Getting The Lyrics Right for The Lion Sleeps Tonight

I spent about three hours once trying to track down the original Zulu verses from Solomon Linda's 1939 recording of "Mbube" because someone on a fan forum insisted the English words were a mistranslation. They weren't wrong, but neither was the version everyone knows. The song has this layered history that makes quoting it cleanly more annoying than it should be. The version most people learn comes from The Tokens' 1961 recording, which became a massive hit in the US and UK. Here are the standard English lyrics as they appear on that release: A-weema-hona, a-weema-hona
Sho-wi-mose, sho-wi-mose
Huli-muhle, huli-muhle
Mhambi yena, mhambi yena
Gona, gona, gona, gona, gona
Wee-ma-hona, wee-ma-hona
A-weema-hona, a-weema-hona
Sho-wi-mose, sho-wi-mose
Huli-muhle, huli-muhle
Mhambi yena, mhambi yena
Gona, gona, gona, gona, gona
In the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight
Near you, far you, all around you
The lion sleeps tonight
A-weema-hona, a-weema-hona
Sho-wi-mose, sho-wi-mose

The Zulu sections are the actual lyrics from Linda's original. The English chorus was essentially made up on the spot by the songwriters who adapted it — George David Weiss, Hugo Peretti, and Luigi Creatore. They heard the Shona vocalization and decided it sounded like it could be English words if you squinted hard enough. "A-weema-hona" doesn't mean anything in English. It's just the sound of the melody with consonants attached. One thing people constantly get wrong: the bridge section where it says "tighten your belt" is not in the original Tokens recording. That came from later cover versions, particularly the 1990s pop revival that kept resurfacing the song. If you're learning it for a performance or a cover, you need to decide which version you're doing. The original Tokens recording does not have that section. It goes straight from the English chorus back into the Zulu nonsense syllables. I once ran into a problem where a karaoke track I was using had the "tighten your belt" bridge inserted at the wrong point in the song — it came before the first English chorus instead of after the second one. The timing was off by about forty seconds and it made the whole structure collapse. What I ended up doing was pulling the track apart in Audacity, cutting out the misplaced bridge, and reinserting it after the correct chorus. Took me maybe twenty minutes. Much faster than trying to find a different track that happened to have the right arrangement, because most freely available versions are just mashed together from different sources and nobody checks the timing.

If you want the full breakdown with both languages side by side, here's how it actually works structurally. The song opens with the Zulu vocalise (the "wee-ma-hona" part), then drops into the English verse about the lion sleeping in the jungle, then returns to the vocalise, then hits the English chorus again. This pattern repeats. The "Ooh, close your eyes" section is an add-on that appeared in later arrangements and isn't part of either the original 1939 recording or the 1961 Tokens version. A note on sourcing the lyrics: Wikipedia has a decent breakdown of the lyrical evolution, but the sheet music on Musicnotes or Sheet Music Plus will give you the exact notes if you're performing it. The key for The Tokens' version is D major, and the vocal range sits roughly between A3 and A4 for the male tenor line, which is why a lot of cover artists struggle with it — it sits right at the top of a comfortable tenor range and then jumps on the chorus. For the Zulu phrases specifically, "A-weema-hona" is considered by some linguists to be derived from the Shona phrase "N'kuhle n'khona" which roughly translates to something like "there it is, beautiful." But that connection is debated. Solomon Linda was Zulu, and the original "Mbube" lyrics are in Zulu, so the Shona theory might just be an attempt to make the song sound more pan-African than it actually is. The point is nobody really agrees on the etymology, and the record labels from the 1960s didn't care enough to fact-check it.

If you're just looking to learn the song, grab the lyrics from a licensed source like the official Bruno Mars version lyrics page or the Spotify metadata, which tends to be accurate. User-generated lyrics sites like AZLyrics or Genius will have the right words most of the time but occasionally mix in the "tighten your belt" bridge from the 1990s resurgence without noting it. Always check which era of the song you're looking at before you commit to learning it.