This article first appeared in the December 1994 issue of Mix, and was the very first installment of the long-running Classic Tracks series.
This month, Mix inaugurates a new regular feature in our “Recording Notes” section—Classic Tracks—in which I’ll look behind the scenes at the recording of famous songs from different eras.
Originally, I thought I might open Classic Tracks with some heavy Beatles or Stones tune, but a funny thing happened on my way to doing #1: I saw the Disney film The Lion King (twice) and re-fell in love with “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” a mere snippet of which is sung by the gruff hut lovable warthog Pumbaa and his wise-cracking meerkat buddy Timon in the film.
When the original version by The Tokens was re-released this past summer, I bought a copy for my Lion King-obsessed 4-year-old son, cranked up the big speakers in my living room and was immediately blown away by how cool the arrangement and the recording of this 33-year-old nugget is. (When I owned the original single at the age of 8, I undoubtedly played it on my little mono record player, and, of course, I knew nothing about either recording or arrangement.) Though it never quite cracked the Top 40 during its 1994 re-release, “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” stayed on the Billboard Hot Singles chart for more than five months, an incredible feat for a bona fide “oldie.”
The tune was derived from a Zulu folk song called “Wimoweh,” which was popularized in the early ’50s by South African singer Miriam Makeba and then covered by The Weavers on their live Carnegie Hall album in 1960. The Brooklyn-based vocal/folk group The Tokens were coming off their first hit single, the million-selling “Tonight I Fell In Love,” when the successful RCA staff producers Hugo & Luigi (Hugo Peretti and Luigi Creatore) wrote English lyrics for “Wimoweh” (along with George Weiss) and brought the song to The Tokens.
“Frankly, at first, we were embarrassed by the lyric,” remembers Tokens lead singer Jay Siegel. “We wanted to sing ‘Wimoweh,’ but Hugo & Luigi and George Weiss came up with ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight.’ After the [recording] date, a couple of the guys in the group were adamant about not releasing it; they didn’t like it at all. I thought we should give it a shot. I felt it was so strange that it was either going to be Number One or nothing. A month later, it hit Number One.”
Siegel wrote the vocal parts for The Tokens (borrowing heavily from Pete Seeger’s Weavers arrangement, he admits), and RCA staff arranger Sammy Lowe—who’d worked on smashes with the likes of Sam Cooke, Harry Belafonte and Elvis Presley—came up with the unusual musical arrangement, featuring guitar, banjo, stand-up bass, soprano saxophone, soprano voice (Metropolitan Opera singer Anita Darien) “and this great guy named Panama Francis on drums,” Siegel recalls. “Although what he did on that date was take his drum kit box, put the The New York Times on top of it, and then played brushes on top of the newspaper; that’s the drum sound you hear on the record.”
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The session took place in Studio A of RCA’s old 23rd Street studio in Manhattan on August 27, 1961. “That was a great studio,” Siegel says, “and we had the best engineer around, a man named Mickey Crawford. This was in the days of 3-track recording, but we always ran a simultaneous mono version, and the hit single was actually the mono version.” The re-release is Hugo & Luigi’s stereo mixdown.
The Tokens had the studio booked for three hours, which was fairly typical for the day, and they managed to cut two songs in that time, “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” and the single’s flip side, an old Portuguese folk tune called “Tina.” Siegel notes, “It went quickly because we were cutting completely live, vocals and instruments together, which was not always the case.”
A more typical regimen for that era, Siegel says, was to record the instruments in the first hour, the vocals in the second hour, and do “whatever sweetening was needed” in the third hour. RCA was equipped with a custom-built Electrodyne console at that time, and the mics were all tube and ribbon models of the day. “The group had one mic,” Siegel explains. “I had my own mic, which was probably one of those [RCA] 44s, and then there were a couple for the players. By today’s standards, it was pretty simple, but it sounded good.”
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The Tokens only cracked the Top 40 two more times before disbanding at the end of the ’60s. However, Tokens first tenor Hank Medress produced a new version of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” for Robert John, and it hit Number Three in 1972. Today, there are not one, but two versions of The Tokens to choose from: Siegel’s East Coast-based band plays about 120 dates a year on the oldies circuit, and brothers Phil and Mitch Margo (the original bass and second tenor voices) head a West Coast Tokens. Needless to say, they are all reaping the rewards of the seemingly endless life of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”
