Netflix has an amazing documentary about the history of the song we know as Wimoweh (The Lion Sleeps Tonight). It is a story about redemption at one point in the documentary, but hanging over it are the echoes of colonialism and racism, and how it reverberates into intellectual property law and global economics. Where the film fails, I think, is helping a viewer understand why it is the three daughters of Solomon Linda, the author of the song Mbube, which became Wimoweh (The Lion Sleeps Tonight) received less than $1 million in royalties, which we will discuss initially below.
The film is well worth seeing first, and I invite people to stop reading and watch it first.
The film is well worth seeing first, and I invite people to stop reading and watch it first.
Okay? Did you watch it? Okay then.
So, you ask, why did the sisters only receive $750,000 in royalties? The first reason is the legal battle the famous South African copyright lawyer fought on Linda's daughters' behalf against Disney was based upon a leftover British copyright law quirk that had remained in South African copyright law, which concerned a reversion of copyrights back to the composer after 25 years (the documentary discusses a so-called 1911 copyright law, designed at the time to protect Charles Dickens' widow and heirs). Such a reversion was later repealed in Great Britain, and was never the law in the United States. The U.S. law has long stated, when the time for copyright expires, the creative works revert to the public domain. So this means, when the daughters achieved a settlement against Disney for its use of the song in The Lion King, it was only for royalties generated within South Africa.
Second, when trying to figure out how much the daughters could have gotten from Disney, there were two other limitations. The song takes up, perhaps, two minutes at the most in an hour and a half film or a two hour play. That's it. Plus, what we learn along the way in the documentary is Solomon Linda did not write the verses "In the jungle/The mighty jungle/The lion sleeps tonight...In the village/The peaceful village/The lion sleeps tonight." That was written in 1961 or thereabouts by a guy named George Weiss, who is shown to be sorta crass, particularly the way he sings and plays what he wrote. My wife and I sat appalled at how crassly he played what was so beautifully rendered in The Tokens' iconic version of the song. But, what I flashed onto as I watched this song's development unfold was how Heart and Soul became La Mer (here is the classic version) which then became Beyond The Sea. I listened to Mbube and realized the heart and soul, pun intended, of the Lion song we find so compelling is as much, and possibly a bit more, from George Weiss' verse melody as the Solomon Linda wee-wee-wee-wee-wee and Mbube chant melody.
Third, if there is any criticism of the lawyers in South Africa, it is their lack of vision in agreeing to the ten-year limitation. But I wonder how good the initial 1911 copyright argument was to have agreed to the ten year limitation in the first place. I think the documentary was weak on this point as it should have delved into why the lawyer thought the settlement was so good to start with. The lawyer had said on camera the settlement was for far more than he had ever hoped to get from Disney, which told me, as a practicing trial lawyer, he thought his argument arising from the 1911 copyright law was clever, but maybe not so much of a slam-dunk as people around him thought. That may be why there was the ten-year limitation on the copyright claim. If there is any legitimate criticism of the strategy in accepting the settlement, it was not seeing the idea of what, since the Spiderman franchise especially, we now call "re-boots." But again, if the 1911 copyright law argument was only so-so, then how far is the leverage?
Now, let's go to the societal issues. First, Gallo Records, the South African record company where Solomon Linda recorded his song in 1939, certainly ripped off Solomon Linda. The idea that this man, who could not read or write, signed away his rights to the song in the early 1950s after Pete Seeger, through Alan Lomax, got hold of the song, is almost glossed over. One looks at Linda's signature on the release of rights and hears the daughters almost saying the signature is a forgery; yet, most lawyers know that waiting decades to challenge such a thing means running smack dab into the statute of limitations. Second, lawyers took at least 30% of the money (the main lawyer getting 20%). Third, the South African government, which had wonderfully stepped in when Gallo proved cowardly in not wanting to challenge the international behemoth Disney, decided to take its share of the money fronted to the lawyers and the costs of the litigation. The documentary does not say what that sum was, but it sounded like another 10-20% so that now nearly half the money went to lawyers and the government--apart from taxes, of course. And again, let's remind ourselves this is only about royalties in South Africa, not anywhere else on the planet, and remind ourselves too this is only about a portion of a single song in a longer film and play.
