Topic: Theology - Seventh-day Adventists
Seventh-day Adventists rejected the Greek separation of body and soul. Instead, they believed the body, mind, and soul were one entity that must be maintained in good condition to be ready for Resurrection. That is, the health of the body was the health of the soul.
Shortly after the denomination organized in Battle Creek, Michigan, in 1863, Ellen White had a vision that led to the establishment of the Health Reform Institute whose goal was to instruct believers on healthful living. [1] John Kellogg became its superintendent in 1876. He transformed it into a sanitarium that promoted vegetarianism, exercise, and natural remedies like water. [2]
Although the church broke with him in 1902, [3] and moved to Takoma Park, Maryland, in 1904, [4] he and his brother William Keith stayed in Battle Creek, one with the sanitarium, the other with the breakfast-food company. Each continued endeavoring to instruct and improve the health of his neighbors.
John organized the Race Betterment Foundation in 1913, [5] and invited Luther Halsey Gulick and his wife, Charlotte Vetter, to Battle Creek to discuss the Camp Fire Girls at the 1914 meeting. [6] Soon after, a woman associated with the Congregational church organized the city’s first Camp Fire group. [7] The next year, the local Seventh-day Adventist press published Ethel Rogers’ book-length description of Vetter’s camping program at Sebago-Wohelo. [8]
The Kiwanis Club helped the CFG council buy land for its own camp on Clear Lake in 1926. Kitanniwa’s appeal waned during the depression. In 1933, William’s Kellogg Foundation paid the mortgage debts and assumed ownership. The council received three-month summer leases, while the facilities were used in winter to teach healthier living to children. By 1937, the Foundation needed the camp all year, and bought the Camp Fire Girls a new site near Hastings, Michigan. [9]
Although I do not remember ever meeting anyone who was an Adventist when I went to Kitanniwa in the 1950s, its philosophy permeated the program. The director’s most important credential was her training as a dietician. [10] She had no experience in Camp Fire, and let the senior counselors run the activities.
The emphasis was on swimming, partly because the American Red Cross provided training and curriculum, and partly because swimming was part of Battle Creek’s county-club culture. It also fell within the Adventists emphasis on the importance of exercise for good health.
The 1950s director did stop insisting everyone drink a cup of water before they ate breakfast, but continued to schedule stewed prunes midweek to regulate digestion. [11] The emphasis on cleansing the internal plumbing with water was a relic of the Adventist’s interest in hydrotherapy.
Clear Lake became a model for public-school outdoor education programs. [12] Kitanniwa survived until 1974, when a fire destroyed the main lodge. I visited the camp during the last session that summer with a woman who had gone to the camp in the 1940s. She arranged for a group of counselors to come together and sing during a free period.
For most songs, the camp director or a counselor simply suggested a title, and they sang it through. "Kumbaya" was more complex because the group included young women from different traditions. They first had to settle on the verses they would sing. [13] Then, when they could not agree on the best key, they sang it twice. On the second set, one of the counselors continued the singing by adding one of her verses that was not included in the first.
When they began, another counselor set the beat. They began singing in timbraic harmony, that is, in unison with harmonic effects caused by the interaction between overtones of individual voices. On the second repetition, one person tried singing a lower, parallel part. In the third, another person tried a soprano parallel part. Harmonic effects resulting from overtones increased.
When they began the chorus the second time, timbraic effects with an added part changed into fully balanced two-part parallel harmony. In the fifth repetition, a third parallel part emerged. Tonal richness resulting from the overtones increased in the final two iterations. They sustained some notes so the transition between tones was modulated into a form of sostenuto.
Performers
Vocal Soloist: none
Vocal Group: eight women
Vocal Director: none; the group made decisions following patterns established during the summer together
Instrumental Accompaniment: staff brought four guitars and an accordion
Rhythm Accompaniment: none
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Pronunciation: not noted at the time
Verses: kumbaya, singing, praying; come by here was added the second time
Vocabulary
Pronoun: someone
Term for Deity: Lord
Special Terms: none
Basic Form: three-verse song
Verse Repetition Pattern: none; entire song was repeated instead
Ending: one felt the "come by here" verse should be used as an ending
Unique Features: none
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: 1-3-5
Tempo: not recorded, probably moderate
Basic Structure: strophic repetition with increasing harmonic complexity
Notes on Performance
They sat on chairs set in the grass in the afternoon.
Notes on Performers
The group was typical of a CFG camp staff. It included five who had gone to Kitanniwa as girls; one who went to CFG camps sponsored by the Seattle, Washington, council; one who had gone to YWCA camps in Michigan, and one who had gone to church camps in Ohio and was attending a local college.
The women from Kitanniwa included two who were working to support the camp in town and three who were on staff. One staff member was the daughter of one of the women; one had been working with the youngest campers, the Blue Birds, since the early 1960s; and the third was the director.
Availability
As I indicated in the post for 25 October 2017, I have not attempted to play the tapes I made in 1974 because I do not how well they have aged. I used notes made at the time, and ones used to write Camp Songs.
End Notes
1. Gary Land. "Health Reform" 147-148 in Historical Dictionary of the Seventh-Day Adventists. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2005. 147.
2. Land. "Kellogg, John Harvey." 179-181 in Dictionary. 180.
3. Land, Kellogg. 181.
4. "General Conference Tours." Seventh-day Adventist website.
5. Land, Kellogg. 181.
6. The Gulicks founded Camp Fire; they were discussed in the post for 15 October 2017.
7. Camp Songs, Folk Songs. 12-13.
8. Ethel Rogers. Sebago-Wohelo Camp Fire Girls. Battle Creek: Good Health Publishing Company, 1915. I could find no information on Rogers. Does anyone know anything about her?
9. Camp Songs. 13-14.
10. Her obituary.
11. Camp Songs quoted a woman who remembered the ways older campers circumvented this requirement in the 1940s. 266-267.
12. The Kellogg Foundation turned management of Clear Lake over to the Battle Creek school district in 1947, and deeded it to them in 1957. I and most of the girls who went to Kitanniwa also spent at least one week at Clear Lake if we attended public schools in Battle Creek or a cooperating school district. In the spring on 1956, there are no overlap in repertoire between the all-girls and the coed camp.
The district began having serious financial problems after 2000, when "the state’s Schools of Choice program eroded" the number of students enrolled. The camp was in danger of closing in 2014. (John Sherwood. "One More Year: Clear Lake Camp Lives On." Battle Creek Inquirer website. 18 August 2014). Even before 2000, the city’s population, and with it the tax base of the school system, was declining. (Wikipedia. "Battle Creek, Michigan.")
13. One girl’s songbook had the verse order: kumbaya, singing, crying, praying, come. Another had: kumbaya, crying, praying, singing, kumbaya.
Wednesday, November 29, 2017
Monday, November 27, 2017
First Presbyterian Church Chancel Choir - Kumbaya
Topic: Theology - Presbyterians
The music director of Jeffersonville, Indiana’s First Presbyterian Church selected Paul Sjolund’s arrangement of "Kumbaya." It may have been chosen because it allowed a choir to sound like a choir. [1]
Steve Inman did not deviate from the score. The choir began with an introduction sung by men, followed by a repetition of the "kumbaya" text by women. When the four vocal parts joined on the standard praying/crying/singing stanzas each iteration began on a higher note of the scale.
Sjolund changed key again for the "sing alleluia" verse that not only was significantly higher in pitch, but also louder. While this appeared to be another verse, it actually was a transition into a doxology that converted the simple song into a hymn. It was followed by progressively softer and slower repetitions of "Oh Lord kumbaya" and "kumbaya" that functioned as amens.
The use of doxologies was the one Scots’ musical habit Puritans were unable to eradicate during their alliance in the English Civil War when they both signed the Westminster Confession in 1646. [2] John Knox had defined what would replace the mass with the Book of Common Prayer in 1549. [3] It was the practices that developed after 1549 that Puritans were trying to reform, not the Roman Catholic liturgy.
Thomas Fotheringham believed Presbyterian preachers did not enter their pulpits to deliver their sermons in those years until after the reader’s service. This often was conducted by "old parish priests who were not qualified to act as Protestant ministers, or the parish school-masters, or some other godly persons." They read lessons from the John Knox Liturgy and the Bible.
"The people knelt in prayer and stood in singing and responded with an ‘Amen’ at the close of the prayers. The Gloria Patri was sung at the end of every psalm, and in some places the Ten Commandments were recited." [4]
During the Puritan Commonwealth, "singing the ‘conclusion’ to the psalms" was banned, but the practice did not die. The official Scots psalter of 1781 allowed their reintroduction as doxologies that translated "the Old Testament text" into the theology of the New. According to Wikipedia there were seven that referred to the Trinity "each for a different metrical pattern, which could be sung at the close of a psalm. These were printed together at the end of the psalms." [5]
"Amens" were adopted as the appropriate ending for hymns by leaders of the Oxford Movement within the Church of England in their 1861 Hymns Ancient and Modern. [6] More recently, purists have argued the word "amen" should be reserved for prayers and not used for hymns.
