties, and he dedicated his later career to the same kind of left-wing activism that Guthrie had taken part in.    Indeed, Guthrie and Seeger had both been members of the Almanac Singers, a folk group of the forties who had been explicitly pro-Communist. They'd been pacifists up until the Soviet entry into the Second World War, at which point they had immediately turned round and become the biggest cheerleaders of the war:   [Excerpt: The Almanac Singers, "Round and Round Hitler's Grave"]   The Almanac Singers had a revolving door membership, including everyone from Burl Ives to Cisco Houston at one point or another, but the core of the group had been Seeger and Lee Hays, and those two had eventually formed another group, more or less as a continuation of the Almanac Singers, but with a less explicitly political agenda -- they would perform Guthrie and Lead Belly songs, and songs they wrote themselves, but not be tied to performing music that fit the ideological line of the Communist Party.   The Weavers immediately had far more commercial success than the Almanac Singers ever had, and recorded such hits as their version of Lead Belly's "Goodnight Irene", with orchestration by Gordon Jenkins:   [Excerpt: The Weavers, "Goodnight Irene"]   And one of the hits they recorded was a version of "Mbube", which they titled "Wimoweh".   Alan Lomax, the folk song collector, had discovered somewhere a big stack of African records, which were about to be thrown out, and he thought to himself that those would be exactly the kind of thing that Pete Seeger might want, and gave them to him. Seeger loved the recording of "Mbube", but neither man had any clear idea of what the song was or where it came from. Seeger couldn't make out the lyrics -- he thought Linda was singing something like "Wimoweh", and he created a new arrangement of the song, taking Linda's melody from the end of the song and singing it repeatedly throughout:   [Excerpt: The Weavers, "Wimoweh"]   At the time, the Weavers were signed as songwriters to Folkways, a company that was set up to promote folk music, but was part of a much bigger conglomerate, The Richmond Organisation. When they were informed that the Weavers were going to record "Wimoweh", Folkways contacted the South African record company and were informed that "Mbube" was a traditional folk song. So Folkways copyrighted "Mbube", as "Wimoweh", in the name Paul Campbell -- a collective pseudonym that the Weavers used for their arrangements of traditional songs.   Shortly after this, Gallo realised their mistake and tried to copyright "Mbube" themselves in the USA, under Solomon Linda's name, only to be told that Folkways already had the copyright. Now, in the 1950s the USA was not yet a signatory to the Berne Convention, the international agreement on copyright laws, and so it made no difference that in South Africa the song had been copyrighted under Linda's name -- in the USA it was owned by Folkways, because they had registered it first.   But Folkways wanted the rights for other countries, too, and so they came to an agreement with Gallo that would be to Gallo's immense disadvantage. Because they agreed that they would pay Gallo a modest one-off fee, and "let" Gallo have the rights to the song in a few territories in Africa, and in return Folkways would get the copyright everywhere else. Gallo agreed, and so "Mbube" by Solomon Linda and "Wimoweh" by Paul Campbell became separate copyrights -- Gallo had, without realising it, given up their legal rights to the song throughout the world.   "Wimoweh" by the Weavers went to number six on the charts, but then Senator McCarthy stepped in. Both Pete Seeger and Lee Hays had been named as past Communist Party members, and were called before the House Unamerican Activities Committee to testify. Hays stood on his fifth amendment rights, refusing to testify against himself, but Seeger took the riskier option of simply refusing on first amendment grounds. He said, quite rightly, that his political activities, voting history, and party membership were nobody's business except his, and he wasn't going to testify about them in front of Congress. He spent much of the next decade with the threat of prison hanging over his head.   As a result, the Weavers were blacklisted from radio and TV, as was Seeger as a solo artist. "Wimoweh" dropped off the charts, and the group's recording catalogue was deleted. The group split up, though they did get back together again a few years later, and managed to have a hit live album of a concert they performed at Carnegie Hall in 1955, which also included "Wimoweh":   [Excerpt: The Weavers, "Wimoweh (live at Carnegie Hall)"]   Seeger left the group permanently a couple of years after that, when they did a commercial for tobacco -- the group were still blacklisted from the radio and TV, and saw it as an opportunity to get some exposure, but Seeger didn't approve of tobacco or advertising, and quit the group because of it -- though because he'd made a commitment to the group, he did appear on the commercial, not wanting to break his word. At his suggestion, he was replaced by Erik Darling, from another folk group, The Tarriers. Darling was an Ayn Rand fan and a libertarian, so presumably didn't have the same attitudes towards advertising.   As you might have gathered from this, Seeger was a man of strong principles, and so you might be surprised that he would take credit for someone else's song. As it turned out, he didn't. When he discovered that Solomon Linda had written the song, that it wasn't just a traditional song, he insisted that all future money he would have made from it go to Linda, and sent Linda a cheque for a thousand dollars for the money he'd already earned. But Seeger was someone who didn't care much about money at all -- he donated the vast majority of his money to worthy causes, and lived frugally, and he assumed that the people he was working with would behave honourably and keep to agreements, and didn't bother checking on them. They didn't, and Linda saw nothing from them.   Over the years after 1952, "Wimoweh" became something of a standard in America, with successful versions like the one by Yma Sumac:   [Excerpt: Yma Sumac, "Wimoweh"]   And in the early sixties it was in the repertoire of almost every folk group, being recorded by groups like the Kingston Trio, who had taken the Weavers' place as the most popular folk group in the country.   