What does ‘Kumbaya’ mean?
No other song has entered the realm of derision and social ridicule as the campfire folk number ‘Kumbaya’. Long-standing as a sarcastic rebuke to ineffectual civil or political action in times of crises, the humble ode to altruistic faith has become a byword among conservative parlance and beyond as everything wrong with their perception of liberal values. Even among the organised Left, fatigue with the hippy generation can often trigger a mocking ‘Kumbaya’ quip when faced with consensus-seeking attitudes that lack socialist discipline or class-war awareness.
Whatever your religion, or lack thereof, any effort to nurture humanist bonds between each other and strive for a road towards peace feels less silly in the violently chaotic political climate we’re all navigating. Before the business class’ corporate takeover of American society as part of the broader neoliberal revolution that has venerated greed over social cohesion, ‘Kumbaya’ was sung in earnest across the country’s storied history of social struggle. Choralled without a shred of irony, many student uprisings, civil rights marches, or popular protests were carried out under ‘Kumbaya’s’ rousing solemnity.
Like many folk songs of traditional heritage, the track’s exact origins are unclear. For a long time, its authorship was thought to be Oregon’s Reverand Marvin V Frey, an evangelical minister who claimed to have written the song in 1936 at a Christian Crusade camp as a teen. The piece, having been taken to Angola as part of missionary work, allegedly shaped the early title of ‘Kum-ba-yah’ based on the West-Central African Luvale dialect and singing style.
Yet, versions of ‘Kumbaya’ can be traced back to 1926. Archived in the Library of Congress’ American Folklife Center, a North Carolina lyric manuscript was issued, and a phonograph recording was made of Georgian singer H Wylie performing the earliest known audio of the number. Hailing from the American Black spirituality tradition, it’s been posited to have its roots among former slaves and the culture of work songs, making its later white-appropriated banality all the more galling. Informed by the horrors of Jim Crow and the segregationist South, ‘Kumbaya’ and its subsequent beige singalong stands as an outrageous pull towards the apolitical, away from its original paean to heavenly intervention and justice: “Someone’s crying, Lord, Kumbaya…”
However, well-meaning and gallant performances of the song did push it to greater popular consciousness during the folk revival. The Folksmiths and old Woody Guthrie comrade Pete Seeger recorded sincere renditions. But it’s Greenwich Village’s Joan Baez who defined the piece as the score to non-violent protest for the rest of the decade—from the Selma to Montgomery marches with Martin Luther King to the obstructions of Oakland’s military enlistment centre during the Vietnam War.
‘Kumbaya’s’ appeal to brotherhood swiftly became lost to pallid Scout hootenannies and a general association with limp wimpiness. Despite its prominent presence in the American songbook, its arguable radical roots were long gone by the 1970s, supplanted with a neutered breeziness sung alongside ‘Puff, the Magic Dragon‘ in cultural, campfire desecration. By the 1990s, ‘Kumbaya’ was a joke, sung as a punchline in The Addams Family Values‘ summer camp by the sadistically bubbly camp leaders.
So what does ‘Kumbaya’ mean?
Research indicates that the phrase “kumbaya” comes from the Black Gullah communities of South Carolina and Georgia’s Sea Islands. In the area’s Creole dialect, kumbaya is thought to have evolved as a pidgin English variant of “come by here”, sung as a spiritual implore for God to break the chains of disenfranchisement and grinding servitude in 1920s America. “The Gullah have always fascinated folklorists because they have kept major parts of their African language and speak in a unique English dialect to this day,” Smithsonian Institution’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage’s Jeff Place told NPR in 2012.
Knowing its traumatised shaping and deep roots in one of modern history’s darkest chapters makes ‘Kumbaya’s’ cultural standing even more tragic. In a contemporary world of bitter polarisation and the USA’s reckoning with its racial history under attack from the reactionary Right, perhaps the track’s revaluation could serve a small part in dismantling white America’s conflicted narratives, which try to bury the Deep South’s racial scars.