Others have responded to the elimination of sung amens by adding other words like Sjolund’s "sing alleluia" to the end of "Kumbaya." More than 10% of the videos on YouTube ended with such repetitions, often with an emphasis on the "Oh Lord" section. Of the ones I counted, seven groups sang it twice, five sang it five times, and two sang it three times. Many more sang a special ending once.
Theology aside, the repetition of the last line of the "kumbaya" verse several times both gave the open-ended song a definitive form and satisfied a need for closure nurtured by hymn singing. The cadences often were the only time people in congregations felt comfortable singing harmony. Words did not matter so much as the aesthetic sense of what was right.
Performers
Vocal Soloist: none
Vocal Group: photograph showed 18 women and 8 men. One may have been an adolescent girl. The adults were all middle-aged. The sheet music was scored for SSA or SATB.
Vocal Director: Steve Inman [7]
Instrumental Accompaniment: piano
Rhythm Accompaniment: none
Credits
Sheet Music
Traditional Spiritual. Arr. Paul Sjolund. Revisions and added Lyrics by P. S.
The Black American Spiritual "Come by Here, My Lord," evolved in the West Indies to it’s present title "Kumbaya, My Lord."
Copyright © 1987 by Hinshaw Music, Inc.
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Pronunciation: Sjolund dropped the final g’s on praying, singing, and singing
Verses: kumbaya, praying, crying, singing, sing alleluia
Vocabulary
Pronoun: someone
Term for Deity: Lord
Special Terms: none
Basic Form: six-verse song
Verse Repetition Pattern: AAxxxx
Ending: repeated "Oh Lord, Kumbaya" twice followed by two more repetitions of the word "kumbaya"
Unique Features: Sjolund introduced the use of "alleluia"
Notes on Music
Sheet Music
Opening Phrase: 1-3-5
Time Signature: 4/4; introduction marked rubato and varied between 4/4, 2/4, and 2/2.
Tempo: legato, quarter note equaled 58 beats per minute
Key Signature: began with no flats or sharps; changed to two sharps, one flat, and two flats
Basic Structure: repetition with variations in key
Singing Style: chordal harmony with one note to one syllable, except for Lord. The one exception was the ends of the last lines of the three gerund verses. In the SSA score, the first sopranos held the note for the last syllable of "kumbaya" while the others repeated "kumbaya." The sustained tone could barely be heard in the YouTube version.
The chancel choir prepared a new piece for every service, and met once a week to rehearse. [8] Presumably Inman divided the time into segments devoted to rehearsing the piece planned for the coming Sunday, going over future pieces, and introducing a new one. This would have kept choristers interested, but would not have allowed the kind of drill needed to perfect difficult or unusual passages.
Sjolund’s arrangement fit this kind of schedule, perhaps because he had been involved with groups who performed weekly. He used parallel thirds, with the first syllable of "someone" sung in unison, and the last "ya" a fifth. The alleluia section used triads. Thus, with the exception of the one phrase, everything was familiar to the singers.
Vocal-Instrumental Dynamics: the piano played the four separate notes of a chord before the choir began. The introduction was marked a capella, but the pianist played the vocal line chords. Sjolund used chords in the left hand and arpeggios in the right throughout, which meant the accompaniment provided no melodic support for the singers.
Notes on Performance
Occasion: the sheet music indicated the arrangement was "Commissioned in an ecumenical spirit by the Choirs of Edgewater Baptist Church, Minneapolis, Minnesota."
Clothing: photograph showed the choir wearing red robes with white V-stoles. The sleeves were lined with white.
Notes on Audience
Applause at the end.
Notes on Performers
Jeffersonville was located on the Ohio river opposite Louisville. The first elder of the Presbyterian Church, Samuel Meriwether, moved to the area in 1813 from Kentucky and helped organize the church in 1830. [9] His immigrant ancestor, Nicholas, arrived in Jamestown during the Puritan Commonwealth. [10] His grandson, and Samuel’s grandfather, David, was a vestryman in the Episcopal church [11]
Samuel’s family may have become Presbyterians when his father William moved to Kentucky. [12] His wife’s grandmother, Jane Cunningham, definitely was Scots. [13] Alternatively, the family may have joined what then was the dominant church on the Louisville frontier.
Jeffersonville grew as a river port: in 1870, 17% of the residents were European immigrants; many had come from Germany. [14] The church also grew, and absorbed converts. The ancestors of the pastor in 1870, Joseph M. Hutchison, had moved from Scotland to Philadelphia. Hutchison was followed by John Simonson Howk, whose German ancestors settled first in Massachusetts. [15]
Inman was raised in the church, and served as a lay pastor [16]
Sjolund has provided no biographical information to his publishers. His undergraduate school, Westmont, said he came to the school’s attention when its choir was touring the Midwest in the 1950s and that he "had sung for the Haven of Rest ministry." [17] That may have placed him in the area of Grand Rapids, Michigan. Don Chalfant, who organized a mission under that name in Battle Creek in 1956, had previously been an "assistant superintendent of the city’s Haven of Rest." [18]
Westmont was established as the non-denominational Bible Missionary Institute in Santa Barbara, California, by Ruth Kerr of Kerr Glass. [19] Sjolund’s musical mentor there was John Lundberg, who then was a member of Charles E. Fuller’s Old Fashioned Revival Hour Quartet. [20] In the middle 1960s, Sjolund substituted for a member of the Blenders quartet on the Lawrence Welk show, [21] made arrangements for Norman Luboff, and toured with Paul Bergan, who had sung with Fred Waring. [22]
Availability
YouTube: uploaded by First Presbyterian Church on 26 April 2015.
Sheet Music: published on demand by Hinshaw Music, Inc. of Chapel Hill and distributed by Hal Leonard in Milwaukee.
End Notes
1. I found seven versions of Sjolund’s arrangement on YouTube.
2. Wikipedia. "Westminster Assembly" and "Westminster Confession of Faith."
3. Wikipedia. "Book of Common Prayer" and "John Knox."
4. T. F. Fotheringham. "The John Knox liturgy, or, Scottish "Book of common order." Lecture delivered before the St. Stephen’s Church Guild, Saint John, New Brunswick. Published in 1898 by E. J. Armstrong in Saint John.
5. Wikipedia. "Hymnbooks of the Church of Scotland."
6. Wikipedia. "Hymns Ancient and Modern." The Oxford Movement was mentioned in the post for 29 September 2017.
7. The Church website listed Inman as its choir director. ("Our Music" tab)
8. "Our Music." Church website.
9. Lewis C. Baird. Baird’s History of Clark County, Indiana. Indianapolis: B. F. Bowen and Company, 1909. 622.
10. The Meriwether Society, Inc. "Nicholas MERIWETHER." Ancestry website. He was the progenitor of Meriwether Lewis.
11. The Meriwether Society, Inc. "David Meriwether." Find a Grave website. 18 October 2010.
12. Sharon Sabel Pike. "William Meriwether." Find a Grave website. 28 December 2002.
13. George. "Jane Cunningham Oldham." Find a Grave website. 19 April 2017.
14. Wikipedia. "Jeffersonville, Indiana."
15. Baird. 791.
16. "Our Staff." Church’s website.
17. "Westmont over the Years: 1950s." Westmont College website.
18. Dillon Davis. "Haven founder Don Chalfant dies at 93." USA Today website. 6 June 2017. Sjolund graduated in 1959, so, at the latest, matriculated in 1955 before Chalfant was in Battle Creek. ("The Life and Sounds of John Lundberg." Westmont Magazine, Summer 2006.)
19. Wikipedia. "Westmont College."
20. Westmont College website.
21. "Group: Blenders 1965-1966." Welk Notes website.
22. Item on California Nurses Association banquet. [Long Beach, California] Independent, 10 June 1965. 45
The music director of Jeffersonville, Indiana’s First Presbyterian Church selected Paul Sjolund’s arrangement of "Kumbaya." It may have been chosen because it allowed a choir to sound like a choir. [1]
Steve Inman did not deviate from the score. The choir began with an introduction sung by men, followed by a repetition of the "kumbaya" text by women. When the four vocal parts joined on the standard praying/crying/singing stanzas each iteration began on a higher note of the scale.
Sjolund changed key again for the "sing alleluia" verse that not only was significantly higher in pitch, but also louder. While this appeared to be another verse, it actually was a transition into a doxology that converted the simple song into a hymn. It was followed by progressively softer and slower repetitions of "Oh Lord kumbaya" and "kumbaya" that functioned as amens.
The use of doxologies was the one Scots’ musical habit Puritans were unable to eradicate during their alliance in the English Civil War when they both signed the Westminster Confession in 1646. [2] John Knox had defined what would replace the mass with the Book of Common Prayer in 1549. [3] It was the practices that developed after 1549 that Puritans were trying to reform, not the Roman Catholic liturgy.
Thomas Fotheringham believed Presbyterian preachers did not enter their pulpits to deliver their sermons in those years until after the reader’s service. This often was conducted by "old parish priests who were not qualified to act as Protestant ministers, or the parish school-masters, or some other godly persons." They read lessons from the John Knox Liturgy and the Bible.
