Its epic transcultural saga is also, in a way, the story of popular music, which limped pale-skinned and anemic into the twentieth century but danced out the other side vastly invigorated by transfusions of ragtime and rap, jazz, blues and soul, all of whose bloodlines run back to Africa via slave ships and plantations and ghettos. It is the most famous melody ever to emerge from Africa, a tune that has penetrated so deep into the human consciousness over so many generations that one can truly say, here is a song the whole world knows. It has logged nearly three decades of continuous radio airplay in the U.S. Hollywood put it in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. England’s 1986 World Cup soccer squad turned it into a joke. The New Zealand army band turned it into a march. and Glen Campbell, Brian Eno and Chet Atkins, the Nylons and Muzak schlockmeister Bert Kaempfert.
It has been recorded by artists as diverse as R.E.M. The French have a version sung in Congolese.
Later, the song took flight and landed in America, where it mutated into a truly immortal pop epiphany that soared to the top of the charts here and then everywhere, again and again, returning every decade or so under different names and guises. He just opened his mouth and out it came, a haunting skein of fifteen notes that flowed down the wires and into a trembling stylus that cut tiny grooves into a spinning block of beeswax, which was taken to England and turned into a record that became a very big hit in that part of Africa. He hadn’t composed the melody or written it down or anything. It was 1939, and he was standing in front of a microphone in the only recording studio in black Africa when it happened. Once upon a time, a long time ago, a small miracle took place in the brain of a man named Solomon Linda. This story was originally published in the issue of Rolling Stone.