A Long Road From 'Come by Here' to 'Kumbaya'
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/20/us/20religion.html
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
Published: November 19, 2010
Nearing 40 and nearly broke, ousted from his last job as an English
professor, a folklore buff named Robert Winslow Gordon set out in the
spring of 1926 from his temporary home on the Georgia seacoast,
lugging a hand-cranked cylinder recorder and searching for songs in
the nearby black hamlets.
One particular day, Mr. Gordon captured the sound of someone
identified only as H. Wylie, singing a lilting, swaying spiritual in
the key of A. The lyrics told of people in despair and in trouble,
calling on heaven for help, and beseeching God in the refrain, "Come by here."
With that wax cylinder, the oldest known recording of a spiritual
titled for its recurring plea, Mr. Gordon set into motion a strange
and revealing process of cultural appropriation, popularization and
desecration. "Come By Here," a song deeply rooted in black
Christianity's vision of a God who intercedes to deliver both solace
and justice, by the 1960s became the pallid pop-folk sing-along
"Kumbaya." And "Kumbaya," in turn, has lately been transformed into
snarky shorthand for ridiculing a certain kind of idealism, a quest
for common ground.
Conservative Republicans use the term to mock the Obama
administration as naïve. Liberals on the left wing of the Democratic
Party use it to chastise President Obama for trying to be bipartisan.
The president and some of his top aides use it as an example of what
they say their policies are not.
Yet the word nobody wants to own, the all-purpose put-down of the
political moment, has a meaningful, indeed proud, heritage that
hardly anyone seems to know or to honor. Only within black church
circles can one, to this day, still hear "Come By Here" with the
profundity that Mr. Gordon did almost a century ago.
"I find it troubling, but not surprising," said Glenn Hinson, a
professor of folklore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill who has studied the song. "Yet again, a product of
African-American spirituality has been turned into a term of joking
and derision. It's a distortion, and it's a sad reversal."
The current political landscape Red State, Blue State, Tea Party,
MoveOn.org, Congressional gridlock only adds to the insult's appeal.
" 'Kumbaya' lets you ridicule the whole idea of compromise," said
John G. Geer, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University in
Nashville who is an expert in negative campaigning. "And that
ridicule is the latest manifestation of the polarization that the
country is dealing with."
Far from compromise, "Come By Here" in its original hands appealed
for divine intervention on behalf of the oppressed. The people who
were "crying, my Lord" were blacks suffering under the Jim Crow
regime of lynch mobs and sharecropping. While the song may have
originated in the Georgia Sea Islands, by the late 1930s, folklorists
had made recordings as far afield as Lubbock, Tex., and the Florida
women's penitentiary.
With the emergence of the civil rights movement in the 1950s, "Come
By Here" went from being an implicit expression of black liberation
theology to an explicit one. The Folkways album "Freedom Songs"
contains an emblematic version deep, rolling, implacable sung by
the congregation at Zion Methodist Church in Marion., Ala., soon
after the Selma march in March 1965.
The mixed blessing of the movement was to introduce "Come By Here" to
sympathetic whites who straddled the line between folk music and
progressive politics. The Weavers, Peter Seeger, the Folksmiths, Joan
Baez and Peter, Paul and Mary all recorded versions of the song.
By the late 1950s, though, it was being called "Kumbaya." Mr. Seeger,
in liner notes to a 1959 album, claimed that America missionaries had
brought "Come By Here" to Angola and it had returned retitled with an
African word.
Experts like Stephen P. Winick of the Library of Congress say that it
is likely that the song traveled to Africa with missionaries, as many
other spirituals did, but that no scholar has ever found an
indigenous word "kumbaya" with a relevant meaning. More likely,
experts suggest, is that in the Gullah patois of blacks on the
Georgia coast, "Come By Here" sounded like "Kumbaya" to white ears.
So a nonsense word with vaguely African connotations replaced a
specific, prayerful appeal. And, thanks to songbooks, records and the
hootenanny boom, the black Christian petition for balm and
righteousness became supplanted by a campfire paean to brotherhood.
"The song in white hands was never grounded in faith," Professor
Hinson said. "Its words were simplistic; its tune was breezy. And it
was simplistically dismissed."
Not surprisingly, much of the dismissiveness emanated from the
political right.
Urbandictionary.com defines a "kumbaya liberal" as "knee-jerk
thinkers, politicians and other individuals of the far left who tend
to (a) believe force is never an answer, (b) talk about problems,
rather than do something about them" and so on. The Web site
RightWingStuff.com sells T-shirts, coffee mugs and other merchandise
that show a drill sergeant choking an antiwar demonstrator and
shouting, "Kiss My Kumbaya, Hippie!"
Yet while running for president, Barack Obama once said, "The
politics of hope is not about holding hands and singing, 'Kumbaya.' "
His education secretary, Arne Duncan, said last month, "I'm a big
believer in less of singing 'Kumbaya' together and going on retreats
than in rolling up our sleeves and doing work together." The activist
filmmaker Michael Moore said of President Obama's appeal for
bipartisanship after the Democrats' "shellacking" in the midterm
elections, "You don't respond with 'Kumbaya.' "
In the civil rights era, "Come By Here" was a call to action. In the
cynical present, essentially the same song has become a disparagement
of action.
"If you say someone's engaged in 'kumbaya,' you're saying that person
isn't serious," said Thomas S. De Luca, a political scientist at
Fordham University in New York who studies political rhetoric. "It's
designed to disempower someone who's trying to do something."
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