"The people knelt in prayer and stood in singing and responded with an ‘Amen’ at the close of the prayers. The Gloria Patri was sung at the end of every psalm, and in some places the Ten Commandments were recited." [4]
During the Puritan Commonwealth, "singing the ‘conclusion’ to the psalms" was banned, but the practice did not die. The official Scots psalter of 1781 allowed their reintroduction as doxologies that translated "the Old Testament text" into the theology of the New. According to Wikipedia there were seven that referred to the Trinity "each for a different metrical pattern, which could be sung at the close of a psalm. These were printed together at the end of the psalms." [5]
"Amens" were adopted as the appropriate ending for hymns by leaders of the Oxford Movement within the Church of England in their 1861 Hymns Ancient and Modern. [6] More recently, purists have argued the word "amen" should be reserved for prayers and not used for hymns.
Others have responded to the elimination of sung amens by adding other words like Sjolund’s "sing alleluia" to the end of "Kumbaya." More than 10% of the videos on YouTube ended with such repetitions, often with an emphasis on the "Oh Lord" section. Of the ones I counted, seven groups sang it twice, five sang it five times, and two sang it three times. Many more sang a special ending once.
Theology aside, the repetition of the last line of the "kumbaya" verse several times both gave the open-ended song a definitive form and satisfied a need for closure nurtured by hymn singing. The cadences often were the only time people in congregations felt comfortable singing harmony. Words did not matter so much as the aesthetic sense of what was right.
Performers
Vocal Soloist: none
Vocal Group: photograph showed 18 women and 8 men. One may have been an adolescent girl. The adults were all middle-aged. The sheet music was scored for SSA or SATB.
Vocal Director: Steve Inman [7]
Instrumental Accompaniment: piano
Rhythm Accompaniment: none
Credits
Sheet Music
Traditional Spiritual. Arr. Paul Sjolund. Revisions and added Lyrics by P. S.
The Black American Spiritual "Come by Here, My Lord," evolved in the West Indies to it’s present title "Kumbaya, My Lord."
Copyright © 1987 by Hinshaw Music, Inc.
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Pronunciation: Sjolund dropped the final g’s on praying, singing, and singing
Verses: kumbaya, praying, crying, singing, sing alleluia
Vocabulary
Pronoun: someone
Term for Deity: Lord
Special Terms: none
Basic Form: six-verse song
Verse Repetition Pattern: AAxxxx
Ending: repeated "Oh Lord, Kumbaya" twice followed by two more repetitions of the word "kumbaya"
Unique Features: Sjolund introduced the use of "alleluia"
Notes on Music
Sheet Music
Opening Phrase: 1-3-5
Time Signature: 4/4; introduction marked rubato and varied between 4/4, 2/4, and 2/2.
Tempo: legato, quarter note equaled 58 beats per minute
Key Signature: began with no flats or sharps; changed to two sharps, one flat, and two flats
Basic Structure: repetition with variations in key
Singing Style: chordal harmony with one note to one syllable, except for Lord. The one exception was the ends of the last lines of the three gerund verses. In the SSA score, the first sopranos held the note for the last syllable of "kumbaya" while the others repeated "kumbaya." The sustained tone could barely be heard in the YouTube version.
The chancel choir prepared a new piece for every service, and met once a week to rehearse. [8] Presumably Inman divided the time into segments devoted to rehearsing the piece planned for the coming Sunday, going over future pieces, and introducing a new one. This would have kept choristers interested, but would not have allowed the kind of drill needed to perfect difficult or unusual passages.
Sjolund’s arrangement fit this kind of schedule, perhaps because he had been involved with groups who performed weekly. He used parallel thirds, with the first syllable of "someone" sung in unison, and the last "ya" a fifth. The alleluia section used triads. Thus, with the exception of the one phrase, everything was familiar to the singers.
Vocal-Instrumental Dynamics: the piano played the four separate notes of a chord before the choir began. The introduction was marked a capella, but the pianist played the vocal line chords. Sjolund used chords in the left hand and arpeggios in the right throughout, which meant the accompaniment provided no melodic support for the singers.
Notes on Performance
Occasion: the sheet music indicated the arrangement was "Commissioned in an ecumenical spirit by the Choirs of Edgewater Baptist Church, Minneapolis, Minnesota."
Clothing: photograph showed the choir wearing red robes with white V-stoles. The sleeves were lined with white.
Notes on Audience
Applause at the end.
Notes on Performers
Jeffersonville was located on the Ohio river opposite Louisville. The first elder of the Presbyterian Church, Samuel Meriwether, moved to the area in 1813 from Kentucky and helped organize the church in 1830. [9] His immigrant ancestor, Nicholas, arrived in Jamestown during the Puritan Commonwealth. [10] His grandson, and Samuel’s grandfather, David, was a vestryman in the Episcopal church [11]
Samuel’s family may have become Presbyterians when his father William moved to Kentucky. [12] His wife’s grandmother, Jane Cunningham, definitely was Scots. [13] Alternatively, the family may have joined what then was the dominant church on the Louisville frontier.
Jeffersonville grew as a river port: in 1870, 17% of the residents were European immigrants; many had come from Germany. [14] The church also grew, and absorbed converts. The ancestors of the pastor in 1870, Joseph M. Hutchison, had moved from Scotland to Philadelphia. Hutchison was followed by John Simonson Howk, whose German ancestors settled first in Massachusetts. [15]
Inman was raised in the church, and served as a lay pastor [16]
Sjolund has provided no biographical information to his publishers. His undergraduate school, Westmont, said he came to the school’s attention when its choir was touring the Midwest in the 1950s and that he "had sung for the Haven of Rest ministry." [17] That may have placed him in the area of Grand Rapids, Michigan. Don Chalfant, who organized a mission under that name in Battle Creek in 1956, had previously been an "assistant superintendent of the city’s Haven of Rest." [18]
Westmont was established as the non-denominational Bible Missionary Institute in Santa Barbara, California, by Ruth Kerr of Kerr Glass. [19] Sjolund’s musical mentor there was John Lundberg, who then was a member of Charles E. Fuller’s Old Fashioned Revival Hour Quartet. [20] In the middle 1960s, Sjolund substituted for a member of the Blenders quartet on the Lawrence Welk show, [21] made arrangements for Norman Luboff, and toured with Paul Bergan, who had sung with Fred Waring. [22]
Availability
YouTube: uploaded by First Presbyterian Church on 26 April 2015.
Sheet Music: published on demand by Hinshaw Music, Inc. of Chapel Hill and distributed by Hal Leonard in Milwaukee.
End Notes
1. I found seven versions of Sjolund’s arrangement on YouTube.
2. Wikipedia. "Westminster Assembly" and "Westminster Confession of Faith."
3. Wikipedia. "Book of Common Prayer" and "John Knox."
4. T. F. Fotheringham. "The John Knox liturgy, or, Scottish "Book of common order." Lecture delivered before the St. Stephen’s Church Guild, Saint John, New Brunswick. Published in 1898 by E. J. Armstrong in Saint John.
5. Wikipedia. "Hymnbooks of the Church of Scotland."
6. Wikipedia. "Hymns Ancient and Modern." The Oxford Movement was mentioned in the post for 29 September 2017.
7. The Church website listed Inman as its choir director. ("Our Music" tab)
8. "Our Music." Church website.
9. Lewis C. Baird. Baird’s History of Clark County, Indiana. Indianapolis: B. F. Bowen and Company, 1909. 622.
10. The Meriwether Society, Inc. "Nicholas MERIWETHER." Ancestry website. He was the progenitor of Meriwether Lewis.
11. The Meriwether Society, Inc. "David Meriwether." Find a Grave website. 18 October 2010.
12. Sharon Sabel Pike. "William Meriwether." Find a Grave website. 28 December 2002.
13. George. "Jane Cunningham Oldham." Find a Grave website. 19 April 2017.
14. Wikipedia. "Jeffersonville, Indiana."
15. Baird. 791.
16. "Our Staff." Church’s website.
17. "Westmont over the Years: 1950s." Westmont College website.
18. Dillon Davis. "Haven founder Don Chalfant dies at 93." USA Today website. 6 June 2017. Sjolund graduated in 1959, so, at the latest, matriculated in 1955 before Chalfant was in Battle Creek. ("The Life and Sounds of John Lundberg." Westmont Magazine, Summer 2006.)
19. Wikipedia. "Westmont College."
20. Westmont College website.
21. "Group: Blenders 1965-1966." Welk Notes website.
22. Item on California Nurses Association banquet. [Long Beach, California] Independent, 10 June 1965. 45
Saturday, November 25, 2017
Strathroy United Church Youth Choir - Kum Ba Yah
Topic: Theology
The reasons a group sings "Come by Here" or "Kumbaya" may have nothing to do with the lyrics or musical experience. It may simply have become traditional for its church to sing one particular variant. As the end table shows, there seems to be fairly clear preferences in the versions uploaded to YouTube.
More than two-thirds of the groups or individuals who identified their religion were members of churches that emphasized contact with the Spirit or were Mormons or Millerites. The other third were denominations formed before or during the Reformation, or were direct descendants of Reformation groups.