And then the Tokens entered the picture. We've mentioned the Tokens before, in the episode on "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?" -- they were the group, also known as the Linc-Tones, that was led by Carole King's friend Neil Sedaka, and who'd recorded "While I Dream" with Sedaka on lead vocals:   [Excerpt: Neil Sedaka and the Tokens, "While I Dream"]   After recording that, one member of the group had gone off to college, and been replaced by the falsetto singer Jay Siegel. But then the group had split up, and Sedaka had gone on to a very successful career as a solo performer and a songwriter.  But Siegel and one of the other group members, Hank Medress, had carried on performing together, and had formed a new group, Darrell and the Oxfords, with two other singers. That group had made a couple of records for Roulette Records, one of which, "Picture in Your Wallet", was a local hit:   [Excerpt: Darrell and the Oxfords, "Picture in Your Wallet"]   But that group had also split up. So the duo invited yet another pair of singers to join them -- Mitch Margo, who was around their age, in his late teens, and his twelve-year-old brother Phil. The group reverted to their old name of The Tokens, and recorded a song called "Tonight I Fell In Love", which they leased to a small label called Warwick Records:   [Excerpt: The Tokens, "Tonight I Fell In Love"]   Warwick Records sat on the track for six months before releasing it. When they did, in 1961, it went to number fifteen on the charts. But by then, the group had signed to RCA Records, and were now working with Hugo and Luigi, the production duo who you might remember from the episode on "Shout".   The group put out a couple of flop singles on RCA, including a remake of the Moonglows' "Sincerely":   [Excerpt: The Tokens, "Sincerely"]   But after those two singles flopped, the group made the record that would define them for the rest of their lives. The Tokens had been performing "Wimoweh" in their stage act, and they played it for Hugo and Luigi, who thought there was something there, but they didn't think it would be commercial as it was. They decided to get a professional writer in to fix the song up, and called in George David Weiss, a writer with whom they'd worked before. The three of them had previously co-written "Can't Help Falling In Love" for Elvis Presley, basing it on a traditional melody, which is what they thought they were doing here:   [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Can't Help Falling In Love"]   Weiss took the song home and reworked it. Weiss decided to find out what the original lyrics had been about, and apparently asked the South African consulate, who told him that it was about lions, so he came up with new lyrics -- "in the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight".   Hugo and Luigi came up with an arrangement for Weiss' new version of the song, and brought in an opera singer named Anita Darian to replicate the part that Yma Sumac had sung on her version. The song was recorded, and released on the B-side of the Tokens' third flop in a row:   [Excerpt: The Tokens, "The Lion Sleeps Tonight"]   As it was believed by everyone involved that the song was a traditional one, the new song was copyrighted in the names of Weiss, Hugo, and Luigi. And as it was released as a B-side of a flop single, nobody cared at first.   But then a DJ flipped the record and started playing the B-side, and suddenly the song was a hit. Indeed, it went to number one. And it didn't just go to number one, it became a standard, recorded over the years by everyone from Brian Eno to Billy Joel, The New Christy Minstrels to They Might Be Giants.   Obviously, the publishers of "Wimoweh", who knew that the song wasn't a traditional piece at all, wanted to get their share of the money. However, the owner of the publishing company was also a good friend of Weiss -- and Weiss was someone who had a lot of influence in the industry, and who nobody wanted to upset, and so they came to a very amicable agreement. The three credited songwriters would stay credited as the songwriters and keep all the songwriting money -- after all, Pete Seeger didn't want it, and the publishers were only under a moral obligation to Solomon Linda, not a legal one -- but the Richmond Organisation would get the publishing money.   Everyone seemed to be satisfied with the arrangement, and Solomon Linda's song went on earning a lot of money for a lot of white men he never met.   The Tokens tried to follow up with a version of an actual African folk song, "Bwa Nina", but that wasn't a hit, and nor was a version of "La Bamba". While they continued their career for decades, the only hit they had as performers was in 1973, by which point Hank Medress had left and the other three had changed their name to Cross Country and had a hit with a remake of "In the Midnight Hour":   [Excerpt: Cross Country, "The Midnight Hour"]   I say that was the only hit they had as performers, because they went into record production themselves. There they were far more successful, and as a group they produced records like the Chiffons' "He's So Fine", making them the first vocal group to produce a hit for another vocal group:   [Excerpt: The Chiffons, "He's So Fine"]   That song would, of course, generate its own famous authorial dispute case in later years. After Hank Medress left the group, he worked as a producer on his own, producing hits for Tony Orlando and Dawn, and also producing one of the later hit versions of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight", Robert John's version, which made number three in 1972:   [Excerpt: Robert John, "The Lion Sleeps Tonight"]   Today there are two touring versions of the Tokens, one led by Jay Siegel and one by Phil Margo.   But while in 1961 the Richmond Organisation, Hugo and Luigi, and George Weiss all seemed happy with their agreement, things started to go wrong in 1989.   American copyright law has had several changes over the years, and nothing of what I'm saying applies now, but for songs written before 1978 and the first of the Mickey Mouse copyright extensions, the rule used to be that a song would be in copyright for twenty-eight years. The writer could then renew it for a second twenty-eight-year term. (The rule is now that songs published in America remain in copyright until seventy years after the writer's death).    And it's specifically the *writer* who could renew it for that second term, not the publishers. George Weiss filed notice that he was going to renew the copyright when the twenty-eight-year term expired, and that he wasn't going to let the Richmond Organisation publish the song.   