Kumbaya

The story

"Kum ba yah", "Come by here", is an African-American spiritual whose origins are disputed. It is known to have been sung in the Gullah culture of the islands off South Carolina and Georgia, which has ties to enslaved Central Africans; Gullah is the creole language of the formerly enslaved Africans and their descendants on the Sea Islands and in the Bahamas. In its first form the song was an appeal to God to come to the aid of those in need. Stephen Winick of the Library of Congress writes that it almost certainly began among African Americans in the Southeastern United States, and that a Gullah version appeared early, even if the song did not begin in that dialect.

The two oldest versions with a certain year were both collected in 1926 and are kept in the Library of Congress's American Folklife Center; either may be the earliest. One is a manuscript of words without music, collected in Alliance, North Carolina, by a high-school student, Minnie Lee, for her teacher Julian P. Boyd, later a Princeton historian. The other is a wax-cylinder recording made by the folklorist Robert Winslow Gordon within a few hours' drive of Darien, Georgia, of an unaccompanied tenor named only as H. Wylie, singing in Gullah. Between 1922 and 1931 the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals collected a Gullah version on the South Carolina coast, "Come by Yuh", which cannot be dated with certainty. In May 1936 John Lomax found Ethel Best singing "Come by Here" with a group in Raiford, Florida.

These records contradict the long-standing copyright claim of the white songwriter Reverend Marvin V. Frey (1918–1992), who said he wrote the song about 1936 as "Come By Here", inspired by a prayer of a Portland evangelist, "Mother Duffin", and printed it in 1939. Frey said the title "Kum Ba Yah" came in 1946 from a missionary family, the Cunninghams, who brought back from Angola a partly translated version in which the phrase was Luvale. The story of an African origin also spread through the revival group the Folksmiths. Winick rejects it: "come by here" in Luvale would not give "Kum Ba Yah", and Wylie's 1926 recording already shows the Gullah pronunciation of "here" as "yah". He also notes that the Boyd manuscript was probably not collected from a Gullah speaker.

Little Sugar and the Hightower Brothers released a gospel recording, "Come by Here", in 1958. The Cooperative Recreation Service, a camp songbook publisher run by Lynn and Katherine Rohrbough, printed "Kumbaya" in 1956; from them it passed to the Boston singer Tony Saletan, who sang it at the Swarthmore Folk Festival on April 14, 1957, and taught it to Joe Hickerson. The Folksmiths recorded it in 1957 and Pete Seeger in 1958. It became a standard campfire song in Scouting and summer camps, and Joan Baez's 1962 recording made it widely popular in the folk revival. It was tied to the civil rights movement: marchers were recorded singing it as "Come By Here" on the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery for voting rights.

From the 1990s the title entered American political speech, usually sarcastically: to "sing Kumbaya" means to expect an easy reconciliation. Richard Vatz describes such uses as criticism of a consensus that does not examine the issues; Barack Obama, Mike Huckabee and Herman Cain are among the politicians who have used the phrase in this way.

What it says

A prayer asking God to come near and help those in need. It is quiet, repetitive and pleading, made for many voices to sing together.

The words

The words of this song are in the public domain, but no free, reliable edition of them has been found yet to import them from, and the Institute never types a song’s words from memory. “What it says” above tells what they are about.