![Come By Here Kumbaya Transcription of 1926 recording](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3d/Come_By_Here_Kumbaya_Transcription_of_1926_recording.jpg)
"''Kum ba yah''" ("''Come by here''") is an
African American
African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans and Afro-Americans) are an ethnic group consisting of Americans with partial or total ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa. The term "African American" generally denotes descendants of ens ...
spiritual song of disputed origin, but known to be sung in the
Gullah
The Gullah () are an African Americans, African American ethnic group who predominantly live in the South Carolina Lowcountry, Lowcountry region of the U.S. states of Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, and North Carolina, within the coastal plain ...
culture of the
islands off South Carolina and Georgia, with ties to enslaved
West Africa
West Africa or Western Africa is the westernmost region of Africa. The United Nations defines Western Africa as the 16 countries of Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Mali, Maurit ...
ns. The song is thought to have spread from the islands to other Southern states and the North, as well as other places in the world. The first known recording, of someone known only as H. Wylie, who sang in the
Gullah dialect, was recorded by
folklorist
Folklore studies, less often known as folkloristics, and occasionally tradition studies or folk life studies in the United Kingdom, is the branch of anthropology devoted to the study of folklore. This term, along with its synonyms, gained currenc ...
Robert Winslow Gordon
Robert Winslow Gordon (September 2, 1888 – March 26, 1961) was an American academic, known as a collector of folk songs.
Gordon was educated at Harvard University. He joined the English faculty at the University of California at Berkeley in 19 ...
in 1926. It later became a standard campfire song in
Scouting
Scouting, also known as the Scout Movement, is a worldwide youth movement employing the Scout method, a program of informal education with an emphasis on practical outdoor activities, including camping, woodcraft, aquatics, hiking, backpacking ...
and
summer camp
A summer camp or sleepaway camp is a supervised program for children conducted during the summer months in some countries. Children and adolescents who attend summer camp are known as ''campers''. Summer school is usually a part of the academ ...
s and enjoyed broader popularity during the
folk revival
The American folk music revival began during the 1940s and peaked in popularity in the mid-1960s. Its roots went earlier, and performers like Josh White, Burl Ives, Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Big Bill Broonzy, Billie Holiday, Richard Dyer-Benn ...
of the 1950s and 1960s.
The song was originally an appeal to God to come and help those in need.
Origins
According to
Library of Congress
The Library of Congress (LOC) is the research library that officially serves the United States Congress and is the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the country. The library is ...
editor Stephen Winick, the song almost certainly originated among African Americans in the Southeastern United States, and had a
Gullah
The Gullah () are an African Americans, African American ethnic group who predominantly live in the South Carolina Lowcountry, Lowcountry region of the U.S. states of Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, and North Carolina, within the coastal plain ...
version early in its history even if it did not originate in that dialect.
The two oldest versions whose year of origin is known for certain were both collected in 1926, and both reside in the Library's
American Folklife Center
The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. was created by Congress in 1976 "to preserve and present American Folklife". The center includes the Archive of Folk Culture, established at the library in 1928 as a repos ...
. No precise month or day was recorded for either version, so either may be the earliest known version of the song. One was submitted as a high-school collecting project by a student named Minnie Lee to her teacher,
Julian P. Boyd, later a professor of history at Princeton University and president of the American Historical Association. This version, collected in Alliance, North Carolina, is a manuscript featuring lyrics but no music. The other 1926 version was recorded on
wax cylinder
Waxes are a diverse class of organic compounds that are lipophilic, malleable solids near ambient temperatures. They include higher alkanes and lipids, typically with melting points above about 40 °C (104 °F), melting to give low ...
by
Robert Winslow Gordon
Robert Winslow Gordon (September 2, 1888 – March 26, 1961) was an American academic, known as a collector of folk songs.
Gordon was educated at Harvard University. He joined the English faculty at the University of California at Berkeley in 19 ...
, founder of what began as the Library of Congress's
Archive of Folk Song, which became the
American Folklife Center
The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. was created by Congress in 1976 "to preserve and present American Folklife". The center includes the Archive of Folk Culture, established at the library in 1928 as a repos ...
. The singer's name was H. Wylie, and the song was recorded within a few hours' drive of
Darien, Georgia
Darien () is a city in and the county seat of McIntosh County, Georgia, United States. It lies on Georgia's coast at the mouth of the Altamaha River, approximately south of Savannah, and is part of the Brunswick, Georgia Metropolitan Statist ...
