Kumbaya
African-American spiritual of disputed origin, widely sung in camps and politics.
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Kumbaya (also known as 'Come by here') is an African-American spiritual of disputed origin, with ties to the Gullah culture of the Sea Islands off South Carolina and Georgia and to enslaved Central Africans. The song, originally an appeal to God to aid those in need, spread from the islands to other parts of the United States and beyond, becoming a standard campfire song in Scouting and summer camps and gaining broader popularity during the folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s. In American politics, the phrase 'sing Kumbaya' emerged as a sarcastic criticism of expectations of reconciliation as unrealistic.
Background
The song's earliest known versions both date to 1926. One was a manuscript submitted by high school student Minnie Lee to her teacher Julian P. Boyd in Alliance, North Carolina, containing lyrics but no music.
The other was a wax cylinder recording by folklorist Robert Winslow Gordon, featuring an unaccompanied tenor voice identified only as 'H. Wylie' singing in Gullah, recorded within a few hours' drive of Darien, Georgia. Between 1926 and 1928, Gordon recorded three more versions of traditional spirituals with the refrain 'come by here' or 'come by heah,' though one was lost and another broken. Some time between 1922 and 1931, the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals collected a Gullah version called 'Come by Yuh' from the South Carolina coast, which may be the earliest if collected before 1926, but the society's publications are not dated.
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Sources
Compiled from Wikipedia and the sources listed below. Text from Wikipedia is available under CC BY-SA 4.0; this entry is adapted from it.
- Wikipedia: Kumbaya (CC BY-SA 4.0).
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