The Origins of “Kumbaya” The folk song and spiritual “Kumbaya” is known by many people in the United States and around the world; it may be sung in church, but it’s also heard at rallies and around the campfire. It has been recorded and performed by various folk singers and groups. One possible reason for the popularity of the song – besides its melody and the repetition of lines that allows people to join in the singing – is the flexibility of the lyrics. The first verse of the original gospel song may have been something like “Hear me crying, Lord. Kumbaya.” The folk singer Joan Baez sang, “Someone’s singing, Lord. Kumbaya.” The group Peter, Paul, and Mary added a verse about laughing. Yet all of these alterations work well with the melody and indicate how this song can be adapted to changing situations. Actually, such modifications are to be expected from a tune with such an interesting and varied history. The spiritual was recorded as early as the 1920s and published versions appeared in the 1930s. However, most scholars believe that the song itself is older. While it was long thought to be an Angolan folk song, many linguists (people who study the history and development of language) and ethnomusicologists (people who study the music of different cultures) now believe that the work originated on the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina. Here, inhabitants speak a creole called Gullah. This language is related to English, and the word “kumbaya” is actually the English phrase “come by here,” pronounced with a Gullah accent. Gullah is actually one of numerous pidgins and creoles used in West Africa and the Americas during the slave trade. Often, when people who speak different languages are brought together and must communicate with one another, they take elements from the various languages and develop a simplified language called a “pidgin.” Sometimes, people learn this pidgin as their first language. When that happens, the pidgin becomes a “creole.” The Gullah creole and culture developed among slaves brought to the Sea Islands to work on rice plantations. Many of these slaves were brought over from West African countries such as Senegal, Sierra Leone, Angola, and Congo, and they spoke similar, but distinct languages. On the Sea Islands, slaves developed a pidgin with which they could communicate with each other and their masters. Today, there are still some people on the Sea Islands who still speak this language. The influence of West African languages and cultures is readily apparent in Gullah and in the cultural traditions of the Sea Islands. In 1949, the linguist Dr. Lorenzo Turner demonstrated that Gullah is not simply a dialect of English, but actually a creole that uses grammatical structures from African languages with English words. Through the isolation of the Sea Islands this remarkable linguistic and cultural mixture of Africa and America was preserved. Amazingly, the song “Kumbaya” was probably taken to those countries from which the ancestors of the Sea Islands’ inhabitants came, specifically Angola. It’s believed that American missionaries brought the song to Africa. In Africa, “Kumbaya” became popular at a time when it was losing popularity in the United States. Eventually in the 1950s and 1960s, it was rediscovered in Angola and brought back to the U.S., where it gained popularity as not only a religious tune, but also as a campfire song and a song of the civil rights movement. Today, the song and its title symbolize a desire for social change through peaceful means.

© 2006 Plank Road Publishing, Inc.