Part of the aesthetic differences stemmed from the musical traditions that existed at the time a denomination was formed. Reformation leaders renounced the Roman Catholic mass. Martin Luther wrote chorales, while Puritans and Presbyterians sang psalms taken directly from the Bible. Methodists later added hymns inspired by specific Biblical passages.
Gospel songs developed in the Romantic period of the nineteenth century to describe personal religious experiences. They emerged at the same time the Holiness movement was spreading in this country after the Civil War. By the end of the century, Methodists had rejected its offspring, [1] and stayed with hymns. Presbyterians did not even accept hymns until late in the century, and some still do not. [2]
The social ferment of the 1960s forced denominations descended from the Anglo-Scots Reformation to change if they wanted to retain their young people who no longer blindly accepted their parents’ institutions: both Methodists and Presbyterians added "Kumbaya" to their hymnals around 1990. [3, 4] Roman Catholics could only absorb the song after Vatican II abandoned the Latin mass in 1964, and folk masses were produced. [5]
Whether one sings "Come by Here" or "Kumbaya" depends on culture. Only Blacks in this country know the first, while "Kumbaya is the one generally known outside the United States. In this country, it is sung by both African Americans and by whites.
Within that pattern, there was a tendency for the churches that defined religion as exposure to the word of God to use commercial arrangements of "Kumbaya." This, of course, was partly a utilitarian choice: it was easier to use an existing arrangement than it was for a volunteer or part-time choral director to create his or her own.
More important, it was a consequence of the emphasis on the printed word. Most could not teach a song without a score, because any talents that exploited aural tradition had been belittled when they were young. Neither they nor their groups could learn from a recording.
When a young quartet from the Strathroy, Ontario, United Church used Patsy Ford Simms’ arrangement of "Kumbaya" in 2011, it was obvious the pianist was the one who relied on the score. Simms created a three-part version that used parallel chords and a descant passage, but the Strathroy youth sang in unison.
While the teenagers or their pianist could not prepare for a performance without a score, Simms was a public-school music teacher who created her own arrangements because there was nothing available in the early 1980s. [6] She was raised in a Presbyterian church in Louisville, Kentucky, and apparently was able to merge the demand for written music by that church and by school boards with her own musical abilities nurtured in the African-American community of Smokeville.
Her earliest known ancestor, Basil Ford, was born into slavery in 1793. His parents had been taken from Maryland to Nelson County, Kentucky, as part of the exodus of Roman Catholics in 1790. [7] Simms believed that, because Basil’s descendants were owned by Catholics, they were allowed to marry. As a result, she found evidence of nuclear families that averaged seven children. After the Civil War, Basil and his son bought land in Nelson County where his descendants stayed until Simm’s grandfather moved to Smoketown around 1923 or 1924. [8]
Her mother’s ancestral history was more fragmented. Family tradition said the earliest, Emma Peyton, was a Native American. Simms could find no public records for Peyton plantation owners and thought it possible her family were Shawnee who left Indiana for the area that eventually became Smoketown where she was born in 1837. The women were dominant, living in multi-generation households without the men who fathered their children. Several only had one child. [9]
Smoketown developed around the brickyards and clay pits of Louisville after the Civil War when freedmen streamed in from Kentucky plantations and farms. [10] Simms’ grandmother was part of the community’s entrepreneurial middle class when she ran her own beauty shop. Her parents worked for Mary Cummings Eudy, who ran a fabric designing company until World War II, then began publishing poetry. [11] Eudy was a Presbyterian, [12] and Simms’ father was active in the all-Black Grace-Hope Presbyterian church. [13]
Simms earned a degree in music education from Knoxville College, which Presbyterians had founded in 1875 for freedmen. [14] She later earned a masters from the University of Louisville, taught in the Jefferson County public schools, and was the organist for Grace Hope. [15]
The Strathroy church had been Methodist before the denomination’s merger with Presbyterians and Congregationalists in 1925. [16] While the membership in 2011 likely reflected that diversity, many still thought of themselves as Methodists.
Performers
YouTube
Vocal Soloist: none
Vocal Group: one male and three female adolescents whose voices had not changed
Vocal Director: none visible
Instrumental Accompaniment: grand piano played by woman
Rhythm Accompaniment: none
Sheet Music
SSA or 3-part mixed chorus with piano
Credits
YouTube
Simms’ Kum Ba Yah
Sheet Music
Traditional Spiritual. Arranged by Patsy Ford Simms (ASCAP)
Copyright © 1994 by Alfred Publishing Co, Inc.
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Pronunciation: kum By ya
Verses: kumbaya, singing, crying
Vocabulary
Pronoun: someone
Term for Deity: Lord
Special Terms: none
Basic Form: 3-verse song
Verse Repetition Pattern: none
Ending: repeated the word "kumbaya" three times
Unique Features: none; did not vary from Simms’ text
Notes on Music
Sheet Music
Opening Phrase: 1-3-5
Time Signature: 3/4
Tempo: prayerfully, quarter note equals 69 beats a minute
Key Signature: began with no sharps or flats; changed to five flats before the final crying verse
YouTube
Basic Structure: piano defined the structure, with an introduction and passages between the verses. The last verse was sung higher than the previous two.
Singing Style: unison
Vocal-Instrument Dynamics: the pianist emphasized the first beats of each measure, and had the more complicated part. However, she did not turn the pages of the score in front of her.
Sheet Music
The kumbaya verse was sung in unison. Beginning with the singing verse, the second sopranos and altos sang parallel thirds and the first sopranos began the descant-style phrases a beat later. The closing cadence used parallel third chords and ended in unison.
Notes on Performance
Occasion: Family Sunday service, 20 February 2011.
Location: Strathroy United Church. One girl was standing on the first step that also held an altar table. The other three stood on the next step. The choir was sitting behind them in an area with wooden partitions that defined the rows. The grand piano was placed on the main floor on the right side.
Microphones: floor mike with a boom. The girl in front removed it when they left.
Clothing: all were wearing slacks; the boy and two girls wore white shirts; the other girl wore a maroon top. The choir wore red robes with white V-stoles, and the pianist also was dressed in a maroon gown.
Notes on Movement
The four stood still, with their arms at their sides, and looked straight ahead. Their faces betrayed no emotion, not even when they had finished and were walking away. They did not open their mouths wide to sing.
Notes on Audience
One woman in the first occupied row held an infant and swayed from side to side. Applause at the end.
Notes on Performers
Strathroy was situated on the Grand Trunk Western rail line from London, Ontario, to Sarnia where it crossed into the United States at Port Huron, Michigan. [17] It had been settled in 1832 as a farming community with a grist mill on the Sydenham River by an immigrant from County Tyrone. [18]
The Wesleyan Methodist Church first met in 1840, and grew rapidly with the railroad. It built a frame church in 1851, a larger one in 1861, and a brick building with stained glass windows was begun in 1875 that seated a thousand people. It purchased a melodeon in 1865, which it traded for a pump organ in 1868. That organ passed to the Sunday School, when it was replaced by a pipe organ in 1884. [19]
The Canadian Wesleyan Methodist church was a descendant of the English one, which had taken that name when it separated from the Anglicans to distinguish itself from the Calvinist Methodists associated with George Whitefield in Wales. [20] It was not the same as the Wesleyan Methodist Church in the United States, which held its first convention in Utica, New York, in 1844, to protest the denomination’s acceptance of slavery. [21]
It also was not associated with the Methodist Episcopal Church, which had been established in the United States after the American Revolution. However, members of that denomination did settle in Ontario and held a camp meeting near Strathroy in 1858. [22] It probably was a Holiness meeting.
Most of the currently available compositions by Simms are arrangements of spirituals. Distributers promoted this one by suggesting, "although the text is general, consider programming Kum Ba Yah at Christmas or in celebration of Kwanza." [23]
Availability
YouTube: uploaded by rocketsforever on 22 February 2011.
Sheet Music: Patsy Ford Simms. "Kum Ba Yah." Van Nuys, California: Alfred Music. On 1 November 2017, its website warned "this item is going out of print."
Table
Based on survey of YouTube versions of "Come by Here" and "Kumbaya" made in December 2016.
End Notes
1. The meaning of the term "holiness" has evolved. After the Civil War, it was used by followers of Phoebe Palmer. Most were Methodists who were seeking a stronger religious experience than baptism, and wanted proof they were saved. As the movement spread in the 1880s, its theology absorbed elements of the end-times beliefs of the Millerites, and rituals of conversion became more emotional. When the Southern Methodist church began distancing itself, Holiness leaders began promoting separate churches. The break came in 1894. After that the term was used by African Americans for churches that emphasized contact with the Spirit.
2. The Scots church did not produce a hymnal until 1898. (Wikipedia. "Hymnbooks of the Church of Scotland."). As mentioned in the post for 3 September 2017, Charles Finney introduced choirs and organs into Presbyterian revivals in this country before the Civil War.
3. United Methodist Church. "Kum Ba Yah (Come By Here)." The United Methodist Hymnal. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1989. 491.
4. Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) "Kum ba Yah." Presbyterian Hymnal. Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1990. 338.