The racism and colonialism hover over this because, as we think of Solomon Linda's daughters, we think of Leadbelly and the black blues artists who sang the songs that never were copyrighted by these poor, black singers and how it was largely the music business executives (whites and some Jews who became "white" in the parlance of the mid to late 20th Century) who made the money. When one sees how Pete Seeger, upon learning the song was not some "traditional" song--meaning really old, public domain melody--but something composed only thirteen years before, said he wanted no royalties from the song, one stands up and applauds the old Red. But one quickly learns Folkways Records, for whom Seeger recorded, had no such guilty or humane conscience, and merely gave a relative few pennies percentage of royalties to Solomon Linda and later his widow and daughters. This is horrible because Seeger was literally singing most of Mbube and had not been singing the later George Weiss-Tokens version. Seeger, though, coined "wimoweh" because for some reason he could not pronounce "mbube," which I found a bit odd, I have to admit. And later, when there was litigation in the 1990s between Folkways Records and George Weiss and his music publisher, somehow Folkways lost and George Weiss became, get this, sole owner of the song. What the heck? Sole owner? That there seems to have been no consideration of the Solomon Linda family in the American litigation tells us so much about how law actually works in developed nations and how little regard we have for the nations the U.S. and European nations have exploited over centuries.
And, in the modern world, meaning since the end of World War II, we have corporations and scamming professionals so often ripping off artists. When I hear the now late Harlan Ellison criticizing individual consumers for piracy, I think first and foremost of South Park's response. The real rip off people are the big corporations, and us professionals. Most artists make very little money, and it is only a few superstars who make any real money. And even then, one thinks of The Beatles' John Lennon and Paul McCartney saying how much money record companies and managers made off the Beatles--one thinks of the song You Never Give Me Your Money and, for our libertarian friends, Taxman. One thinks of how Ray Davies and the Kinks railed against record companies, and how Flo and Eddie/The Turtles talk about how managers and lawyers ripped them off. Zappa saw this early on and formed his own record company, as did the Beatles, but the money always ended up not quite staying where they thought, which was in their pockets as composers. And now the Zappa children are fighting over the still vast royalty money proceeds arising from Zappa's estate.
This is why, the older I get, the more I wonder about why so many of us are so much against a strong, deeply penetrating welfare state, where people are simply taken care of, and allowed to make art, where one may get adulation and status more than money from creating art that touches a mass of people. Money is a root of evil, not the only one, of course. However, it is stunning how much evil money can generate when we stop to think about it. The middle people, whether they are corporate executives or professionals (in the form of management, distributors, lawyers, accountants, etc.), are the ones who seem to make oodles of money, and there is nothing creative in any moral sense about what these persons actually do. And the grasping children or heirs, who did not create the art, end up fighting each other as with the Zappa kids and so many other heirs of artists over the last century.
And so we return to Solomon Linda's daughters, and I find I weep more for their father, weep more over the exploitation of Africans and African-Americans, which exploitation debases and undermines any joy in the daughters' lives (the side bar about the one sister dying of AIDS does not even bother to mention how many Africans died of AIDS, and how men, who were notoriously straying from their wives, infected many African wives), and weep more for how corporate globalism continues to wind its way through our planet, putting our planet at risk, and harming and eventually killing many human beings and killing off many of the planet's creatures. We rarely want to make all these connections because to do so is simply overwhelming. However, we should also recognize this as a result of propaganda from international corporate owned media, whose executives and management do not want us to think in this manner. It is, as former elite power player Al Gore, Jr. recognized, only in his exile, an assault on reason. It is why, again, I find myself, as I get older, becoming more radical in my views about money and power, and why I keep reading Louis Auchincloss novels to salve my psychic wounds and depression, I suppose. In my dreams, I keep hoping one day the lion of justice and human kindness will awake. However, I see more likely only more reaction, more religious fundamentalism, and more fascism. We humans would rather fight each other over money and power, and, in doing so, draw socially constructed distinctions between ourselves about our religions and skin color, rather than see what we have in common with each other as human beings. We would rather promote a philosophy of selfishness rather than a philosophy sharing with each other. I did weep a bit too for Solomon Linda's daughters, yes, but I stepped back and thought of these other things and fell into a far deeper despair.