As soon as the Richmond Organisation heard about this, they took Weiss to court, saying that he couldn't take the publishing rights away from them, because the song was based on "Wimoweh", which they owned. Weiss argued that if the song was based on "Wimoweh", the copyright should have reflected that for the twenty-eight years that the Richmond Organisation owned it. They'd signed papers agreeing that Weiss and Hugo and Luigi were the writers, and if they'd had a problem with that they should have said so back in 1961.   The courts sided with Weiss, but they did say that the Richmond Organisation might have had a bit of a point about the song's similarity to "Wimoweh", so they had to pay a small amount of money to Solomon Linda's family.   And the American writers getting the song back coincided with two big boosts in the income from the song. First, R.E.M recorded a song called "The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite", on their album Automatic For the People (a record we will definitely be talking about in 2026, assuming I'm still around and able to do the podcast by then). The album was one of the biggest records of the decade, and on the song, Michael Stipe sang a fragment of Solomon Linda's melody:   [Excerpt: R.E.M. "The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite"]   The owners of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" took legal action about that, and got themselves credited as co-writers of R.E.M.'s song, and the group also had to record "The Lion Sleeps Tonight", releasing it as a B-side to the hit single version of "Sidewinder":   [Excerpt: R.E.M. "The Lion Sleeps Tonight"]   Even better from their point of view, the song was featured in the Disney film The Lion King, which on its release in 1994 became the second highest-grossing film of all time and the most successful animated film ever, and in its Broadway adaptation, which became the most successful Broadway show of all time.   And in 2000, Rian Malan, a South African journalist based in America, who mostly dedicated his work to expunging his ancestral guilt -- he's a relative of Daniel Malan, the South African dictator who instituted the apartheid system, and of Magnus Malan, one of the more monstrous ministers in the regime in its last days of the eighties and early nineties -- found out that while Solomon Linda's family had been getting some money, it amounted at most to a couple of thousand dollars a year, shared between Linda's daughters. At the same time, Malan estimated that over the years the song had generated something in the region of fifteen million dollars for its American copyright owners.   Malan published an article about this, and just before that, the daughters got a minor windfall -- Pete Seeger noticed a six thousand dollar payment, which came to him when a commercial used "Wimoweh", rather than "The Lion Sleeps Tonight". He realised that he'd been receiving the royalties for "Wimoweh" all along, even though he'd asked that they be sent to Linda, so he totalled up how much he'd earned from the song over the years, which came to twelve thousand dollars, and he sent a cheque for that amount to Linda's daughters.   Those daughters were living in such poverty that in 2001, one of the four died of AIDS -- a disease which would have been completely treatable if she'd been able to afford the anti-retroviral medication to treat it.   The surviving sisters were told that the copyright in "Mbube" should have reverted to them in the eighties, and that they had a very good case under South African law to get a proper share of the rights to both "Wimoweh" and "The Lion Sleeps Tonight".   They just needed to find someone in South Africa that they could sue. Abilene Music, the current owners of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight", were based in the USA and had no assets in South Africa. Suing them would be pointless. But they could sue someone else:   [Excerpt: Timon and Pumbaa, "The Lion Sleeps Tonight"]   Disney had assets in South Africa. Lots of them. And they'd used Solomon Linda's song in their film, which under South African law would be copyright infringement. It would even be possible, if the case went really badly for Disney, that Linda's family could get total ownership of all Disney assets in South Africa.   So in 2006, Disney came to an out of court settlement with Linda's family, and they appear to have pressured Abilene Music to do the same thing. Under South African law, "Mbube" would go out of copyright by 2012, but it was agreed that Linda's daughters would receive royalties on "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" until 2017, even after the South African copyright had expired, and they would get a lump sum from Disney. The money they were owed would be paid into a trust.   After 2017, they would still get money from "Wimoweh", but not from "The Lion Sleeps Tonight", whose rights would revert fully to its American owners.   Unfortunately, most of the money they got seems to have gone on legal bills. The three surviving sisters each received, in total, about eighty-three thousand dollars over the ten-year course of the agreement after those bills, which is much, much, more than they were getting before, but only a fraction of what the song would have earned them if they'd been paid properly.   In 2017, the year the agreement expired, Disney announced they were making a photorealistic CGI remake of The Lion King. That, too, featured "The Lion Sleeps Tonight", and that, too, became the most successful animated film of all time. Under American copyright law, "Wimoweh" will remain in copyright until 2047, unless further changes are made to the law. Solomon Linda's family will continue to receive royalties on that song. "The Lion Sleeps Tonight", the much more successful song, will remain in copyright until 2057, and the money from that will mostly go to Claire Weiss-Creatore, who was George Weiss' third wife, and who after he died in 2010 became the third wife of Luigi Creatore, of Hugo and Luigi, who died himself in 2015. Solomon Linda's daughters won't see a penny of it.   According to George Weiss' obituary in the Guardian, he "was a familiar figure at congressional hearings into copyright reform and music piracy, testifying as to the vital importance of intellectual property protection for composers".  

