Kumbaya my Lord, kumbaya

Kumbaya my Lord, kumbaya

Kumbaya my Lord, kumbaya

Oh Lord, kumbaya

Somebody needs you Lord, kumbaya

Somebody needs you Lord, kumbaya

Somebody needs you Lord, kumbaya

Oh Lord, Kumbaya

I routinely begin my musical lectures by singing a lively version of the African American spiritual Kumbaya. It is one of the most easily recognizable American folk songs, sung by people around the world. Effortlessly, the voices in the audience rise and fall into familiar harmonies as they sing the song along with me. After the applause for the beloved song subsides, I inquire of my audience, “Where did you learn to sing Kumbaya?”

For most of the audience, the song stirs sweet and deeply abiding images. They recount childhood stories of carefree summers at camp where they sang Kumbaya in the spirit of camaraderie by the glow of a campfire, under the watchful gazes of troop leaders and youth ministers.

Some, like me, are descended from people enslaved in the US, and Kumbaya is permanently fixed in our memories. Passed down from generation to generation, the call-and-response song has been a staple in black churches, both physical sanctuaries and the invisible ones created by enslaved people in obscured wooded locations, to practice their faith with autonomy. 

I inevitably ask my next question, “Do you know the meaning of Kumbaya?” The answer to the question is always the same, but it is stated in many different ways. “Yes, it means to find a peaceful solution,” or “Let’s find a way to get along,” or “We’re going to have a come-to-Jesus meeting and work out our differences.” The latter explanation elicits a good-natured laugh from the audience. 

I understand how the evocative song has reached the masses and why it appeals to people across cultural and generational lines. Kumbaya has been sung and recorded by white American folk artists such as the Folksmiths, Joan Baez, and Pete Seeger, as well as hugely popular foreign artists like Manda Djinn and Joan Orleans. However, those versions of the seemingly pleasant song actually belie the painful and tragic experiences of enslaved Black people, whence the song was born.

Kumbaya is a song from the Gullah Geechee culture. The Gullah language was created and spoken by enslaved people along the isolated seacoast islands of South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. The distinct African creole language, still spoken by modern-day descendants, is comprised primarily of English and a variety of words derived from languages spoken along the West African coast. The creation of the Gullah language allowed enslaved people who spoke numerous African languages to modify English to communicate among themselves. 1

Translated, Kumbaya simply means “come by here.” The spiritual began as an appeal to God, a request for help by enslaved people because of the atrocities they faced in their daily lives. They perceived the worst cruelties, like family separations, brutal beatings of children and adults, which sometimes resulted in death, and rampant sexual assaults against enslaved girls and women, to be more than any human should be expected to endure. So, a supernatural intervention was literally being requested through the song. 

“Somebody needs you, Lord. kumbaya!”

In his 1845 autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, abolitionist and formerly enslaved orator Fredrick Douglass disputed the false ideology perpetuated by proponents of slavery who attempted to romanticize the cruelty of the institution. Douglas noted that contrary to the portrayal of happy singing slaves working in the fields, he had rarely witnessed spirituals sung by slaves during happy times. He insisted instead that spirituals, “…told a tale of woe which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension; they were tones loud, long, and deep; they breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with bitterest anguish. Every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains.”2

Kumbaya survived the generational migrations from the Low Country region of South Carolina  to inland plantations in the pineland Pee Dee region of South Carolina where my ancestors were enslaved and where I learned the song. In a 1937 Federal Writers’ Project interview, Charlie Grant, my great grandmother’s older brother, recounted poignant stories from his childhood during his enslavement by prominent planter and physician William Rogers Johnson in Mars Bluff, South Carolina. During his interview, a disturbing memory caused Uncle Charlie to exclaim, “Great God in de morning,” as the nearly ninety-year-old recalled seeing his mother, Priscilla Johnson, partially disrobed and beaten in the presence of the entire plantation community. According to his testimony, whippings were a common occurrence on Johnson’s and neighboring plantations. Men were undressed completely before being tied down and whipped.3

Both acts, stripping and whipping, by the slaveholder or the designated punisher, were intended to exact shame and agonizing pain with every brutal lash of the whip.

