Almost everybody can hum “Can’t Help Falling in Love.” Elvis made it his own, and you’ve probably heard it at a wedding or two. But ask a room full of fans who wrote it and you’ll mostly get blank looks.
It took three songwriters. Their names were Hugo Peretti, Luigi Creatore and George David Weiss.
They didn’t start from scratch, either. The melody is based on “Plaisir d’amour,” a French love song from 1784. The three men shaped it into something new, and on March 23, 1961, Elvis recorded it at Radio Recorders in Hollywood for his movie “Blue Hawaii.” The same team also wrote the title song for another Elvis picture that year, “Wild in the Country.”
It’s worth seeing the scene from the film, because the song was recorded for this very moment on screen.
Elvis sings it in “Blue Hawaii”
Now here’s the part that surprises people.
That same year a teen group from Brooklyn called the Tokens wanted to record an older song called “Wimoweh.” They went to George David Weiss and asked him to give it new English words. Hugo and Luigi produced the record.
The song became “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”
It came out in October 1961 and went all the way to No. 1 in America. It was still sitting at No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 on Jan 6, 1962. That was the same winter Elvis’s “Can’t Help Falling in Love” single was out in stores, after its release on Nov 21, 1961. So for a little while the same three men had two very different songs on the radio at once, and most people never put the two together.
To be fair to its roots, “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” grew out of a 1939 song by South African singer Solomon Linda, who is now credited as a co-composer.
Give the Tokens’ record a spin and see how fast the words come back to you.
The Tokens’ 1961 record
Then the song got a second life. In 1994 it was sung in Disney’s “The Lion King,” a film that grossed nearly $1 billion. A whole new generation picked it up from Timon and Pumbaa, and plenty of grandparents heard it on repeat from the back seat.
If that sounds familiar, this is the scene the kids were singing along to.
Timon and Pumbaa sing it in “The Lion King”
And George David Weiss wasn’t finished. He also co-wrote “What a Wonderful World” with Bob Thiele for Louis Armstrong, who recorded it on Aug 16, 1967. Twenty years later the movie “Good Morning, Vietnam” used it, and in February 1988 it climbed to No. 32 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Weiss went on to serve as a president of the Songwriters Guild of America, and he entered the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1984. He passed away in 2010.
So the next time Elvis comes on singing it, you’ll know the names behind it. Peretti, Creatore and Weiss gave us a lot more music than most folks realize, and some of it is probably playing in your grandkids’ rooms right now.