Episode ninety-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” by The Tokens, and at a seventy-year-long story of powerful people repeatedly ripping off less powerful people, then themselves being ripped off in turn by more powerful people, and at how racism meant that a song that earned fifteen million dollars for other people paid its composer ten shillings. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.   Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Tossin’ and Turnin'” by Bobby Lewis.   Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/   —-more—-   ERRATUM: I say “Picture in Your Wallet” when I mean “Picture in My Wallet”.   Resources   As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.    Rian Malan’s 2000 article on Solomon Linda and The Lion Sleeps Tonight can be found here.   This 2019 article brings the story of the legal disputes up to date.   The information about isicathamiya comes from Nightsong: Performance, Power and Practice in South Africa by Veit Erlmann.   This collection of early isicathamiya and Mbube music includes several tracks by the Evening Birds.   Information on Pete Seeger and the Weavers primarily comes from Pete Seeger vs. The Un-Americans: A Tale of the Blacklist by Edward Renehan.   This collection has everything the Weavers recorded before their first split.   This is the record of one of the legal actions taken during Weiss’ dispute with Folkways in the late eighties and early nineties.   Information on the Tokens came from This is My Story.   There are, surprisingly, no budget compilations of the Tokens’ music, but this best-of has everything you need.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?   Transcript   Today we’re going to look at a song that became a worldwide hit in multiple versions, and which I can guarantee everyone listening to this podcast has heard many times. A song that has been recorded by REM, that featured in a Disney musical, and which can be traced back from a white doo-wop group through a group of Communist folk singers to a man who was exploited by racist South African society — a man who invented an entire genre of music, which got named after his most famous song, but who never saw any of the millions that his song earned for others, and died in poverty. We’re going to look at the story of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”:   [Excerpt: The Tokens, “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”]   The story of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” is a story that goes back to 1939, when a singer called Solomon Linda was performing in South Africa. Linda was a Zulu, and thus in the racist regime of South Africa was largely without rights. Linda was, in the thirties and forties, probably the single most important performer in South Africa. He was the leader of a vocal group called the Evening Birds, who were the most popular isicathamiya group in South Africa.   Isicathamiya — and I hope I’m pronouncing that right — was a form of music which has a lot of parallels to some of the American vocal group music we’ve looked at, largely because it comes from some of the same roots. I don’t pretend to be an expert on the music by any means — I’ll put a link on the podcast webpage to a book which has far more information about this — but as best I understand it, it’s a music created when rural black people were forcibly displaced in the late nineteenth century and forced to find work in the city.   Those people combined elements of traditional Zulu music with two more Western elements. The first was the religious music that they heard from Church missions, and the second was American minstrel songs, heard from troupes of minstrels that toured the country, especially a black performer named Orpheus McAdoo, who led a troupe of minstrel and gospel performers who toured South Africa a lot in the late nineteenth century.   This new style of music was usually performed a capella, though sometimes there might be a single instrument added, and it gained a relatively formalised structure — it would almost always have very specific parts based on European choral music, with parts for a tenor, a soprano, an alto, and a bass, in strict four-part harmony — though the soprano and alto parts would be sung in falsetto by men. It would usually be based around the same I, IV, and V chords that most Western popular music was based on, and the Zulu language would often be distorted to fit Western metres, though the music was still more freeform than most of the Western music of the time.   This music started to be recorded in around 1930, and you can get an idea of the stylistic range from two examples. Here’s “Umteto we Land Act” by Caluza’s Double Quartet:   [Excerpt, “Umteto We Land Act”, Caluza’s Double Quartet”]   While here’s the Bantu Glee Singers, singing “Jim Takata Kanjani”:   [Excerpt: The Bantu Glee Singers, “Jim Takata Kanjani”]   Solomon Linda’s group, the Evening Birds, sang in this style, but incorporated a number of innovations. One was that they dressed differently — they wore matching striped suits, rather than the baggy trousers that the older groups wore — but also, they had extra bass singers. Up until this point, there would be four singers or multiples of four, with one singer singing each part. The Evening Birds, at Linda’s instigation, had a much thicker bass part, and in some ways prefigured the sound of doo-wop that would take over in America twenty years later.   Their music was often political — while the South African regime was horribly oppressive in the thirties, it wasn’t as oppressive as it later became, and a certain amount of criticism of the government was allowed in ways it wouldn’t be in future decades.   At the time, the main way in which this music would be performed was at contests with several groups, most of whom would be performing the same repertoire. An audience member would offer to pay one of the groups a few pennies to start singing — and then another audience member, when they got bored with the first group, would offer that group some more money to stop singing, before someone else offered another group some money. The Evening Birds quickly became the centre of this scene, and between 1933 and 1948, when they split, they were the most popular group around. As with many of the doo-wop groups they so resembled, they had a revolving lineup with members coming and going, and joining other groups like the Crocodiles and the Dundee Wandering Singers. There was even a second group called the Evening Birds, with a singer who sounded like Linda, and who had a long-running feud with Linda’s group.   But it wasn’t this popularity that got the Evening Birds recorded. It was because Solomon Linda got a day job packing records for Gallo Records, the only record label in South Africa, which owned the only recording studio in sub-Saharan Africa. While he was working in their factory, packing records, he managed to get the group signed to make some records themselves. In the group’s second session, they recorded a song that Linda had written, called “Mbube”, which means “lion”, and was about hunting the lions that would feed on his family’s cattle when he was growing up:   [Excerpt: Solomon Linda and the Evening Birds, “Mbube”]   There’s some dispute as to whether Linda wrote the whole song, or whether it’s based on a traditional Zulu song — I tend to fall on the side of Linda having written the whole thing, because very often when people say something is based on a traditional song, what they actually mean is “I don’t believe that an uneducated or black person can have written a whole song”.   