In the case of Priscilla, a healer and caretaker of sick and wounded enslaved people on the Johnson plantation, it was usually her responsibility to clean the wounds and anesthetize the scars of others with salves concocted from local herbs and plants. Women in her community, who had most likely been cared for by Priscilla, would have administered the same care to her after her beating, which her son so vividly described. It is undoubtedly a time when those women would have sung the spiritual.

“Somebody praying, Lord. kumbaya!”

It isn’t surprising that Kumbaya was spread throughout the country by forcibly migrated enslaved people or through the appropriation of spiritual music by their former slaveholders. In Charleston, South Carolina, women from prominent slaveholding families, like the Balls and Ravenels, formed a group called the Plantation Melody Singers. Their intent, according to authors Blain Roberts and Ethan J. Kytle in Denmark Vesey’s Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy, was to “reproduce the tender memories and deep affection” between masters and their slaves. Later former Plantation Melody Singers, Maria Ravenel Gailliard (daughter of a wealthy physician and slaveholder), Mrs. William Seabrook, and Mrs. William Wayne- Charleston socialites whose families were also enriched by the labor of enslaved people formed another group called the Southern Home Spirituals. Most of the singers had lived in close proximity to enslaved people and their descendants. The white singers imitated the ring shouts and the circular shuffling and stomping dance movements of the Gullah people. They, along with similar co-ed singing groups, performed in blackface and dressed in brightly colored clothing that was evocative of former bondspeople, while mocking their religious practices during their outlandish performances. 4

Interestingly, the minstrel groups quickly gained popularity in northern states, and the Plantation Melody Singers performed at the White House for President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his wife Eleanor. Roosevelt might have heard the spirituals sung for the first time by African American soldiers from South Carolina-soldiers like my grandfather Nathan James, Sr., who sailed aboard the Leviathan naval ship with Roosevelt during the outbreak of the deadly flu pandemic in 1918.

Caroline Pinkney Rutledge and other white Charlestonians began changing the narratives of people like Frederick Douglass and Charlie Grant, people who had themselves experienced slavery. Instead Pinkney Rutledge insisted the songs were distinctly “African” rather than the creations of American-born enslaved people. She maintained that the songs were sung by “loyal and contented people” who loved the very slaveholding families that held them in bondage.5 

Declarations like these were common among former slaveholders and their descendants. It was their way of assuaging accusations of bigotry, while at the same time, distancing the mockery of their Black contemporaries and discrediting their contributions to the cultural landscape.

In the book, Camp Songs, Folk Songs, by Patricia Averill, campers recalled singing many songs from Black American religious culture, including Kumbaya. Caroline Pinkney Rutledge, a member of the Charleston Society of the Preservation of Spirituals, is credited by Averill as one of the editors of the book The Carolina Low Country, which helped to appropriate Kumbaya as a camp song during the Jim Crow era.6

Although the term cultural appropriation was not coined until the 1980s, the act of taking elements from the cultures of people who have been historically and systematically oppressed is a practice that is rooted in colonialism. In the co-opting of Kumbaya and other African American spirituals, Pinkney Rutledge and her contemporaries succeeded in extracting the true meanings from the songs over time and desensitizing millions of people around the world to the truthful experiences of enslaved Black people meant to be expressed through their music.

I share with my audience that I by no means want them to stop singing Kumbaya. It is a song from the culture of American-born people of African descent that I want everyone to know and sing, just not devoid of the knowledge of the history that has shaped its lyrics. When we sing Kumbaya and other spirituals with respect for the culture that created it, then, and only then, can we have a true exchange of culture rather than  appropriating it.

“Now, let’s try that again,” I say to the audience after sharing the etymology of the song. 

“Kumbaya, my Lord, kumbaya!”

1. Gullahgeecheecorridor.org, Cultural Heritage Corridor Commission, https://gullahgeecheecorridor.org/thegullahgeechee/, April 1, 2020.

2. Douglass, Frederick, and William Lloyd Garrison. Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American slave. Boston: Anti-Slavery Office, 1849. Pdf. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/item/82225385/.

3. Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 14, South Carolina, Part 2, Eddington-Hunter. 1937. Manuscript/Mixed Material. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/item/mesn142/

4. Roberts, Blaine, and Ethan J. Kytle, Denmark Vesey’s Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy, New York : The New Press, 2018.

5. Ibid

6. Averill, Patricia, Camp Songs, Folk Songs. Self-published, Xlibris, 2014.