The Tokens were an American doo-wop group who, in 1961, scored one of the most enduring number-one hits in pop history with "The Lion Sleeps Tonight". Its soaring "wimoweh" chorus has never really left the culture, turning up in films, adverts, and playgrounds for more than sixty years.
The song was not theirs to begin with, and that story matters. It descends from "Mbube", written and recorded by the South African musician Solomon Linda in 1939. Linda was paid a pittance and died with almost nothing, while the song he created earned fortunes for others over the decades, a famous and painful case of credit denied.
For The Tokens themselves, it was the one. Nothing else they recorded comes close on streaming. "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" sits past 200 million plays, while their next biggest track has only a few million. The ratio is above 60, vastly beyond our 5.0 line.
By our measure The Tokens are a certified one-hit wonder, though the fuller truth is that their one hit was a new coat of paint on a much older, and much wronged, piece of music.