But whatever the circumstances of most of the composition, one thing is definitely known – Linda was the one who came up with this falsetto melody:   [Excerpt: Solomon Linda and the Evening Birds, “Mbube”]   The song became massively, massively popular — so popular that eventually the master copy of the record disintegrated, as they’d pressed so many copies from it. It gave its name to a whole genre of music — in the same way that late fifties American vocal groups are doo-wop groups, South African groups like Ladysmith Black Mambazo are, more than eighty years later, still known as “mbube groups”.   Linda and the Evening Birds would make many more records, like “Anodu Gonda”:   [Excerpt: Solomon Linda and the Evening Birds, “Anodu Gonda”]   But it was “Mbube” that was their biggest hit. It sold a hundred thousand copies on Gallo Records — and earned Solomon Linda, its writer and lead singer, ten shillings. The South African government at the time estimated that a black family could survive on thirty-seven shillings and sixpence a week. So for writing the most famous melody ever to come out of Africa, Linda got a quarter of a week’s poverty-level wages. When Linda died in 1962, he had a hundred rand — equivalent then to fifty British pounds — in his bank account. He was buried in an unmarked grave.   And, a little over a year before his death, his song had become an international number one hit record. To see why, we have to go back to 1952, and a folk group called the Weavers.   Pete Seeger, the most important member of the Weavers, is a figure who is hugely important in the history of the folk music rebirth of the 1960s. Like most of the white folk singers of the period, he had an incredibly privileged background — he had attended Harvard as a classmate of John F Kennedy — but he also had very strong socialist principles. He had been friends with both Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly in the forties, and he dedicated his later career to the same kind of left-wing activism that Guthrie had taken part in.    Indeed, Guthrie and Seeger had both been members of the Almanac Singers, a folk group of the forties who had been explicitly pro-Communist. They’d been pacifists up until the Soviet entry into the Second World War, at which point they had immediately turned round and become the biggest cheerleaders of the war:   [Excerpt: The Almanac Singers, “Round and Round Hitler’s Grave”]   The Almanac Singers had a revolving door membership, including everyone from Burl Ives to Cisco Houston at one point or another, but the core of the group had been Seeger and Lee Hays, and those two had eventually formed another group, more or less as a continuation of the Almanac Singers, but with a less explicitly political agenda — they would perform Guthrie and Lead Belly songs, and songs they wrote themselves, but not be tied to performing music that fit the ideological line of the Communist Party.   The Weavers immediately had far more commercial success than the Almanac Singers ever had, and recorded such hits as their version of Lead Belly’s “Goodnight Irene”, with orchestration by Gordon Jenkins:   [Excerpt: The Weavers, “Goodnight Irene”]   And one of the hits they recorded was a version of “Mbube”, which they titled “Wimoweh”.   Alan Lomax, the folk song collector, had discovered somewhere a big stack of African records, which were about to be thrown out, and he thought to himself that those would be exactly the kind of thing that Pete Seeger might want, and gave them to him. Seeger loved the recording of “Mbube”, but neither man had any clear idea of what the song was or where it came from. Seeger couldn’t make out the lyrics — he thought Linda was singing something like “Wimoweh”, and he created a new arrangement of the song, taking Linda’s melody from the end of the song and singing it repeatedly throughout:   [Excerpt: The Weavers, “Wimoweh”]   At the time, the Weavers were signed as songwriters to Folkways, a company that was set up to promote folk music, but was part of a much bigger conglomerate, The Richmond Organisation. When they were informed that the Weavers were going to record “Wimoweh”, Folkways contacted the South African record company and were informed that “Mbube” was a traditional folk song. So Folkways copyrighted “Mbube”, as “Wimoweh”, in the name Paul Campbell — a collective pseudonym that the Weavers used for their arrangements of traditional songs.   Shortly after this, Gallo realised their mistake and tried to copyright “Mbube” themselves in the USA, under Solomon Linda’s name, only to be told that Folkways already had the copyright. Now, in the 1950s the USA was not yet a signatory to the Berne Convention, the international agreement on copyright laws, and so it made no difference that in South Africa the song had been copyrighted under Linda’s name — in the USA it was owned by Folkways, because they had registered it first.   But Folkways wanted the rights for other countries, too, and so they came to an agreement with Gallo that would be to Gallo’s immense disadvantage. Because they agreed that they would pay Gallo a modest one-off fee, and “let” Gallo have the rights to the song in a few territories in Africa, and in return Folkways would get the copyright everywhere else. Gallo agreed, and so “Mbube” by Solomon Linda and “Wimoweh” by Paul Campbell became separate copyrights — Gallo had, without realising it, given up their legal rights to the song throughout the world.   “Wimoweh” by the Weavers went to number six on the charts, but then Senator McCarthy stepped in. Both Pete Seeger and Lee Hays had been named as past Communist Party members, and were called before the House Unamerican Activities Committee to testify. Hays stood on his fifth amendment rights, refusing to testify against himself, but Seeger took the riskier option of simply refusing on first amendment grounds. He said, quite rightly, that his political activities, voting history, and party membership were nobody’s business except his, and he wasn’t going to testify about them in front of Congress. He spent much of the next decade with the threat of prison hanging over his head.   As a result, the Weavers were blacklisted from radio and TV, as was Seeger as a solo artist. “Wimoweh” dropped off the charts, and the group’s recording catalogue was deleted. The group split up, though they did get back together again a few years later, and managed to have a hit live album of a concert they performed at Carnegie Hall in 1955, which also included “Wimoweh”:   [Excerpt: The Weavers, “Wimoweh (live at Carnegie Hall)”]   Seeger left the group permanently a couple of years after that, when they did a commercial for tobacco — the group were still blacklisted from the radio and TV, and saw it as an opportunity to get some exposure, but Seeger didn’t approve of tobacco or advertising, and quit the group because of it — though because he’d made a commitment to the group, he did appear on the commercial, not wanting to break his word. At his suggestion, he was replaced by Erik Darling, from another folk group, The Tarriers. Darling was an Ayn Rand fan and a libertarian, so presumably didn’t have the same attitudes towards advertising.   