5. According to Wikipedia, the "1964 Instruction on implementing the Constitution on Sacred Liturgy of the Second Vatican Council laid down that ‘normally the epistle and gospel from the Mass of the day shall be read in the vernacular’." ("Tridentine Mass") Ray Repp produced the first folk mass, the Mass for Young Americans, that same year.
6. "Patsy Ford Simms." Alfred Music website.
7. According to Geni, Saint Mary’s County, Maryland, lay on the tip of a peninsula between the Potomac river and Chesapeake Bay, where it had been attacked by the British during the American Revolution. Agricultural prices fell after the war, when families emigrated to Nelson County, Kentucky. The League of Catholic Families sponsored the first large move in 1785. ("The Kentucky Migration 1780 - 1820.") Most probably were small farmers who grew a variety of crops in Kentucky. Tobacco was only grown by planters who owned a large number of slaves. (Kentucky Heritage Council. "Coombs-Duncan-Brown Farmhouse." National Register of Historic Places, Registration Form. 14-15) Simms found the 1860 census showed 31 slaves spread among five different Fords. (See #8)
8. Patsy Ford Simms. "Discovering the Past, Living Today, Anticipating Tomorrow." Paternal side, 1997/2013. ScribD website.
9. Patsy Simms Turner. "Discovering the Past, Living Today, Anticipating Tomorrow." Maternal side, 2013. ScribD website.
10. Wikipedia. "Smoketown, Louisville."
11. Candace K. Perry. "Eudy, Mary Cummings." 277 in The Encyclopedia of Louisville. Edited by John E. Kleber. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001.
12. Vickie. "Mrs. Mary Cummings (Paine) Eudy." Ancestry website. 8 March 1999. She was reproducing an entry from some unidentified directory.
13. "Grace Hope Presbyterian Church." Presbyterian Church USA website.
14. Wikipedia. "Knoxville College."
15. "Patsy Ford Simms." The Fred Brock Music Companies website.
16. Wikipedia. "Methodist Church, Canada."
17. Hammond’s Illustrated Library World Atlas. New York: C. S. Hammond and Company, 1948. 39.
18. Wikipedia. "Strathroy-Caradoc." The Ulster founder was James Buchanan.
19. Anne Pelkman. "History of Strathroy United Church." Its website.
20. Wikipedia. "Wesleyan Methodist Church (Great Britain)."
21. Wikipedia. "Wesleyan Methodist Church (United States)." Leaders of this group became involved with the more radical parts of the Holiness Movement.
22. Pelkman.
23. "Kum Ba Yah," Sheet Music Plus website, and "Kum Ba Yah," Brick House Music website.
The reasons a group sings "Come by Here" or "Kumbaya" may have nothing to do with the lyrics or musical experience. It may simply have become traditional for its church to sing one particular variant. As the end table shows, there seems to be fairly clear preferences in the versions uploaded to YouTube.
More than two-thirds of the groups or individuals who identified their religion were members of churches that emphasized contact with the Spirit or were Mormons or Millerites. The other third were denominations formed before or during the Reformation, or were direct descendants of Reformation groups.
Part of the aesthetic differences stemmed from the musical traditions that existed at the time a denomination was formed. Reformation leaders renounced the Roman Catholic mass. Martin Luther wrote chorales, while Puritans and Presbyterians sang psalms taken directly from the Bible. Methodists later added hymns inspired by specific Biblical passages.
Gospel songs developed in the Romantic period of the nineteenth century to describe personal religious experiences. They emerged at the same time the Holiness movement was spreading in this country after the Civil War. By the end of the century, Methodists had rejected its offspring, [1] and stayed with hymns. Presbyterians did not even accept hymns until late in the century, and some still do not. [2]
The social ferment of the 1960s forced denominations descended from the Anglo-Scots Reformation to change if they wanted to retain their young people who no longer blindly accepted their parents’ institutions: both Methodists and Presbyterians added "Kumbaya" to their hymnals around 1990. [3, 4] Roman Catholics could only absorb the song after Vatican II abandoned the Latin mass in 1964, and folk masses were produced. [5]
Whether one sings "Come by Here" or "Kumbaya" depends on culture. Only Blacks in this country know the first, while "Kumbaya is the one generally known outside the United States. In this country, it is sung by both African Americans and by whites.
Within that pattern, there was a tendency for the churches that defined religion as exposure to the word of God to use commercial arrangements of "Kumbaya." This, of course, was partly a utilitarian choice: it was easier to use an existing arrangement than it was for a volunteer or part-time choral director to create his or her own.
More important, it was a consequence of the emphasis on the printed word. Most could not teach a song without a score, because any talents that exploited aural tradition had been belittled when they were young. Neither they nor their groups could learn from a recording.
When a young quartet from the Strathroy, Ontario, United Church used Patsy Ford Simms’ arrangement of "Kumbaya" in 2011, it was obvious the pianist was the one who relied on the score. Simms created a three-part version that used parallel chords and a descant passage, but the Strathroy youth sang in unison.
While the teenagers or their pianist could not prepare for a performance without a score, Simms was a public-school music teacher who created her own arrangements because there was nothing available in the early 1980s. [6] She was raised in a Presbyterian church in Louisville, Kentucky, and apparently was able to merge the demand for written music by that church and by school boards with her own musical abilities nurtured in the African-American community of Smokeville.
Her earliest known ancestor, Basil Ford, was born into slavery in 1793. His parents had been taken from Maryland to Nelson County, Kentucky, as part of the exodus of Roman Catholics in 1790. [7] Simms believed that, because Basil’s descendants were owned by Catholics, they were allowed to marry. As a result, she found evidence of nuclear families that averaged seven children. After the Civil War, Basil and his son bought land in Nelson County where his descendants stayed until Simm’s grandfather moved to Smoketown around 1923 or 1924. [8]
Her mother’s ancestral history was more fragmented. Family tradition said the earliest, Emma Peyton, was a Native American. Simms could find no public records for Peyton plantation owners and thought it possible her family were Shawnee who left Indiana for the area that eventually became Smoketown where she was born in 1837. The women were dominant, living in multi-generation households without the men who fathered their children. Several only had one child. [9]
Smoketown developed around the brickyards and clay pits of Louisville after the Civil War when freedmen streamed in from Kentucky plantations and farms. [10] Simms’ grandmother was part of the community’s entrepreneurial middle class when she ran her own beauty shop. Her parents worked for Mary Cummings Eudy, who ran a fabric designing company until World War II, then began publishing poetry. [11] Eudy was a Presbyterian, [12] and Simms’ father was active in the all-Black Grace-Hope Presbyterian church. [13]
Simms earned a degree in music education from Knoxville College, which Presbyterians had founded in 1875 for freedmen. [14] She later earned a masters from the University of Louisville, taught in the Jefferson County public schools, and was the organist for Grace Hope. [15]
The Strathroy church had been Methodist before the denomination’s merger with Presbyterians and Congregationalists in 1925. [16] While the membership in 2011 likely reflected that diversity, many still thought of themselves as Methodists.
Performers
YouTube
Vocal Soloist: none
Vocal Group: one male and three female adolescents whose voices had not changed
Vocal Director: none visible
Instrumental Accompaniment: grand piano played by woman
Rhythm Accompaniment: none
Sheet Music
SSA or 3-part mixed chorus with piano
Credits
YouTube
Simms’ Kum Ba Yah
Sheet Music
Traditional Spiritual. Arranged by Patsy Ford Simms (ASCAP)
Copyright © 1994 by Alfred Publishing Co, Inc.
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Pronunciation: kum By ya
Verses: kumbaya, singing, crying
Vocabulary
Pronoun: someone
Term for Deity: Lord
Special Terms: none
Basic Form: 3-verse song
Verse Repetition Pattern: none
Ending: repeated the word "kumbaya" three times
Unique Features: none; did not vary from Simms’ text
Notes on Music
Sheet Music
Opening Phrase: 1-3-5
Time Signature: 3/4
Tempo: prayerfully, quarter note equals 69 beats a minute
Key Signature: began with no sharps or flats; changed to five flats before the final crying verse
YouTube
Basic Structure: piano defined the structure, with an introduction and passages between the verses. The last verse was sung higher than the previous two.
Singing Style: unison
Vocal-Instrument Dynamics: the pianist emphasized the first beats of each measure, and had the more complicated part. However, she did not turn the pages of the score in front of her.
Sheet Music
The kumbaya verse was sung in unison. Beginning with the singing verse, the second sopranos and altos sang parallel thirds and the first sopranos began the descant-style phrases a beat later. The closing cadence used parallel third chords and ended in unison.
Notes on Performance
Occasion: Family Sunday service, 20 February 2011.
Location: Strathroy United Church. One girl was standing on the first step that also held an altar table. The other three stood on the next step. The choir was sitting behind them in an area with wooden partitions that defined the rows. The grand piano was placed on the main floor on the right side.
Microphones: floor mike with a boom. The girl in front removed it when they left.
Clothing: all were wearing slacks; the boy and two girls wore white shirts; the other girl wore a maroon top. The choir wore red robes with white V-stoles, and the pianist also was dressed in a maroon gown.
Notes on Movement
The four stood still, with their arms at their sides, and looked straight ahead. Their faces betrayed no emotion, not even when they had finished and were walking away. They did not open their mouths wide to sing.
