The vocal talent credited with making "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" a number one hit has died, at the age of 68. Hank Medress recorded "Lion" with the Tokens in 1961. The song had been a folk standard (originally performed by The Weavers in the 1950’s) but acheived number one on the Top-40 chart with the Tokens version. <\/p>\n
The Tokens were the second band for Medress, his fisrt was the Linc-Tones with fellow Lincoln High School buddy Neil Sedaka.<\/p>\n
Medress moved into music production and was credited for the success of the Chiffons "One Fine Day" and "He’s So Fine" in the 60’s.<\/p>\n
After he broke off from the Tokens in the 70’s, his first solo production effort was convincing a record company executive, Tony Orlando, to handle lead vocals for a band called "Dawn", which was recording a new song called "Knock Three Times". Medress also produced "Candida".<\/p>\n
In the 1980’s, he was responsible for re-inventing New York Dolls lead singer David Johansen as "Buster Poindexter" and producing his first hit single "Hot, Hot, Hot". <\/p>\n
Rest in Peace, Hank Medress<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The vocal talent credited with making "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" a number one hit has died, at the age of 68. Hank Medress recorded "Lion" with the Tokens in 1961. The song had been a folk standard (originally performed by The Weavers in the 1950’s) but acheived number one on the Top-40 chart with the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rantings-ravings"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/famille.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/famille.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/famille.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/famille.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/famille.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=167"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/famille.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/famille.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/famille.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/famille.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}