, although Gordon did not note the exact location. Between 1926 and 1928, Gordon recorded three more versions of traditional
spirituals
Spirituals (also known as Negro spirituals, African American spirituals, Black spirituals, or spiritual music) is a genre of Christian music that is associated with Black Americans, which merged sub-Saharan African cultural heritage with the e ...
with the refrain "come by here" or "come by heah". One of these is a different song concerning the story of
Daniel
Daniel is a masculine given name and a surname of Hebrew origin. It means "God is my judge"Hanks, Hardcastle and Hodges, ''Oxford Dictionary of First Names'', Oxford University Press, 2nd edition, , p. 68. (cf. Gabriel—"God is my strength" ...
in the den of lions. Of the other two, one has been lost, and one cylinder was broken, so it cannot be determined if they are versions of "Kumbaya".
According to an article in ''Kodaly Envoy'' by Lum Chee-Hoo, some time between 1922 and 1931, members of the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals collected a version from the South Carolina coast.
"Come by Yuh", as they called it, was sung in
Gullah
The Gullah () are an African Americans, African American ethnic group who predominantly live in the South Carolina Lowcountry, Lowcountry region of the U.S. states of Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, and North Carolina, within the coastal plain ...
, the creole language spoken by the formerly enslaved Africans and their descendants living on the
Sea Islands
The Sea Islands are a chain of tidal and barrier islands on the Atlantic Ocean coast of the Southeastern United States. Numbering over 100, they are located between the mouths of the Santee and St. Johns Rivers along the coast of South Carolina, ...
of
South Carolina
)''Animis opibusque parati'' ( for, , Latin, Prepared in mind and resources, links=no)
, anthem = " Carolina";" South Carolina On My Mind"
, Former = Province of South Carolina
, seat = Columbia
, LargestCity = Charleston
, LargestMetro = ...
and
Georgia
Georgia most commonly refers to:
* Georgia (country), a country in the Caucasus region of Eurasia
* Georgia (U.S. state), a state in the Southeast United States
Georgia may also refer to:
Places
Historical states and entities
* Related to the ...
, as well as
The Bahamas
The Bahamas (), officially the Commonwealth of The Bahamas, is an island country within the Lucayan Archipelago of the West Indies in the Atlantic Ocean, North Atlantic. It takes up 97% of the Lucayan Archipelago's land area and is home to ...
. It is possible this is the earliest version, if it was collected before 1926. Because the individual songs in this society's publications are not dated, however, it cannot be dated with certainty to before 1931.
In May 1936,
John Lomax
John Avery Lomax (September 23, 1867 – January 26, 1948) was an American teacher, a pioneering musicologist, and a folklorist who did much for the preservation of American folk music. He was the father of Alan Lomax, John Lomax Jr. and Bess Lo ...
, Gordon's successor as head of the Archive of Folk Song, discovered a woman named Ethel Best singing "Come by Here" with a group in
Raiford, Florida
Raiford is a town in Union County, Florida
Union County is a county located in the north central portion of the U.S. state of Florida, the smallest in the state. As of the 2020 census, the population was 16,147. The county seat is Lake Bu ...
.
These facts contradict the longstanding copyright and authorship attribution to the white Anglo-American songwriter, Reverend Marvin V. Frey.
Frey (1918–1992) said he wrote the song circa 1936 under the title "Come By Here", inspired, he said, by a prayer he heard delivered by "Mother Duffin", a storefront evangelist in
Portland, Oregon
Portland (, ) is a port city in the Pacific Northwest and the largest city in the U.S. state of Oregon. Situated at the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers, Portland is the county seat of Multnomah County, the most populous co ...
. It first appeared in this version in ''Revival Choruses of Marvin V. Frey'', a lyric sheet printed in that city in 1939. In an interview at the Library of Congress quoted by Winick,
Frey said the change of the title to "Kum Ba Yah" came about in 1946, when a missionary family named Cunningham returned from Africa where they had sung Frey's version. According to Frey, they brought back a partly translated version, and "Kum Ba Yah" was an African phrase from
Angola
, national_anthem = " Angola Avante"()
, image_map =
, map_caption =
, capital = Luanda
, religion =
, religion_year = 2020
, religion_ref =
, coordina ...