Notes on Audience
One woman in the first occupied row held an infant and swayed from side to side. Applause at the end.
Notes on Performers
Strathroy was situated on the Grand Trunk Western rail line from London, Ontario, to Sarnia where it crossed into the United States at Port Huron, Michigan. [17] It had been settled in 1832 as a farming community with a grist mill on the Sydenham River by an immigrant from County Tyrone. [18]
The Wesleyan Methodist Church first met in 1840, and grew rapidly with the railroad. It built a frame church in 1851, a larger one in 1861, and a brick building with stained glass windows was begun in 1875 that seated a thousand people. It purchased a melodeon in 1865, which it traded for a pump organ in 1868. That organ passed to the Sunday School, when it was replaced by a pipe organ in 1884. [19]
The Canadian Wesleyan Methodist church was a descendant of the English one, which had taken that name when it separated from the Anglicans to distinguish itself from the Calvinist Methodists associated with George Whitefield in Wales. [20] It was not the same as the Wesleyan Methodist Church in the United States, which held its first convention in Utica, New York, in 1844, to protest the denomination’s acceptance of slavery. [21]
It also was not associated with the Methodist Episcopal Church, which had been established in the United States after the American Revolution. However, members of that denomination did settle in Ontario and held a camp meeting near Strathroy in 1858. [22] It probably was a Holiness meeting.
Most of the currently available compositions by Simms are arrangements of spirituals. Distributers promoted this one by suggesting, "although the text is general, consider programming Kum Ba Yah at Christmas or in celebration of Kwanza." [23]
Availability
YouTube: uploaded by rocketsforever on 22 February 2011.
Sheet Music: Patsy Ford Simms. "Kum Ba Yah." Van Nuys, California: Alfred Music. On 1 November 2017, its website warned "this item is going out of print."
Table
| Denomination | Culture | Song | Count | Culture | Song | Count | Total | |
| Birth Right | United States | International | ||||||
| Jewish | White | K |
2
|
White | K |
1
|
3
|
|
| Roman Catholic | White, Hispanic | K |
5
|
Black, White | K |
7
|
12
|
|
| Reformation | ||||||||
| Lutheran | White | K |
3
|
3
|
||||
| EpiscopalAnglican | White | K |
2
|
White | K |
2
|
4
|
|
| Presbyterian | White | K |
4
|
4
|
||||
| Methodist | White | K |
3
|
White, Native | K |
3
|
6
|
|
| AME Zion | Black | C-2 |
3
|
3
|
||||
| Contact with the Spirit | ||||||||
| Baptist | White | K |
5
|
White 3 | K |
4
|
9
|
|
| Baptist | Black | C |
15
|
15
|
||||
| Apostolic | Black | K/C |
3
|
3
|
||||
| Church of Christ | Black | C |
2
|
2
|
||||
| Church of God in Christ | Black | C-3 |
5
|
5
|
||||
| Pentecostal | Black | C-6 |
7
|
Black, White | K |
11
|
18
|
|
| Spiritist | White | K |
2
|
2
|
||||
| Other | ||||||||
| Mormons | White | K |
2
|
2
|
||||
| Seventh Day Adventist | White | K |
5
|
Black, White | K |
6
|
11
|
|
| End Times | Black | C |
1
|
White | K |
1
|
2
|
|
104
|
Based on survey of YouTube versions of "Come by Here" and "Kumbaya" made in December 2016.
End Notes
1. The meaning of the term "holiness" has evolved. After the Civil War, it was used by followers of Phoebe Palmer. Most were Methodists who were seeking a stronger religious experience than baptism, and wanted proof they were saved. As the movement spread in the 1880s, its theology absorbed elements of the end-times beliefs of the Millerites, and rituals of conversion became more emotional. When the Southern Methodist church began distancing itself, Holiness leaders began promoting separate churches. The break came in 1894. After that the term was used by African Americans for churches that emphasized contact with the Spirit.
2. The Scots church did not produce a hymnal until 1898. (Wikipedia. "Hymnbooks of the Church of Scotland."). As mentioned in the post for 3 September 2017, Charles Finney introduced choirs and organs into Presbyterian revivals in this country before the Civil War.
3. United Methodist Church. "Kum Ba Yah (Come By Here)." The United Methodist Hymnal. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1989. 491.
4. Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) "Kum ba Yah." Presbyterian Hymnal. Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1990. 338.
5. According to Wikipedia, the "1964 Instruction on implementing the Constitution on Sacred Liturgy of the Second Vatican Council laid down that ‘normally the epistle and gospel from the Mass of the day shall be read in the vernacular’." ("Tridentine Mass") Ray Repp produced the first folk mass, the Mass for Young Americans, that same year.
6. "Patsy Ford Simms." Alfred Music website.
7. According to Geni, Saint Mary’s County, Maryland, lay on the tip of a peninsula between the Potomac river and Chesapeake Bay, where it had been attacked by the British during the American Revolution. Agricultural prices fell after the war, when families emigrated to Nelson County, Kentucky. The League of Catholic Families sponsored the first large move in 1785. ("The Kentucky Migration 1780 - 1820.") Most probably were small farmers who grew a variety of crops in Kentucky. Tobacco was only grown by planters who owned a large number of slaves. (Kentucky Heritage Council. "Coombs-Duncan-Brown Farmhouse." National Register of Historic Places, Registration Form. 14-15) Simms found the 1860 census showed 31 slaves spread among five different Fords. (See #8)
8. Patsy Ford Simms. "Discovering the Past, Living Today, Anticipating Tomorrow." Paternal side, 1997/2013. ScribD website.
9. Patsy Simms Turner. "Discovering the Past, Living Today, Anticipating Tomorrow." Maternal side, 2013. ScribD website.
10. Wikipedia. "Smoketown, Louisville."
11. Candace K. Perry. "Eudy, Mary Cummings." 277 in The Encyclopedia of Louisville. Edited by John E. Kleber. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001.
12. Vickie. "Mrs. Mary Cummings (Paine) Eudy." Ancestry website. 8 March 1999. She was reproducing an entry from some unidentified directory.
13. "Grace Hope Presbyterian Church." Presbyterian Church USA website.
14. Wikipedia. "Knoxville College."
15. "Patsy Ford Simms." The Fred Brock Music Companies website.
16. Wikipedia. "Methodist Church, Canada."
17. Hammond’s Illustrated Library World Atlas. New York: C. S. Hammond and Company, 1948. 39.
18. Wikipedia. "Strathroy-Caradoc." The Ulster founder was James Buchanan.
19. Anne Pelkman. "History of Strathroy United Church." Its website.
20. Wikipedia. "Wesleyan Methodist Church (Great Britain)."
21. Wikipedia. "Wesleyan Methodist Church (United States)." Leaders of this group became involved with the more radical parts of the Holiness Movement.
22. Pelkman.
23. "Kum Ba Yah," Sheet Music Plus website, and "Kum Ba Yah," Brick House Music website.
Thursday, November 23, 2017
Kanjélé Choir - Kumbaya
Topic: Movement - Clap Origins
When one attempts to trace the origins of gestures used with "Come by Here," one needs to map versions and establish connections between geographic points. As an example, I knew William Averell moved from Chipping Norton, England, to Ipswich, Massachusetts, some time before 1637. [1] That information gave me starting points for tracing the cultural history of my immigrant ancestor.
African Americans were not as fortunate as I. The founder of the Boys Choir of Harlem wrote: "Like that of most blacks, our family history can be traced back two or three generations through slavery. Go back any further and our roots vanish into the Atlantic Ocean." [2]
Embarkation and debarkation ports are conjecture. If one knows which part of the South an individual’s ancestors lived, one can make guesses based on the fact that slavery moved west when new land was opened for cultivation. Dates exist for white settlement, and they can be related to the fact the slave trade also had a temporal-geographic dimension.
For example, when Charleston, South Carolina, first was importing slaves, they came from the area marked Senegambia on the map at the lower right. When they began growing rice with flood irrigation in 1741, they tended to come from Sierra Leone. [3] Cotton did not become profitable until 1793. At that time, slaves were coming from the Bights of Benin and Biafra. [4]
However, if like Walter Turnbull, one’s ancestors were in the Mississippi Delta, one knows much less. The area was settled after the end of the trans-Atlantic trade when slaves were purchased from the upper south. Much of the area was not cultivated until after the Civil War when freedman moved there voluntarily from other parts of the South.
Willie Mae Ford Smith was born in Mississippi in 1904 and knew her grandmother came from South Carolina, but did not say what part. She knew her grandfather, and knew he was born in Africa. That means he probably was imported by a smuggler after 1807 when slaves were coming from Portuguese areas in Angola and the southern Congo. [5]
These generic starting points in Africa are not as useful as they appear. In 1884, agents of the European powers met in Berlin to divide control of Africa among themselves. [6] As shown on the map at the right, many of the areas of greatest interest to African Americans went to the French, and whatever research exists today was done in that language.
