For most of King Kong's cast and creators, the end goal was to get to the United States. As performers, they recognized that their careers would be constrained if they stayed in South Africa. As the era’s global center of jazz, cinema, and popular culture in general, America loomed large in black Johannesburg during the postwar era. Through records, cinema, and magazines, black South Africans learned how black celebrities like Louis Armstrong, Joe Louis, Ella Fitzgerald, Charlie Parker, and Dorothy Dandridge had succeeded in becoming stars in the United States. Thus, a common dream for Johannesburg's black performers was not simply to escape apartheid and establish careers overseas but get to the States for a chance to become the next Armstrong or Fitzgerald. It was the destination of first choice.

Shortly after the 1959 domestic South Africa tour, three cast/ orchestra members from King Kong, Miriam Makeba, Hugh Masekela, and Jonas Gwangwa, migrated to the United States to attend school or pursue professional careers. Within four years, Eunice “Mamsie” Mthombeni (who took the surname Gwangwa after marrying Jonas in 1963), Caiphus Semenya, and Letta Mbulu, all former King Kong cast mates, joined the others in the States. Unlike the British-based King Kong exiles from the previous chapter, those who came to the United States during the early to mid-1960s achieved significant success. Five of them—Masekela, Makeba, Mbulu, Semenya, and Jonas Gwangwa— forged lasting music careers abroad. Makeba and Masekela, perhaps the most notable, even became near-household names in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s.

In achieving this success overseas, these five musicians proved exceptional. Alongside only a handful of other South African performers (most notably pianist Abdullah Ibrahim, a.k.a. Dollar Brand; singer Sathima Bea Benjamin; and the group Ladysmith Black Mambazo), these performers gained significant traction in American music. Although few South African musicians achieved widespread success in the United States, the existing scholarship concerning South African music and the experiences of exiled African performers there is quite substantial, due in part to these performers’ immense standing in South African cultural history. Typically focusing on the histories of individual artists or work (i.e., songs, albums), this scholarship has furthered our understanding of the American reception of South African music and its performers in the latter half of the twentieth century.