In 2004, a decade after “The Lion King” movie came out, Linda’s family went to court against Disney, which initially tried to use its considerable muscle to quash the suit. In the film, Rian Malan says family history was a source of considerable guilt and shame for him growing up and a big part of his motivation to find a way to do something positive for the black community. Malan, was the prime minister of South Africa who oversaw the creation of the government’s apartheid policies. “Lion’s Share” opens with fascinating biographical background on Malan, whose granduncle, D.F. The saga of ‘Mbube’ and ’The Lion Sleeps Tonight’ is one of the most complicated and convoluted music publishing-songwriting stories ever.” “I’ve been in the music publishing business for decades,” said Randy Poe, president of Leiber & Stoller Music Publishing, which at one point administered copyrights for more than 50,000 songs. The story gets richer through the intervention of Malan, who explored its history in an extensive piece for Rolling Stone in 2000, writing: “This one’s for Solomon Linda….a Zulu who wrote a melody that earned untold millions for white men but died so poor that his widow couldn’t afford a stone for his grave.” for black blues, R&B and soul musicians who often unknowingly signed away lucrative rights to their music. It’s a classic theme repeated countless times in the U.S. “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” wound up generating millions of dollars over the decades, little of which ever reached Linda’s family. He originated the song “Mbube,” the Zulu word for “lion,” and during one of three attempts at the song in a South African recording studio, spontaneously spun out the soaring and bewitching falsetto melody that has defined every subsequent version of his song.
The simplistic version of the story would be that Linda was cheated out of his rightful songwriting royalties by scheming, heartless music business sharps. “As we were filming and uncovering the story, we had to follow the truth of what we were uncovering, and not where our hearts were.” “I definitely experienced a bit of whiplash a number of times during production,” Cullman said by phone from Brooklyn. That saga is the crux of the new film, directed by Sam Cullman and centering heavily on the back story unearthed by Malan, who, along with Linda and his daughters, are focal points of the documentary.
The song, as the “Lion’s Share” documentary outlines, dates to 1939, and Linda, whose group the Evening Birds made the recording that found its way across the Atlantic and into the hands of folk music revivalists Pete Seeger and the Weavers, and then, with additional lyrics written by George David Weiss, to the Tokens.
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