The English gained control of modern day Ghana, whose slaves went to Jamaica, and Nigeria, whose Yoruba primarily went to Cuba, Haiti and Brazil. Most of the research has been done in eastern Africa colonized by Englishmen after the discoveries of diamonds in 1867 and gold in 1884. [7]
The Soweto Gospel Choir was drawn from an area that suffered from forced labor in the mines, not from the external slave trade. The Voices of Zimbabwe and the Windhoek Adventist Choir Anglicized Lucas Deon Bok’s arrangement of "Kumbaya." They did not use drums or hand claps. In contrast, the Kanjélé Choir of Dakar, Sénégal, modernized it with a synthesizer and movements closer to those described by Bessie Jones in the Georgia Sea Islands. [8]
The men and women stood with their arms at their sides during an instrumental introduction that set the pace, rhythm, and key. They sang the first "somebody’s crying Lord" standing still, then began moving on the first "kumbaya." They turned slightly to the diagonal, then bent their outside arms to their waists and pushed them forward twice while bending their weightless knees twice and raising their heels. [9] They repeated the pattern turning from one diagonal to the other. Even when lifted, their feet remained flat.
The individuals in the front two rows introduced lexical gestures when they reached the "Lord hear my" phrase. The singers in the first two rows put their hands into the standard prayer position with flat hands, palm to palm, and bent over at the waists, with their weight on both feet. The tall men in back stood still.
When they reached the word "prayer" the ones in the first two rows straightened their backs and separated their hands. As they stood, they continued raising their arms with their hands pointed upward. The men in back resumed stepping to the left and right.
On the words "as I raise" they brought their arms back down toward their chests, then raised their left arms high on "I need you Lord today." They lowered the arms again on "I need you right away," then stood still for the "somebody’s" that introduced the next section. With the word "kumbaya" they began stepping.
They did not attempt any more lexical variations: the harmonies became more complex and the verse with "in despair" had fewer words that could be dramatized with conventional gestures. [10] Instead, when they reached the "Oh Lord kumbaya" refrain, they began clapping once, like the Soweto Choir, instead of pulsing their forearms twice.
The men and women in the first two rows clapped by bringing their flattened hands together side to side in front of their chests, and dropped their arms to their sides as they turned. The men in the last row clapped over their heads. They all continued bending their knees twice, so their hands and feet were making different patterns. On the last line, they stopped, stood facing front, and held the last note.
Performers
Vocal Soloist: none
Vocal Group: seven women in the front row; six women in the second; six men in the back row. It was hard to identify people in middle row, and my numbers may be wrong.
Vocal Director: none visible.
Instrumental Accompaniment: synthesizer. Men, seen from the back, were holding a hollow-bodied guitar and an electric bass, but their arms were not in playing positions.
Rhythm Accompaniment: drum, rattle. It could have been a shaker, but the man using it was only seen from the back.
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Pronunciation: kum BYE yah
Verses: crying/praying, I need you, despair/care, kumbaya
Vocabulary
Pronoun: somebody
Term for Deity: Lord
Special Terms: none
Basic Form: Lucas Deon Bok
Unique Features: none
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: Lucas Deon Bok
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: harmonies that increased in complexity
Singing Style: unornamented, one syllable to one note
Notes on Performance
Occasion: rehearsal
Location: long, narrow room
Microphones: none
Clothing: casual. Some women in the front row were wearing slacks or knee-length skirts that made it possible to see their leg and foot movements.
Photographs on its Facebook page showed the choir usually performed in robes. In one, the women were wearing tangerine floor-length evening gowns and the men were in brown suits with tangerine shirts. [11]
Notes on Movement
The singers stood at the far end of the room with open space between them and the musicians. A man playing synthesizer stood at the right side of the video, and the man playing the drum sat on the opposite side of the room where everyone could see him. The man using the rattle had his back to the camera, but his head was turned toward the drummer. The guitar and base player sat to his left and right. The camera was behind the man with the rattle.
Concert videos on YouTube showed the singers spread apart with a floor microphone for each one in the first row. Their arm and torso movements were more obvious that the ones with their feet. [12]
Notes on Performers
Music in Africa said the choir was "founded by Bruno d’Erneville, a politician passionate about gospel." [13] I could not determine if he was Bruno Victor Louis d’Erneville, the man who was one of more than a dozen candidates who ran for president of Sénégal in 2012. The choir began posting videos to YouTube in 2012, but Bruno Victor never mentioned any interest in music, not even on his Facebook or LinkedIn pages. [14] The man who founded Kanjele indicated he "performs on stage every Friday at the Dakar calabash restaurant." [15]
If they were two men, they shared a common ancestor. Pierre Henri d’Erneville was born in Normandy in 1714 and went to New Orleans as a soldier. He married a woman who was born in New Orleans in 1731 and who died in 1758, thirty years before he died in 1788. [16] More than likely he fathered Charles Jean Baptiste d’Erneville with a slave woman.
Charles moved to France where he spent time in debtor’s prison. Like his father, he became a soldier and moved to what is now Sénégal in 1785. He married into a prominent Métis family, and also contracted a second marriage. Métis women, the children of French men and native women, had become the wholesalers in the slave trade, sending parties out to capture slaves, then keeping them until European ships arrived to buy them. They, and Charles’ descendants, maintained contacts with Bordeaux merchants and rose to political power in the nineteenth century. [17]
The costumes worn by the Kanjélé choir suggested a continuing commitment to the symbols of the French church and its social elite. However, a concert televised by Dunyaa Télévision in 2016 showed the group had incorporated traditional artists into their programs. [18]
Availability
YouTube: uploaded by kanjele choir on 28 March 2012.
End Notes
1. Clara A. Avery. The Averell-Averill-Avery Family. 1922 supplement.
2. Walter Turnbull. Lift Every Voice. With Howard Manly. New York: Hyperion, 1995. 2.
3. Daniel Heyward introduced flood irrigation at Beaufort, South Carolina. The primary slave trader in Charleston from 1748 to 1762 was Henry Laurens. He worked with Grant, Oswald, who controlled the slave trade in modern-day Sierra Leone from Bunce Island. (David Duncan Wallace. The Life of Henry Laurens. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1915.) As mentioned in the post for 10 November 2017, Sierra Leone became the center of the Poro and Sande societies who rituals were transferred and transformed in lowland South Carolina.
4. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall and Michael A. Gomez each have chronicled the slave trade by African area. Her emphasis was on Louisiana, the Caribbean, and Brazil in Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). His focus was on the United States in Exchanging Our Country Marks (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
5. Willie Mae Ford Smith was discussed in the post for 10 November 2017.
6. Wikipedia. "Berlin Conference."
7. Wikipedia. "South Africa."
8. Bessie Jones was discussed in the post for 27 October 2017.
9. Bessie Jones also used an analogous "double offbeat clap pattern." (Bessie Jones and Bess Lomax Hawes. Step it Down: Games, Plays, Songs, and Stories from the Afro-American Heritage. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987 edition. 21.)
10. The ability to create a gesture when no convention existed was one of the defining traits of camps where lexical movement songs were important in the repertoire. This was discussed in the post for 25 October 2017.
11. Kanjele. Home and About tabs. Facebook.
12. They were wearing purple robes with lilac insets in "Prestation du Groupe Gospel Kanjele au Grand Théâtre de Dakar," uploaded to YouTube by SnlTV, 30 October2016. They wore cream robes with rust-colored stoles in "Kanjele Gospel Choir - Ke na le modisa," uploaded to YouTube by Jeff Mvondo, 2 January 2013.
13. "Kanjele." Music in Africa website.
14. Bruno d’Erneville, About tab, Facebook, and Bruno d’Erneville, LinkedIn.
15. Music in Africa.
16. Jacob Neu. "Pierre Henri Henry d’ Erneville" and "Perinne Pelagie Fleuriau" (his wife). Geni website. 11 December 2014. Neu’s primary interest seemed to be a sister of Charles. The information on Charles and his other sister did not include birth dates.
17. Hilary Jones. The Métis of Senegal: Urban Life and Politics in French West Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013. 193. The French also used the word Métis for the children of French traders and Native American women in what is now Canada.
18. "CONCERT Chœur Kanjele." Uploaded by Dtv Sénégal on 13 November 2016. More than two hours in length.
When one attempts to trace the origins of gestures used with "Come by Here," one needs to map versions and establish connections between geographic points. As an example, I knew William Averell moved from Chipping Norton, England, to Ipswich, Massachusetts, some time before 1637. [1] That information gave me starting points for tracing the cultural history of my immigrant ancestor.
African Americans were not as fortunate as I. The founder of the Boys Choir of Harlem wrote: "Like that of most blacks, our family history can be traced back two or three generations through slavery. Go back any further and our roots vanish into the Atlantic Ocean." [2]
Embarkation and debarkation ports are conjecture. If one knows which part of the South an individual’s ancestors lived, one can make guesses based on the fact that slavery moved west when new land was opened for cultivation. Dates exist for white settlement, and they can be related to the fact the slave trade also had a temporal-geographic dimension.
