Thanks to Longform, an aggregator that finds great old essays which might otherwise be forgotten, an epic tale of cultural globalisation written for Rolling Stone in 2000 about one's of the world's best loved songs, 'a pop song so powerful that Brian Wilson had to pull off the road when he first heard it':
Navajo Indians sing it at powwows. Japanese teenagers know it as ?????????. The French have a version sung in Congolese. Phish perform it live. It has been recorded by artists as diverse as R.E.M. and Glen Campbell, Brian Eno and Chet Atkins, the Nylons and Muzak schlockmeister Bert Kaempfert. The New Zealand army band turned it into a march. England’s 1986 World Cup soccer squad turned it into a joke. Hollywood put it in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. It has logged nearly three decades of continuous radio airplay in the U.S. alone. 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.