Kum Ba Yah – Anonymous

These words may summarize the most-often used phrase or similar words used by a praying person or group. Especially if you were a Boy Scout or Camp Fire Girl in the mid-20^th Century, you most likely saw a poster like this one (shown here) and sang this song around a smoky burning log one summer evening. Though they are most often vocalized in the original language, the message of “Kum Ba Yah” is nearly universal, as whoever wrote them sought the presence of the Almighty. ‘Come By Here’, we would say in English. We want Him to be near us, a not uncommon desire, because there’s lots of strife that civilized people have wanted to overcome or escape. Evidently, this unknown poet-author also sought Him during times of delight, too, perhaps believing He is the ultimate source of happiness.  

Was Kum Ba Yah the expression born of a black person living in the southeastern United States, someone who recognized or still practiced a Creole language-Caribbean heritage in the 1920s? Or, did it originate with its English title on the opposite coastline of the continental U.S., in Portland, Oregon in the late 1930s? Another version of the song’s evolution has it transiting the Atlantic Ocean as ‘Kum Ba Yah’ via a missionary family returning from Angola in the mid-1940s. Its origin mattered little to Boy Scouts or Camp Fire Girls who had adopted it as a popular campfire ditty by the 1950s. Was it the mixture of emotions expressed in the song’s verses that appealed to the Scouts when they chose to sing Kum Ba Yah around the fire? Maybe someone was happy or ‘laughing’ (v.2) about the day’s events in the woods or elsewhere in nature where the group was gathered. On the other hand, someone might as easily have been depressed or even ‘crying’ (v.3) about his/her immediate circumstances. Was its rendition around the fire the Scouts’ leaders determination to encourage some faith in the young people, when they sang that ‘someone’s praying, Lord’ (v. 4)? We could also assume that a group wanted to bond as friends when they sang ‘Kum Ba Yah’, to reassure each other that loneliness would be overcome among them. ‘Strength in numbers’, you might have heard them utter. ‘Lord’ was the most important part of that calculus too, sang as the object of the group’s directed energy, even as they were seeking His peace. Whoever first composed the words, ‘Kum Ba Yah’ signals that he/she had not yet been answered, yet trusted that He would respond after repeated entreaties. ‘Come by here’, he continues to call, no matter what condition he inhabits.

Can someone survive without a ‘kumbayah’ from time to time? Does anyone really want to be alone? What happens when someone is a loner, our culture has warned us repeatedly over the last several years? That is someone to earmark as potentially violent, an explosion awaiting the cork’s removal from the bottle, a deadly fuse waiting to be lit. I need companions, friends who will be there to listen and commiserate or joke with me. This song’s composer had discovered the most important companion, however. He’s someone I may find through other corporeals, for sure. And, even He needed human companionship when He was here. Could that be why He created you and me, too? Think about it.               

See this site for all the verses: http://www.hymntime.com/tch/htm/k/u/m/kumbayah.htm

See this site for information about the song: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kumbaya