As you might have gathered from this, Seeger was a man of strong principles, and so you might be surprised that he would take credit for someone else’s song. As it turned out, he didn’t. When he discovered that Solomon Linda had written the song, that it wasn’t just a traditional song, he insisted that all future money he would have made from it go to Linda, and sent Linda a cheque for a thousand dollars for the money he’d already earned. But Seeger was someone who didn’t care much about money at all — he donated the vast majority of his money to worthy causes, and lived frugally, and he assumed that the people he was working with would behave honourably and keep to agreements, and didn’t bother checking on them. They didn’t, and Linda saw nothing from them.   Over the years after 1952, “Wimoweh” became something of a standard in America, with successful versions like the one by Yma Sumac:   [Excerpt: Yma Sumac, “Wimoweh”]   And in the early sixties it was in the repertoire of almost every folk group, being recorded by groups like the Kingston Trio, who had taken the Weavers’ place as the most popular folk group in the country.   And then the Tokens entered the picture. We’ve mentioned the Tokens before, in the episode on “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” — they were the group, also known as the Linc-Tones, that was led by Carole King’s friend Neil Sedaka, and who’d recorded “While I Dream” with Sedaka on lead vocals:   [Excerpt: Neil Sedaka and the Tokens, “While I Dream”]   After recording that, one member of the group had gone off to college, and been replaced by the falsetto singer Jay Siegel. But then the group had split up, and Sedaka had gone on to a very successful career as a solo performer and a songwriter.  But Siegel and one of the other group members, Hank Medress, had carried on performing together, and had formed a new group, Darrell and the Oxfords, with two other singers. That group had made a couple of records for Roulette Records, one of which, “Picture in Your Wallet”, was a local hit:   [Excerpt: Darrell and the Oxfords, “Picture in Your Wallet”]   But that group had also split up. So the duo invited yet another pair of singers to join them — Mitch Margo, who was around their age, in his late teens, and his twelve-year-old brother Phil. The group reverted to their old name of The Tokens, and recorded a song called “Tonight I Fell In Love”, which they leased to a small label called Warwick Records:   [Excerpt: The Tokens, “Tonight I Fell In Love”]   Warwick Records sat on the track for six months before releasing it. When they did, in 1961, it went to number fifteen on the charts. But by then, the group had signed to RCA Records, and were now working with Hugo and Luigi, the production duo who you might remember from the episode on “Shout”.   The group put out a couple of flop singles on RCA, including a remake of the Moonglows’ “Sincerely”:   [Excerpt: The Tokens, “Sincerely”]   But after those two singles flopped, the group made the record that would define them for the rest of their lives. The Tokens had been performing “Wimoweh” in their stage act, and they played it for Hugo and Luigi, who thought there was something there, but they didn’t think it would be commercial as it was. They decided to get a professional writer in to fix the song up, and called in George David Weiss, a writer with whom they’d worked before. The three of them had previously co-written “Can’t Help Falling In Love” for Elvis Presley, basing it on a traditional melody, which is what they thought they were doing here:   [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Can’t Help Falling In Love”]   Weiss took the song home and reworked it. Weiss decided to find out what the original lyrics had been about, and apparently asked the South African consulate, who told him that it was about lions, so he came up with new lyrics — “in the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight”.   Hugo and Luigi came up with an arrangement for Weiss’ new version of the song, and brought in an opera singer named Anita Darian to replicate the part that Yma Sumac had sung on her version. The song was recorded, and released on the B-side of the Tokens’ third flop in a row:   [Excerpt: The Tokens, “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”]   As it was believed by everyone involved that the song was a traditional one, the new song was copyrighted in the names of Weiss, Hugo, and Luigi. And as it was released as a B-side of a flop single, nobody cared at first.   But then a DJ flipped the record and started playing the B-side, and suddenly the song was a hit. Indeed, it went to number one. And it didn’t just go to number one, it became a standard, recorded over the years by everyone from Brian Eno to Billy Joel, The New Christy Minstrels to They Might Be Giants.   Obviously, the publishers of “Wimoweh”, who knew that the song wasn’t a traditional piece at all, wanted to get their share of the money. However, the owner of the publishing company was also a good friend of Weiss — and Weiss was someone who had a lot of influence in the industry, and who nobody wanted to upset, and so they came to a very amicable agreement. The three credited songwriters would stay credited as the songwriters and keep all the songwriting money — after all, Pete Seeger didn’t want it, and the publishers were only under a moral obligation to Solomon Linda, not a legal one — but the Richmond Organisation would get the publishing money.   Everyone seemed to be satisfied with the arrangement, and Solomon Linda’s song went on earning a lot of money for a lot of white men he never met.   The Tokens tried to follow up with a version of an actual African folk song, “Bwa Nina”, but that wasn’t a hit, and nor was a version of “La Bamba”. While they continued their career for decades, the only hit they had as performers was in 1973, by which point Hank Medress had left and the other three had changed their name to Cross Country and had a hit with a remake of “In the Midnight Hour”:   [Excerpt: Cross Country, “The Midnight Hour”]   I say that was the only hit they had as performers, because they went into record production themselves. There they were far more successful, and as a group they produced records like the Chiffons’ “He’s So Fine”, making them the first vocal group to produce a hit for another vocal group:   [Excerpt: The Chiffons, “He’s So Fine”]   That song would, of course, generate its own famous authorial dispute case in later years. After Hank Medress left the group, he worked as a producer on his own, producing hits for Tony Orlando and Dawn, and also producing one of the later hit versions of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”, Robert John’s version, which made number three in 1972:   [Excerpt: Robert John, “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”]   Today there are two touring versions of the Tokens, one led by Jay Siegel and one by Phil Margo.   But while in 1961 the Richmond Organisation, Hugo and Luigi, and George Weiss all seemed happy with their agreement, things started to go wrong in 1989.   