(specifically in
Luvale The Luvale people, also spelled Lovale, Balovale, Lubale, as well as Lwena or Luena in Angola, are a Bantu ethnic group found in northwestern Zambia and southeastern Angola. They are closely related to the Lunda and Ndembu to the northeast, but the ...
). Frey said the Cunninghams then toured America singing the song with the text "Kum Ba Yah".
The story of an African origin for the phrase circulated in several versions, spread also by the revival group the Folksmiths, whose liner notes for the song stated that "Kum Ba Yah" was brought to America from Angola.
As Winick points out, however:
Although it is often said that the song originated in Gullah, Winick further points out that the Boyd manuscript, which may be the earliest version of the song, was probably not collected from a Gullah speaker.
A
45 rpm recording in a contemporary
gospel
Gospel originally meant the Christian message ("the gospel"), but in the 2nd century it came to be used also for the books in which the message was set out. In this sense a gospel can be defined as a loose-knit, episodic narrative of the words an ...
style was released in 1958 by Little Sugar and the Hightower Brothers as "Come by Here", on the
Savoy
Savoy (; frp, Savouè ; french: Savoie ) is a cultural-historical region in the Western Alps.
Situated on the cultural boundary between Occitania and Piedmont, the area extends from Lake Geneva in the north to the Dauphiné in the south.
Savo ...
label (backed with "At the Golden Gate").
Folk music revival and Civil Rights Movement
The Folksmiths, including
Joe Hickerson
Joseph C. Hickerson (born October 20, 1935, in Highland Park, Illinois) is a folk singer and songleader. A graduate of Oberlin College, for 35 years (1963–1998) he was Librarian and Director of the Archive of Folk Song at the American Folklife ...
, recorded the song in 1957, as did
Pete Seeger
Peter Seeger (May 3, 1919 – January 27, 2014) was an American folk singer and social activist. A fixture on nationwide radio in the 1940s, Seeger also had a string of hit records during the early 1950s as a member of the Weavers, notably ...
in 1958. Hickerson credits
Tony Saletan
Anthony D. "Tony" Saletan is an American folk singer, children's instructional television pioneer, and music educator, who is responsible for the modern rediscovery, in the mid-1950s, of two of the genre's best-known songs, "Michael Row the Boat ...
, then a songleader at the
Shaker Village Work Camp, for introducing him to "Kumbaya".
Saletan had learned it from Lynn Rohrbough, co-proprietor with his wife Katherine of the camp songbook publisher Cooperative Recreation Service, predecessor to World Around Songs.
(Hickerson later succeeded Gordon and Lomax at the
American Folklife Center
The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. was created by Congress in 1976 "to preserve and present American Folklife". The center includes the Archive of Folk Culture, established at the library in 1928 as a repos ...
, successor to the Archive of Folk Song.) The song enjoyed newfound popularity during the
American folk music revival
The American folk music revival began during the 1940s and peaked in popularity in the mid-1960s. Its roots went earlier, and performers like Josh White, Burl Ives, Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Big Bill Broonzy, Billie Holiday, Richard Dyer-Benn ...
of the early to mid-1960s, largely due to
Joan Baez
Joan Chandos Baez (; born January 9, 1941) is an American singer, songwriter, musician, and activist. Her contemporary folk music often includes songs of protest and social justice. Baez has performed publicly for over 60 years, releasing more ...
's 1962 recording of the song, and became associated with the
Civil Rights Movement
The civil rights movement was a nonviolent social and political movement and campaign from 1954 to 1968 in the United States to abolish legalized institutional Racial segregation in the United States, racial segregation, Racial discrimination ...
of that decade. For example, there is a recording of marchers singing the song as "Come By Here" during the
1965 Selma-to-Montgomery (Alabama) march for voting rights.
Political usage
The title of the song is often used
sarcastically in
English-speaking countries
The following is a list of English-speaking population by country, including information on both native speakers and second-language speakers.
List
* The European Union is a supranational union composed of 27 member states. The total Engl ...