For example, when Charleston, South Carolina, first was importing slaves, they came from the area marked Senegambia on the map at the lower right. When they began growing rice with flood irrigation in 1741, they tended to come from Sierra Leone. [3] Cotton did not become profitable until 1793. At that time, slaves were coming from the Bights of Benin and Biafra. [4]
However, if like Walter Turnbull, one’s ancestors were in the Mississippi Delta, one knows much less. The area was settled after the end of the trans-Atlantic trade when slaves were purchased from the upper south. Much of the area was not cultivated until after the Civil War when freedman moved there voluntarily from other parts of the South.
Willie Mae Ford Smith was born in Mississippi in 1904 and knew her grandmother came from South Carolina, but did not say what part. She knew her grandfather, and knew he was born in Africa. That means he probably was imported by a smuggler after 1807 when slaves were coming from Portuguese areas in Angola and the southern Congo. [5]
These generic starting points in Africa are not as useful as they appear. In 1884, agents of the European powers met in Berlin to divide control of Africa among themselves. [6] As shown on the map at the right, many of the areas of greatest interest to African Americans went to the French, and whatever research exists today was done in that language.
The English gained control of modern day Ghana, whose slaves went to Jamaica, and Nigeria, whose Yoruba primarily went to Cuba, Haiti and Brazil. Most of the research has been done in eastern Africa colonized by Englishmen after the discoveries of diamonds in 1867 and gold in 1884. [7]
The Soweto Gospel Choir was drawn from an area that suffered from forced labor in the mines, not from the external slave trade. The Voices of Zimbabwe and the Windhoek Adventist Choir Anglicized Lucas Deon Bok’s arrangement of "Kumbaya." They did not use drums or hand claps. In contrast, the Kanjélé Choir of Dakar, Sénégal, modernized it with a synthesizer and movements closer to those described by Bessie Jones in the Georgia Sea Islands. [8]
The men and women stood with their arms at their sides during an instrumental introduction that set the pace, rhythm, and key. They sang the first "somebody’s crying Lord" standing still, then began moving on the first "kumbaya." They turned slightly to the diagonal, then bent their outside arms to their waists and pushed them forward twice while bending their weightless knees twice and raising their heels. [9] They repeated the pattern turning from one diagonal to the other. Even when lifted, their feet remained flat.
The individuals in the front two rows introduced lexical gestures when they reached the "Lord hear my" phrase. The singers in the first two rows put their hands into the standard prayer position with flat hands, palm to palm, and bent over at the waists, with their weight on both feet. The tall men in back stood still.
When they reached the word "prayer" the ones in the first two rows straightened their backs and separated their hands. As they stood, they continued raising their arms with their hands pointed upward. The men in back resumed stepping to the left and right.
On the words "as I raise" they brought their arms back down toward their chests, then raised their left arms high on "I need you Lord today." They lowered the arms again on "I need you right away," then stood still for the "somebody’s" that introduced the next section. With the word "kumbaya" they began stepping.
They did not attempt any more lexical variations: the harmonies became more complex and the verse with "in despair" had fewer words that could be dramatized with conventional gestures. [10] Instead, when they reached the "Oh Lord kumbaya" refrain, they began clapping once, like the Soweto Choir, instead of pulsing their forearms twice.
The men and women in the first two rows clapped by bringing their flattened hands together side to side in front of their chests, and dropped their arms to their sides as they turned. The men in the last row clapped over their heads. They all continued bending their knees twice, so their hands and feet were making different patterns. On the last line, they stopped, stood facing front, and held the last note.
Performers
Vocal Soloist: none
Vocal Group: seven women in the front row; six women in the second; six men in the back row. It was hard to identify people in middle row, and my numbers may be wrong.
Vocal Director: none visible.
Instrumental Accompaniment: synthesizer. Men, seen from the back, were holding a hollow-bodied guitar and an electric bass, but their arms were not in playing positions.
Rhythm Accompaniment: drum, rattle. It could have been a shaker, but the man using it was only seen from the back.
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Pronunciation: kum BYE yah
Verses: crying/praying, I need you, despair/care, kumbaya
Vocabulary
Pronoun: somebody
Term for Deity: Lord
Special Terms: none
Basic Form: Lucas Deon Bok
Unique Features: none
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: Lucas Deon Bok
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: harmonies that increased in complexity
Singing Style: unornamented, one syllable to one note
Notes on Performance
Occasion: rehearsal
Location: long, narrow room
Microphones: none
Clothing: casual. Some women in the front row were wearing slacks or knee-length skirts that made it possible to see their leg and foot movements.
Photographs on its Facebook page showed the choir usually performed in robes. In one, the women were wearing tangerine floor-length evening gowns and the men were in brown suits with tangerine shirts. [11]
Notes on Movement
The singers stood at the far end of the room with open space between them and the musicians. A man playing synthesizer stood at the right side of the video, and the man playing the drum sat on the opposite side of the room where everyone could see him. The man using the rattle had his back to the camera, but his head was turned toward the drummer. The guitar and base player sat to his left and right. The camera was behind the man with the rattle.
Concert videos on YouTube showed the singers spread apart with a floor microphone for each one in the first row. Their arm and torso movements were more obvious that the ones with their feet. [12]
Notes on Performers
Music in Africa said the choir was "founded by Bruno d’Erneville, a politician passionate about gospel." [13] I could not determine if he was Bruno Victor Louis d’Erneville, the man who was one of more than a dozen candidates who ran for president of Sénégal in 2012. The choir began posting videos to YouTube in 2012, but Bruno Victor never mentioned any interest in music, not even on his Facebook or LinkedIn pages. [14] The man who founded Kanjele indicated he "performs on stage every Friday at the Dakar calabash restaurant." [15]
If they were two men, they shared a common ancestor. Pierre Henri d’Erneville was born in Normandy in 1714 and went to New Orleans as a soldier. He married a woman who was born in New Orleans in 1731 and who died in 1758, thirty years before he died in 1788. [16] More than likely he fathered Charles Jean Baptiste d’Erneville with a slave woman.
Charles moved to France where he spent time in debtor’s prison. Like his father, he became a soldier and moved to what is now Sénégal in 1785. He married into a prominent Métis family, and also contracted a second marriage. Métis women, the children of French men and native women, had become the wholesalers in the slave trade, sending parties out to capture slaves, then keeping them until European ships arrived to buy them. They, and Charles’ descendants, maintained contacts with Bordeaux merchants and rose to political power in the nineteenth century. [17]
The costumes worn by the Kanjélé choir suggested a continuing commitment to the symbols of the French church and its social elite. However, a concert televised by Dunyaa Télévision in 2016 showed the group had incorporated traditional artists into their programs. [18]
Availability
YouTube: uploaded by kanjele choir on 28 March 2012.
End Notes
1. Clara A. Avery. The Averell-Averill-Avery Family. 1922 supplement.
2. Walter Turnbull. Lift Every Voice. With Howard Manly. New York: Hyperion, 1995. 2.
3. Daniel Heyward introduced flood irrigation at Beaufort, South Carolina. The primary slave trader in Charleston from 1748 to 1762 was Henry Laurens. He worked with Grant, Oswald, who controlled the slave trade in modern-day Sierra Leone from Bunce Island. (David Duncan Wallace. The Life of Henry Laurens. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1915.) As mentioned in the post for 10 November 2017, Sierra Leone became the center of the Poro and Sande societies who rituals were transferred and transformed in lowland South Carolina.
4. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall and Michael A. Gomez each have chronicled the slave trade by African area. Her emphasis was on Louisiana, the Caribbean, and Brazil in Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). His focus was on the United States in Exchanging Our Country Marks (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
5. Willie Mae Ford Smith was discussed in the post for 10 November 2017.
6. Wikipedia. "Berlin Conference."
7. Wikipedia. "South Africa."
8. Bessie Jones was discussed in the post for 27 October 2017.
9. Bessie Jones also used an analogous "double offbeat clap pattern." (Bessie Jones and Bess Lomax Hawes. Step it Down: Games, Plays, Songs, and Stories from the Afro-American Heritage. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987 edition. 21.)
10. The ability to create a gesture when no convention existed was one of the defining traits of camps where lexical movement songs were important in the repertoire. This was discussed in the post for 25 October 2017.
11. Kanjele. Home and About tabs. Facebook.
12. They were wearing purple robes with lilac insets in "Prestation du Groupe Gospel Kanjele au Grand Théâtre de Dakar," uploaded to YouTube by SnlTV, 30 October2016. They wore cream robes with rust-colored stoles in "Kanjele Gospel Choir - Ke na le modisa," uploaded to YouTube by Jeff Mvondo, 2 January 2013.
13. "Kanjele." Music in Africa website.
14. Bruno d’Erneville, About tab, Facebook, and Bruno d’Erneville, LinkedIn.
15. Music in Africa.
16. Jacob Neu. "Pierre Henri Henry d’ Erneville" and "Perinne Pelagie Fleuriau" (his wife). Geni website. 11 December 2014. Neu’s primary interest seemed to be a sister of Charles. The information on Charles and his other sister did not include birth dates.
17. Hilary Jones. The Métis of Senegal: Urban Life and Politics in French West Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013. 193. The French also used the word Métis for the children of French traders and Native American women in what is now Canada.
18. "CONCERT Chœur Kanjele." Uploaded by Dtv Sénégal on 13 November 2016. More than two hours in length.
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