American copyright law has had several changes over the years, and nothing of what I’m saying applies now, but for songs written before 1978 and the first of the Mickey Mouse copyright extensions, the rule used to be that a song would be in copyright for twenty-eight years. The writer could then renew it for a second twenty-eight-year term. (The rule is now that songs published in America remain in copyright until seventy years after the writer’s death).    And it’s specifically the *writer* who could renew it for that second term, not the publishers. George Weiss filed notice that he was going to renew the copyright when the twenty-eight-year term expired, and that he wasn’t going to let the Richmond Organisation publish the song.   As soon as the Richmond Organisation heard about this, they took Weiss to court, saying that he couldn’t take the publishing rights away from them, because the song was based on “Wimoweh”, which they owned. Weiss argued that if the song was based on “Wimoweh”, the copyright should have reflected that for the twenty-eight years that the Richmond Organisation owned it. They’d signed papers agreeing that Weiss and Hugo and Luigi were the writers, and if they’d had a problem with that they should have said so back in 1961.   The courts sided with Weiss, but they did say that the Richmond Organisation might have had a bit of a point about the song’s similarity to “Wimoweh”, so they had to pay a small amount of money to Solomon Linda’s family.   And the American writers getting the song back coincided with two big boosts in the income from the song. First, R.E.M recorded a song called “The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite”, on their album Automatic For the People (a record we will definitely be talking about in 2026, assuming I’m still around and able to do the podcast by then). The album was one of the biggest records of the decade, and on the song, Michael Stipe sang a fragment of Solomon Linda’s melody:   [Excerpt: R.E.M. “The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite”]   The owners of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” took legal action about that, and got themselves credited as co-writers of R.E.M.’s song, and the group also had to record “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”, releasing it as a B-side to the hit single version of “Sidewinder”:   [Excerpt: R.E.M. “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”]   Even better from their point of view, the song was featured in the Disney film The Lion King, which on its release in 1994 became the second highest-grossing film of all time and the most successful animated film ever, and in its Broadway adaptation, which became the most successful Broadway show of all time.   And in 2000, Rian Malan, a South African journalist based in America, who mostly dedicated his work to expunging his ancestral guilt — he’s a relative of Daniel Malan, the South African dictator who instituted the apartheid system, and of Magnus Malan, one of the more monstrous ministers in the regime in its last days of the eighties and early nineties — found out that while Solomon Linda’s family had been getting some money, it amounted at most to a couple of thousand dollars a year, shared between Linda’s daughters. At the same time, Malan estimated that over the years the song had generated something in the region of fifteen million dollars for its American copyright owners.   Malan published an article about this, and just before that, the daughters got a minor windfall — Pete Seeger noticed a six thousand dollar payment, which came to him when a commercial used “Wimoweh”, rather than “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”. He realised that he’d been receiving the royalties for “Wimoweh” all along, even though he’d asked that they be sent to Linda, so he totalled up how much he’d earned from the song over the years, which came to twelve thousand dollars, and he sent a cheque for that amount to Linda’s daughters.   Those daughters were living in such poverty that in 2001, one of the four died of AIDS — a disease which would have been completely treatable if she’d been able to afford the anti-retroviral medication to treat it.   The surviving sisters were told that the copyright in “Mbube” should have reverted to them in the eighties, and that they had a very good case under South African law to get a proper share of the rights to both “Wimoweh” and “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”.   They just needed to find someone in South Africa that they could sue. Abilene Music, the current owners of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”, were based in the USA and had no assets in South Africa. Suing them would be pointless. But they could sue someone else:   [Excerpt: Timon and Pumbaa, “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”]   Disney had assets in South Africa. Lots of them. And they’d used Solomon Linda’s song in their film, which under South African law would be copyright infringement. It would even be possible, if the case went really badly for Disney, that Linda’s family could get total ownership of all Disney assets in South Africa.   So in 2006, Disney came to an out of court settlement with Linda’s family, and they appear to have pressured Abilene Music to do the same thing. Under South African law, “Mbube” would go out of copyright by 2012, but it was agreed that Linda’s daughters would receive royalties on “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” until 2017, even after the South African copyright had expired, and they would get a lump sum from Disney. The money they were owed would be paid into a trust.   After 2017, they would still get money from “Wimoweh”, but not from “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”, whose rights would revert fully to its American owners.   Unfortunately, most of the money they got seems to have gone on legal bills. The three surviving sisters each received, in total, about eighty-three thousand dollars over the ten-year course of the agreement after those bills, which is much, much, more than they were getting before, but only a fraction of what the song would have earned them if they’d been paid properly.   In 2017, the year the agreement expired, Disney announced they were making a photorealistic CGI remake of The Lion King. That, too, featured “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”, and that, too, became the most successful animated film of all time. Under American copyright law, “Wimoweh” will remain in copyright until 2047, unless further changes are made to the law. Solomon Linda’s family will continue to receive royalties on that song. “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”, the much more successful song, will remain in copyright until 2057, and the money from that will mostly go to Claire Weiss-Creatore, who was George Weiss’ third wife, and who after he died in 2010 became the third wife of Luigi Creatore, of Hugo and Luigi, who died himself in 2015. Solomon Linda’s daughters won’t see a penny of it.   According to George Weiss’ obituary in the Guardian, he “was a familiar figure at congressional hearings into copyright reform and music piracy, testifying as to the vital importance of intellectual property protection for composers”.  

Songs include: The Night Was Yellow, Yellow Dog Blues, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Yellow Rose of Texas and Yellow Fire. Performers include: Bessie Smith, Cisco Houston, Bob Wills, Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole, Ozzie Nelson and The Andrews Sisters.

