The Real History of the Folk Song ‘Kumbaya’

Two things typically spring to mind when thinking of “Kumbaya.” Most people either image kids enthusiastically singing the tune around a campfire or, less pleasantly, adults using it to mock unrealistic expectations of cooperation. Although the lyrics of the song can vary slightly, they typically run along these lines:

“Kumbaya my Lord, kumbaya
Kumbaya my Lord, kumbaya
Kumbaya my Lord, kumbaya
Oh Lord, kumbaya

Someone’s singing Lord, kumbaya
Someone’s singing Lord, kumbaya
Someone’s singing Lord, kumbaya
Oh Lord, kumbaya”

Basically any verb can be substituted for subsequent verses, such as laughing, crying, praying, and sleeping. For years, two false stories spread about the origin of the well-known folk song; read on to learn its real history.

1. The False Start of “Kumbaya”
2. The Real Roots of “Kumbaya”
3. Changing One’s Tune

The False Start of “Kumbaya”

“Kumbaya” is often referred to as an African folk song. But its most likely origin story actually begins with Black Americans.

The incorrect idea that “Kumbaya” is from Africa got off the ground thanks to The Folksmiths, whose 1958 album We’ve Got Some Singing To Do includes one of the first commercial recordings of the song (the other was released that same year by The Hightower Brothers). The Folksmiths—who learned the tune from folksinger Tony Saletan—sang it when they toured summer camps up and down the east coast of America in 1957, which embedded the ditty in the summer camp experience. “The camp counselors who played guitar liked it because it only has three chords,” band member Joe Hickerson toldTMCnet in 2006. 

The Folksmiths included background information about each song on the album and said that “Kum Ba Yah (Come By Here)” is “from the West coast of southern Africa” [PDF]. The band attributes the song’s copyright to the Cooperative Recreation Service, which published songbooks and was founded by husband and wife Lynn and Katherine Rohrbough. They apparently “collected it from a professor at Baldwin Wallace College in Ohio, who heard it from a missionary in Angola, Africa.”

Stephen Winick, a researcher at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, believes the Rohrboughs likely cited Africa as the song’s source because “the words ‘Kum Ba Yah’ sounded vaguely African.” But the couple quickly conceded their copyright when they learned of a man named Marvin Frey’s claim. 

In 1939, Frey, an Anglo-American Reverend, published the sheet music for a song called “Come by Here,” which he said he wrote in 1936 after being inspired by a prayer he had heard. Frey then claimed copyright once the song started gaining popularity. As for how “Come By Here” became “Kum Ba Yah,” Frey said he performed the song at a camp in Centralia, Washington, where it was heard by the son of a missionary family, who then took it over to Africa. While there, the song was rendered “in an African dialect, with the words, KUM BA YAH.” He claims he then “found out that the language was Luvale, which pervades throughout northeast Angola and southeast Zaire.” 

The snag in Frey’s story is that Luvale contains no such phrase, nor does any other language from that area. The minister went to his grave maintaining that he was the songwriter, with a plaque near his headstone crediting him as such. But his claims were later disproven. 

The Real Roots of “Kumbaya”

Winick set the record straight on “Kumbaya” in a 2018 article for the Library of Congress. The song can be traced as far back as 1926—via both a manuscript and a recording—but its history before that is uncertain.  

In 1927, North Carolinian high school principal Julian Parks Boyd sent a manuscript of the song’s lyrics—which had been collected from a student named Minnie Lee the previous year—to Robert Winslow Gordon, who went on to found the American Folklife Center archive in 1928 [PDF]. The song was titled after the refrain “Oh, Lord, Won’t You Come By Here,” with the preceding lyrics in each verse comprising of one line repeated three times: “Somebody’s sick, Lord, come by here,” “Somebody’s dying, Lord, come by here,” and “Somebody’s in trouble, Lord, come by here.”

The earliest known recording of the song was also included in the archive’s first holdings, having been collected in Georgia by Gordon himself in 1926. This version of the spiritual song is sung by H. Wylie in Gullah, a Creole dialect spoken on the islands off South Carolina and Georgia. Gordon had also collected other spirituals with the “come by here” or “come by yuh” refrain, but the cylinders have since been lost or broken so whether they are versions of the same song can’t be verified.

A version of the song that might predate Wylie and Lee’s versions was collected by the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals in The Carolina Low-Country. The songs in the collection were gathered between 1922 and 1931, so it’s not certain where this song—which features the lyrics “Somebody needs you, come by yuh”—falls in the timeline of “Kumbaya.”

According to Winick, the emergence of Wylie and Lee’s versions at the same time suggests the song “seems to have been shared among both Gullah speakers and speakers of other African American dialects.” Regardless of its precise origin, the spiritual song most likely began with Black Americans living in the Southern states. 

Changing One’s Tune

Although the lyrics and melody of “Kumbaya” haven’t changed all that much since its first known versions, perceptions of the tune certainly have. While the song started out as spiritual, in the years following its widespread popularity, it took on new meanings.

“Kumbaya” became a protest song during the 1960s. In 1965, the congregation of the Zion Methodist Church in Marion, Alabama, sang “Come By Here” in support of the civil rights movement. One year later, students in Gary, Indiana, adapted the lyrics to protest corruption in the city: “Gary’s troubled, my Lord, Kumbaya.” In 1980, crowds in Middletown, Pennsylvania, sang the tune at a candlelight vigil marking the one year anniversary of the Three Mile Island nuclear accident.

But the tide started to turn against “Kumbaya” in the mid-’80s. In 1985, film critic Rita Kempley mockingly referenced the song in her review of Volunteers for The Washington Post, calling the movie “a belated lampoon of ’60s altruism and the idealistic young Kumbayahoos who went off to save the Third World.” This take on the song—of it being an unrealistic and touchy-feely tune—grew in popularity over the years.

The backlash against “Kumbaya” may have started because it had become a staple at children’s summer camps, which sometimes led to it being thought of as saccharine and silly. For instance, in a scene from Addams Family Values (1993), Wednesday (Christina Ricci), Pugsley (Jimmy Workman), and Joel (David Krumholtz) are forced to endure a sappy rendition of the song after trying to escape from Camp Chippewa.

“Kumbaya” has become shorthand for a naïve and ineffectual approach to matters that require a firmer hand, with the phrase kumbaya moment usually being used cynically. The song is particularly used to this effect in the spheres of business and politics. In 2015, President Barack Obama referenced the song when speaking about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, saying the differences between his handling of the issue and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahuon’s “can’t be reduced to somehow a matter of let’s all hold hands and sing ‘Kumbaya.’ ”

From a heartfelt spiritual, to a children’s campfire song, to a powerful protest anthem, to a derisive phrase, “Kumbaya” is certainly a bit of a musical chameleon. 

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