It just doesn't feel like a song that one person wrote.

You know? It doesn't feel like a melody. It doesn't feel like a modest series of repeated musical notes

that one person can take credit for in the sense that

one day one person came up with that melody and now the melody exists because of that one person.

Are we sure about that?

No way.

This melody is always existed.

This melody is too thoroughly ingrained in the fabric of human existence to have ever

not existed.

This melody has existed for exactly as long as the land and the sea and the light have

existed.

And the Lord said, let there be light, and the melody exists. Right? Right.

Adam and or Eve hummed this melody as he and or she bit into an apple from the tree of knowledge.

Right? Right. You get me. But I guess I'm wrong. Grudgingly, skeptically, I am professionally

obligated to tell you that apparently for years, adverbs, for centuries of human existence,

for eons of planetary existence, this melody did not exist, and then one day, this melody just popped

out of this one dude's mouth.

What you just heard is a man named Solomon Linda, singing slash writing slash creating in the

biblical sense, the melody to the song The Lion Sleeps Tonight in the year 1939 in a recording

studio in Johannesburg, South Africa. Solomon Linda, Zulu tribesman and singer and songwriter,

and leader of the super popular a cappella group Solomon Linda and the Evening Birds.

In that photo that Solomon on the far left there,

...