Songwriter’s heirs sleep easier tonight

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa – Three impoverished South African women whose father wrote the song known as “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” have won a six-year battle for royalties in a case that could affect other musicians.

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

Linda composed his now-famous song in 1939 in one of the squalid hostels that housed black migrant workers in Johannesburg. According to family lore, he wrote the song in minutes, inspired by his childhood tasks of chasing prowling lions from the cattle he herded. He called the song “Mbube,” Zulu for lion.

In the 1950s, at a time when apartheid laws robbed blacks of negotiating rights, Linda sold worldwide copyright for 10 shillings – less than $1.70. The song became one of the best known songs in the world as “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” U.S. singer Pete Seeger adapted a version that he called “Wimoweh.”

Owen Dean, South Africa’s leading copyright lawyer, argued successfully that under the British Imperial Copyright Act of 1911, all rights revert to the heirs.