South African Sisters Win Lion Share of Royalties

Three impoverished South African women, whose father wrote The Lion Sleeps Tonight, have won a six-year battle for royalties in a landmark case that could affect musicians worldwide.

No one is saying how many millions will go to the daughters of the late composer Solomon Linda, who died in poverty from a curable kidney disease in 1962 at age 53. But the family's settlement with New York City-based Abilene Music that gives Linda's heirs 25 per cent of past and future royalties, has broad implications.

Linda composed his now-famous song in 1939 in one of the squalid hostels that housed black migrant workers in Johannesburg. Family lore has it he wrote the song in a matter of minutes and was inspired by his childhood tasks of chasing prowling lions from the cattle he herded. It was sung, in true Zulu tradition, a cappella. Linda's innovation was to add his falsetto voice, an overlay of haunting "eeeeeees," to the baritone and bass main line. To this day, this style is called Mbube in South Africa.

The song sold more than 100,000 copies over a decade, probably making it Africa's first big pop hit. In the 1950s, at a time when apartheid laws robbed blacks of negotiating rights, Linda sold worldwide copyright to Gallo Records of South Africa for 10 shillings. Gallo also tried to sell the work in the United States but U.S. folk singer Pete Seeger had adapted a version he called Wimoweh. Then it became one of the best known songs in the world as The Lion Sleeps Tonight, attributed to George Weiss, Hugo Peretti and Luigi Creatore.

Owen Dean, South Africa's leading copyright lawyer, argued successfully for Linda's family that under the British Imperial Copyright Act of 1911, which was in force in South Africa at the time Linda composed his song, all rights revert to the heirs, who are entitled to renegotiate royalties.

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