Vince Hader (Simba), Sydney Production
Photo: James Morgan ©Disney
The Music
The Music | African | South African | Musical Styles | Instruments
MUSICAL STYLES

Here are some South African musical styles. Can you hear how these styles may have inspired the music in THE LION KING?

Mbube: South African style of a capella music (a capella means voices alone without instruments) incorporating one or two high-pitched lead vocals and a heavy bass four-part harmony. In 1939, a South African singer named Solomon Linda and his group the Original Evening Birds recorded a song called Mbube, meaning "Lion." We know this song today as the classic "The Lion Sleeps Tonight." The term Mbube has come to encompass this style of a capella singing.

Iscathamiya: Meaning to "step softly" or "tiptoe." Tiptoe harmony is a four-part call-and-response male choral musical style, associated with Zulu migrant workers. The chorus traditionally stands in a line, tiptoeing in place, sometimes stamping all in unison. Because of the system of apartheid that kept black South Africans in tightly controlled areas, migrant workers made up the country's workforce; black workers had to migrate from their homes to where the work was. Contracts kept young men away from their families for as long as a year. They were forced to live in single-sex guarded compounds or hostels created to isolate them from the white urban population; conditions in the hostels were usually dirty and ramshackle. Men forced to live together in these compounds created a style of choral singing in which men had to sing the higher parts usually reserved for women, and because they did not want to be discovered when practicing, the heavy stamping of traditional dances was replaced by light, tiptoe dances. You can hear, and see, iscathamiya-style singing in THE LION KING,especially in the song "One by One."