This Train (is Bound for Glory) - Chords, Lyrics and OriginsOur version of this Classic African-American Spiritual features a New Orleans Style Piano, Ukelele, Muddy Waters style Delta Blues Dobro, Guitars, Drums, Swing Acoustic Bass, and FiddleOriginsFirst recorded in 1922 by the Florida Normal Industrial Institute Quartet, This Train (or 'This Train is Bound for Glory' or 'Dis Train' as it is sometimes known) is an African-American spiritual. The oddly-named Florida Normal Industrial Institute Quartet were an early African-American barber-shop act who sang the song a cappella. This Train was later made famous by Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who recorded it twice: initially, using an acoustic guitar, in the 1930s, and then again, using an electric guitar, in the 1950s. Her 1950s version is now seen as a precursor of Rock-n-Roll. It was also famously recorded as 'This Train is Bound for Glory' by Woody Guthrie. Guthrie's autobiographical novel, 'Bound for Glory' takes its title from the song.GThis train is bound for glory, this train.G DThis train is bound for glory, this train.GThis train is bound for glory,CNon gonna ride it but the righteous and the holy.G D GThis train is bound for glory, this train.This train don't carry no gamblers, this train;This train don't carry no gamblers, this train;This train don't carry no gamblers,No High Flyers, no midnight ramblers,This train is bound for glory, this train.This train don't carry no liars, this train;This train don't carry no liars, this train;This train don't carry no liars,No Hypocrites, compromiseers, and Truth DeniersThis train don't carry no liars, this train.© 2015 Shiloh Worship Music COPY FREELY;This Music is copyrighted to prevent misuse, however,permission is granted for non-commercial copying-Radio play permitted- www.shilohworshipmusic.comFrom Wikipedia:Early history:The earliest known example of "This Train" is a recording by Florida Normal and Industrial Institute Quartette from 1922, under the title "Dis Train."[3] Another one of the earliest recordings of the song is the version made by Wood's Blind Jubilee Singers in August 1925 under the title "This Train Is Bound for Glory". The next year the song found its way into print for the first time in the Lomaxes' American Folk Songs and Ballads anthology and was subsequently included in Alan Lomax's 1960 anthology, Folk Songs of North America.[2]In 1935, the first hillbilly recording of the song was released by Tennessee Ramblers as "Dis Train" in reference to the song's black roots.[2] Then in the late 1930s, after becoming the first black artist to sign with a major label, gospel singer and guitarist Sister Rosetta Tharpe recorded "This Train" as a hit for Decca. Her later version of the song, released by Decca in the early 1950s, featured Tharpe on electric guitar and is cited as one of several examples of her work that led to the emergence of rock 'n roll.Other recordingsOver the years, "This Train" has been covered by artists specializing in numerous genres, including blues, folk, bluegrass, gospel, rock, post-punk, jazz, reggae, and zydeco. Among the solo artists and groups who have recorded it are Louis Armstrong, Big Bill Broonzy, Brothers Four, Hylo Brown, Alice Coltrane, Delmore Brothers, Sandy Denny, D.O.A., Lonnie Donegan, Jimmy Durante, Snooks Eaglin, Bob Gibson, Joe Glazer, John Hammond, Jr., Cisco Houston, Janis Ian, Mahalia Jackson, Ella Jenkins, Sleepy LaBeef, The Limeliters, Trini Lopez, Bob Marley & The Wailers, Ziggy Marley, Ricky Nelson, Peter, Paul & Mary, Utah Phillips, Pete Seeger, The Seekers, Roberta Sherwood, Hank Snow, David Soul, Staples Singers, Billy Strange, the Tarriers, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Hank Thompson, Sublime, Randy Travis, The Verlaines, Bunny Wailer, Nina Hagen, Girls at Our Best!, Buckwheat Zydeco and Jools Holland.[2][4]”Come and check out our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/ShilohWorshipGroup/videos  Free Christian Worship Music on the iTunes StorePlease check out our free Christian Worship Music on the iTunes Store. We offer 6 free Podcasts that contain our original worship music. Below are the links- if you like them you can subscribe FREE and receive new songs in the form of podcasts as they are released.Free Bluegrass Gospel Hymns and Songs from Shiloh Worship Music. Old Standard Hymns and Songs as well as Original Bluegrass Gospel Songs.http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/what-a-friend-we-have-in-jesus/id471784726?i=100849735FREE PRAISE & WORSHIP  FREE Original Praise and Worship Music Our style is very eclectic ranging from Blues to Folk to Reggae to Worldbeat to Bluegrass to Contemporary Worship. Most songs Are in English, some songs are in English and Spanish, and a few songs have been translated into other languages like Swahili, French, Chinese, and Korean. Etc. We Love Jesus, we are simple christian disciples of Jesus using our gifts to lavish our love and lives for Him. Our desire is to point others to Jesus. Our music is simple-most of these original songs are prayers to Jesus set to music. Although our music is copyrighted ©2000-2013 Shiloh Worship Music, to prevent misuse, feel free to pass this music around for any and all non-commercial use. Jesus said, "freely you have received, freely give!"http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/free-praise-and-worship/id436298678FREE Contemporary Christian Worshiphttps://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/free-contemporary-christian/id882132356 FREE WORSHIP MUSICOriginal Worship music SUBSCRIBE in iTunes We Love Jesus, we are simple christian disciples of Jesus using our gifts to lavish our love and lives for Him. To point others to Jesus. our music is simple-most of these original songs are prayers to Jesus set to music. Although our music is copyrighted ©2000-2013 Shiloh Worship Music, to prevent misuse, feel free to pass this music around for any and all non-commercial use. Jesus said, "freely you have received, freely give!"http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/free-jesus-music/id395892905

Sea-faring songs from North Carolina’s Outer Banks; an Irish pirate ballad; cowboy songs from Woody Guthrie, Harry Jackson, and Cisco Houston and a spiritual from Moving Star Hall on Johns Island, South Carolina.

This show is built around the song “The Ink is Black” or “Black and White” by David Arkin, Alan Arkin’s father and Earl Robinson, who for a time was the music teacher at Michael’s school in New York City. Written on the occasion of the 1954 de-segregation decision by the Supreme Court of the United States, it epitomizes the sensibility that segregation is inherently evil. Smithsonian Folkways: Sounds to Grow On is a 26-part series hosted by Michael Asch that features the original recordings of Folkways Records.

The theme of this show is about Smithsonian Folkways material inspired by dogs, so Michael Asch has called the show “Going to the Dogs.” The idea for the show came from Rob Wiznura, researcher on this radio series, and a guy who likes dogs, and puns about them. Michael is less committed, more of a cat man. Hear songs, sounds and documentary segments, all on the canine theme. Smithsonian Folkways: Sounds to Grow On is a 26-part series hosted by Michael Asch that features the original recordings of Folkways Records.