If it’s summer, someone’s singing KUMBAYA, maybe with friends toasting marshmallows around a campfire or kneeling at a communion rail. At least this used to be true before this simple song became a joke.
Once a reverential plea for God to “Come By Here,” Kumbaya is now most often said sarcastically and mocked as maudlin. It is often referenced to ridicule the naiveté of idealistic and sentimental lefty “do-gooders” (a.k.a. “Kumbaya liberals” or “kumbayahoos”) who still believe that people are really good at heart, if only we’d all join hands and sing.
SIMPLE SONG / COMPLICATED HISTORY
The song’s origins are in dispute. Marvin V. Frey (1918-1992), a white, evangelical pastor, claimed that he wrote “Come By Here” as a teenager in the 1930s, while at a Christian Crusade camp, and that a missionary took the song to Angola and returned with the words changed to Kumbaya. This was stated as fact in Frey’s obituary published by The New York Times, and there is an historic marker to this effect at Frey’s grave in Barre, NY.
But, wait! A scratchy recording of the song was made in the 1920s and is archived in the Library of Congress. Because of this recording, we know that Kumbaya was sung by descendants of enslaved people known as Gullah or Geechee when Frey was still in elementary school.
Because of their geographical isolation, the Gullah and Geechee who populate the “lowcountry” and islands off the coast of North and South Carolina, Georgia, and northern Florida have retained much of their West African culture and language patterns.
Folklorist Robert Winslow Gordon, the first director of the Archive of American Folk Song, made it his life’s work to seek out the music of the people. In 1926, he showed up to listen and learn, lugging heavy recording equipment with him. He used a wax cylinder to record a man identified as H. Wylie singing a spirited, upbeat version of the beloved song.
Kumbaya became Gordon’s most famous recording, albeit a scratchy one, but this didn’t prevent him from losing his job at the Library of Congress to the Great Depression.
When Gordon first heard Kumbaya, the Gullahs had been singing it for some time. Where did they get the song? Theories abound. All we know for sure is what happened later. It became a song for solace and social justice, sung in black churches during the brutal era of Jim Crow, then in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s.
Later, in the ‘60s, sincere teens sang it at church camp hootenannies. (I know I did.) It was recorded and made popular by Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, the Weavers, Peter, Paul, and Mary, and others.
COME BY HERE, MY LORD
Ridicule or no ridicule, the song’s simple prayer still holds. Come by here, we sing, wherever “here” may be, whether we are rushing through an airport to board a red-eye flight, carrying a homemade sign at an antiracism vigil, struggling through a math exam at school, or shaking our heads in disbelief while watching the evening news.
Come by here, God, where we are locked in a hot and sweaty jail cell or sitting by a feverish child or pacing bland, air-conditioned halls before a meeting with a harsh boss. Come by here, oh Lord. Someone’s laughing. Someone’s weeping. Someone’s scared.
Psalm 139 reminds us of the constancy of God’s presence, from the womb to the depths of hell, to the farthest edge of the universe. We plead kumbaya, not because God needs to hear it, but because we need to remind ourselves that the simple plea has been answered even before it was made. God is here, through times when we are tested as well as in the ordinary moments of our lives. Kumbaya. Come by here.
TO GO DEEPER
Music and lyrics at Hymnary.org
First audio recording of Kumbaya as sung by H. Wylie, recorded by Robert Winslow Gordon, on the Library of Congress site.
“A Long Road from ‘Come by here’ to ‘Kumbaya’” by Samuel G. Freedman, The New York Times, Nov. 19, 2010.
“Stop Making Fun of Kumbaya” on The Jesus Question blog by Victoria Emily Jones (This blog post includes YouTube clip of the Glory Gospel Singers acapella rendition. Gorgeous!
“The Rise and Fall of Kumbaya — and the Man Who ‘Discovered’ the Song” from New England Historic Society
“Being Gullah or Geechee, Once Looked Down On, Now a Treasured Heritage” by Ken Otterbourg for National Geographic, October 16, 2014
Obituary: “Rev. Marvin Frey, 74, Writer of Faith Songs” The New York Times, December 2, 1992