On "At The Hungry i" the Trio attributes the song to both The Weavers and Linda, and the song was covered a really surprising number of times by other performers. The source for most of the remaining American pop iterations of the song was the first "live" album in 1958 of the then-phenomenally popular (if today often neglected) Kingston Trio, recorded at San Francisco's legendary showcase nightclub, "The Hungry i." Except for a slightly sophomoric and lightly amusing introduction, the Trio's reading of the song is pretty straightforward and respectful of the original, delivered with their trademark verve and energy It was Seeger who picked out the song out of a couple dozen on records given him by legendary folklorist and song collector Alan Lomax, and Seeger who pronounced "mbube" (very soft first "b") as "uwimoweh." The Weavers recorded it and included it on "The Weavers At Carneige Hall," and it became a moderately successful single, reaching the Hit Parade Top Forty. The song came to America from Linda's record company, Gallo of South Africa, a subsidiary of Decca - which was recording The Weavers. For a man to sing the part was revolutionary - part of what Shabalala guesses was the "tribute" factor - to the audience, or the Zulu king, or God. This "verse" was done in a singing style that before Linda's version was done only by women.
The falsetto "verse" was originally a "ululation" - the curdling cry most often heard in the West as intoned by Arab women in celebration or encouragement but apparently common throughout Africa. On the show, Shabalala pointed out that Linda made a daring, even shocking, change to the performance of the song. The version we hear was codified by Solomon Nisitele, also known as Solomon Linda ( above). Shaka was known, not surprisingly, as "The Lion."
Shabalala believes it was a "tribute" song to someone's majesty, and I have read elsewhere that the song arose in the mid nineteenth century as a tribute to Shaka, the Zulu king who devised their system of warfare, established an empire, and handed the British one of the worst military disasters that their colonial armies ever suffered - a kind of a Custer's Last Stand multiplied by about fifteen times. The song was indeed a traditional Zulu chant, though according to Joseph Shabalala of LBM, not a hunting chant, as is often alleged. During the course of the hour, maybe 12 or 15 versions from Africa were played, ranging from an almost mournful dirge by the composer's daughters (more on that upcoming) to melodic versions by church groups to a vocally stunning rendition by Ladysmith Black Mazambo (of Simon's "Graceland" fame, if anyone's forgotten). PBS had done earlier hours on "This Land Is Your Land" (one of the highlights being Bruce Springsteen singing it solo with guitar) and "Danny Boy" (less successful) that had worked moderately well.
#Original wimoweh series
One of our local PBS stations here in Los Angeles recently re-ran a program on its "Independent Lens" series entitled simply "Mbube," the Zulu word that was the only lyric in the original chant that became Anglicized (by Pete Seeger, no less) as "Wimoweh."I had had doubts that the topic could sustain an hour's worth of television I was wrong.
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