Kumbaya: A Song History
"Kumbaya" is an African American spiritual from the American South, and its title renders the phrase "come by here" as sung in a dialect, most likely Gullah, in which "here" sounds like "yah."[1] The oldest sound recording known to the Library of Congress is an undated wax cylinder made by Robert Winslow Gordon, founder of the Library's folk song archive, of a singer identified as H. Wylie; Gordon's faint spoken announcement appears to give the date as April 17, 1926, and the Library's folklorist Stephen Winick judges it likely that the recording was made in Darien, Georgia, where Gordon was then living.[1] In 1926 Julian Parks Boyd also collected a version from a student in Alliance, North Carolina, and a "Come by Yuh" text was printed in 1931 in The Carolina Low Country.[1] Because the early versions then known came from Georgia and South Carolina, many scholars proposed a Gullah origin; the North Carolina text makes that less than certain, and Winick allows that the song may have arisen in African American speech more generally.[1]
Winslow Homer, Camp Fire, oil on canvas, 1880. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). Shown for its subject; it has no connection to the song.
Two other origin stories circulate, and Winick discounts both.[1] The evangelist Marvin Frey published a "Come by Here" as sheet music in 1939 and later said he had written the words in 1936, but Winick finds that claim very unlikely, since Wylie's recording, made nearly a decade earlier, already resembles Frey's song in words and tune.[1] A second account, that a missionary brought the song back from Angola, reached the Ohio songbook publishers Lynn and Katharine Rohrbough secondhand, and Winick concludes that the notion of an African origin took hold partly because they did not know of older American versions.[1][2]
The song spread through summer camps in the late 1950s; the Folksmiths, who had taught it to campers on a 1957 tour, issued the first published recording on Folkways in early 1958, Folkways released Pete Seeger's version later that year, and the Weavers recorded it in 1959.[1] Joan Baez, Odetta, and Sweet Honey in the Rock were among many later performers, and protesters came to regard it as a civil rights song.[1][2] It entered church use as well, appearing as No. 494 in The United Methodist Hymnal.[2] Its very familiarity bred a backlash: from the 1980s on, the title became shorthand for naive, feel-good unity, as in the dismissive talk of joining hands to sing "Kumbaya."[1] In 2017 a Georgia Senate resolution recognized it as the state's official historical song.[1][2]
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