, either to make fun of
spirituality
The meaning of ''spirituality'' has developed and expanded over time, and various meanings can be found alongside each other. Traditionally, spirituality referred to a religious process of re-formation which "aims to recover the original shape o ...
and
interpersonal relationships
The concept of interpersonal relationship involves social associations, connections, or affiliations between two or more people. Interpersonal relationships vary in their degree of intimacy or self-disclosure, but also in their duration, in t ...
or to criticize their superficiality.
Beginning in the 1990s and increasing in the following decades, references to "Kumbaya" or "singing Kumbaya" entered
idiom
An idiom is a phrase or expression that typically presents a figurative, non-literal meaning attached to the phrase; but some phrases become figurative idioms while retaining the literal meaning of the phrase. Categorized as formulaic language, ...
atic usage in the
politics of the United States
The politics of the United States function within a framework of a constitutional federal republic and presidential system, with three distinct branches that share powers. These are: the U.S. Congress which forms the legislative branch, a bi ...
, often to suggest that someone other than the speaker is too conciliatory or eager to compromise.
Richard Vatz
Richard Eugene Vatz (born December 21, 1946) is an American academic, lecturer and writer who is a professor of Rhetoric and Communication at Towson University.
Vatz is a Faculty Fellow at the Eastern Communication Association (ECA) and has ...
has characterized these references to the song as sarcastic criticism of consensus "that allegedly does not examine the issues or is revelatory of cockeyed optimism."
For example, in discussing the
Israeli–Palestinian conflict
The Israeli–Palestinian conflict is one of the world's most enduring conflicts, beginning in the mid-20th century. Various attempts have been made to resolve the conflict as part of the Israeli–Palestinian peace process, alongside other ef ...
,
U.S. President
The president of the United States (POTUS) is the head of state and head of government of the United States of America. The president directs the executive branch of the federal government and is the commander-in-chief of the United States ...
Barack Obama
Barack Hussein Obama II ( ; born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, Obama was the first African-American president of the U ...
commented that the substantive disagreements between the parties "can't be reduced to somehow a matter of let's all hold hands and sing 'Kumbaya.'" Many other high-profile political figures have similarly referred derisively to the singing of the song as a way of expressing doubt or disparagement for potential compromise.
Former
Arkansas Governor
The governor of Arkansas is the head of government of the U.S. state of Arkansas. The governor is the head of the executive branch of the Arkansas government and is charged with enforcing state laws. They have the power to either approve or v ...
Mike Huckabee
Michael Dale Huckabee (born August 24, 1955) is an American politician, Baptist minister, and political commentator who served as the 44th governor of Arkansas from 1996 to 2007. He was a candidate for the Republican Party presidential nomina ...
explained his skepticism that ideologically aligned candidates in the
2012 Republican Party presidential primaries would unite around a single individual by saying, "there's not going to be some magic moment at which three or four of these people sit around a campfire toasting marshmallows, singing 'Kumbaya' and giving the nod to one of their competitors."
Businessman and political candidate
Herman Cain, speaking to a rally in 2011, said, "Singing ‘Kumbaya’ is not a foreign policy strategy."
Lyrics
Additional stanzas by Barry Moore (1973), in "Sing and Rejoice" songbook, Herald Press (1979);
In Your Body, Lord, we are one.
In Your Body, Lord, we are one.
In Your Body, Lord, we are one.
O Lord, we are one.
In his banquet, Lord, we find strength.
In his banquet, Lord, we find strength.
In his banquet, Lord, we find strength.
O Lord, we find strength.
Draw us nearer, Lord, each to each.
Draw us nearer, Lord, each to each.
Draw us nearer, Lord, each to each.
O Lord, each to each.
Fill our mind, Lord, with Your peace.
Fill our mind, Lord, with Your peace.
Fill our mind, Lord, with Your peace.
O Lord, with Your peace.
Undivided, Lord, we shall stand.
Undivided, Lord, we shall stand.
Undivided, Lord, we shall stand.
O Lord, we shall stand.
See also
*
Christian child's prayer § Spirituals
*
Civil rights movement in popular culture
The history of the 1954 to 1968 American civil rights movement has been depicted and documented in film, song, theater, television, and the visual arts. These presentations add to and maintain cultural awareness and understanding of the goals, tact ...
References
External links
Kumbaya: History of an Old Song , Folklife TodayLibrary of Congress research on the origins of Kumbaya
{{Authority control
American Christian hymns
Gullah culture
African-American spiritual songs
Songs of the civil rights movement