The Weavers - Kum-Ba-Ya

Topic: Political Versions
Carl Benkert recognized the importance of documenting events while they were occurring. After the Civil Rights and Vietnam protest movements had faded, Tom Glazer collected their songs in his 1970 Songs of Peace, Freedom and Protest. He included Carawan’s version of "Come by Here" and a new variant by The Weavers. [1] He called the first "a fraternal twin" of the second." [2]

In this one The Weavers added four verses to three taken from the standard song (weeping, singing, praying); one permutation was "the world’s in danger." They used "someone" and restored "Lord." The latter bridged the gulf between New Testament Christians, who associated the word with Jesus, and Old Testament believers, who used it for Jehovah. [3]

Glazer gave the same copyright information for this song that appeared with the recorded version discussed in the post for 3 October 2017. So far as I know they never recorded it. Did any of you ever hear them sing it? Let me know with a comment or email.
Credits
Additional words and new music by Lee Hays, Fred Hellerman, Ronnie Gilbert, and Erik Darling.

Copyright: © 1959, Sanga Music, Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Verses: kumbaya, weeping, singing, praying, their own

Vocabulary:
Pronoun: someone
Term for Deity: Lord

Special Terms: they replaced the usual crying with weeping

Theme: the political verses were generic. They could have fitted the atom bomb tests of the 1950s and today’s problems with climate change.

Format: 8 verse song
Verse Length: 4 lines
Verse Repetition Pattern: none
Line Meter: trochaic
Line Length: 8 syllables
Line Repetition Pattern: AAAB
Line Form: statement-refrain

Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: 1-3-5
Time Signature: 3/2 and 2/2
Key Signature: no sharps or flats
Guitar Chords: C F G

Notes on Performers
Ronnie Gilbert’s mother was active in the trade union movement, and took her to a rally where Paul Robeson performed. She later told an interviewer:

"I can remember my mother on the picket line, singing, what would it have been? (singing) ‘Hold the fort for we are coming. Union men be strong.’ Union men, not union women. ‘Union men be strong.’ And so there was that. And then there was Robeson. So something clicked at that time, and Robeson said, I remember him saying, ‘Your people and mine are forever connected by our slave heritage.’ Well, that got me thinking, what was that about? So, there it was. That was the beginning of my life as a singer and a — I wouldn’t call myself an activist, but a singer, a singer with social conscience, let’s say." [4]

Her mother sent her to Camp Wo-Chi-Ca, sponsored by the Communists’ Worker’s Order. Paul Robeson appeared most summers. She began singing with Hellerman when the two were counselors there. [5]

Lee Hays remembered he discovered the importance of singing in the 1930s when he was in a car with African-American activists trying to outrun a white mob in Arkansas. Jeff Sharlet summarized the experience for the Oxford American in 2014:

"‘The organizer started singing.’

"Ordinarily, they’d sing union songs. ‘But in this cold night we sang hymns.’ They’d all been raised in the church and all had converted to the union; they believed in deliverance, here and now, not salvation in the hereafter. But they remembered the old words, harmonies swelling and breaking (‘Floods of joy o’er my soul like the sea billows roll’) bass voice giving way to sweet soprano, the organizer’s raspy baritone coming in with a verse or a chorus, one hymn after another, and all the voices searching, working for harmonies unheard and unknown, perfect blends of tones and feelings and fears.

"I wondered about this, why we found such comfort in the old hymns, we whose eyes were fixed on a new day and a new way of life. For awhile it was possible not to be scared, even.

"But the answer was there, and it came to me that the words of the song didn’t matter. They were there and we sang them, but what mattered was that we were singing." [6]

Hellerman, Darling, and Glazer were musicians rather than activists. Darling said he had not thought much about politics until he was hired by The Weavers. He then found others assumed he was a serious as they, even though "I wasn’t aligned with any political group." He left after he read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, an event that coincided with his divorce. [7]

Glazer began playing guitar in Washington after he met Alan Lomax, then moved to New York where people like Pete Seeger were generating a new interest in American folk music. He wrote songs for folk revival singers in the 1950s and 1960s, but his best remembered was a parody, "On Top of Spaghetti." [8]

Hellerman later produced Joan Baez’s first album for Vanguard [9] and worked as music director for Elektra Records. [10]. He argued:

"It would seem that the question boils down to looking upon a folksong in either one of two ways: (1) as a inviolate museum piece, which must be kept as antiseptic as possible; or (2) as a living expression of a folk culture, susceptible and subject to all the forces of the culture. As a living thing, it must grow and change." [11]

Availability
Songbook: Tom Glazer. Songs of Peace, Freedom and Protest. New York: D. McKay Company, 1970.

End Notes
1. The Weavers’ first version of "Kumbaya" was described in the post for 3 October 2017.

2. Glazer. 56. It did not credit Carawan’s book discussed in the post for 5 October 2017.

3. Hebrews were forbidden from pronouncing or writing the name of their god, Jehovah. The word translated as Lord was given to Moses as YHWH, which was the word stripped of its vowels. (Encyclopædia Britannica. "Yahweh.")

The New Testament usage came from 1 Corinthians 8:6: "But to us there is but one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we in him; and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we by him." ("There Is One God." Is God a Trinity. United Church of God Beyond Today website.)

The two words went through several translations before they emerged as one in the Greek. The Encyclopædia Britannica said the first Hebrew word, "Elohim," was replaced with "Adonai." That, in turn, became "Kyrios" in Greek. The New Testament used the Greek "Theos" for God, and "Kyrios" for Lord. (S. Michael Houdmann. "What do LORD, GOD, Lord, God, etc., stand for in the Bible?" Got Questions website.)

4. Ronnie Gilbert. Interview with Kate Weigand, Smith College archives, 10 March 2004. 4-5. Paul Robeson was mentioned in the post for 17 August 2017.

5. Gilbert. 9.

6. Jeff Sharlet. "The Embattled Lee Hays." Oxford American, Fall 2007. The line quoted was from "Since Jesus Came into My Heart." It was written in 1914 by Rufus H. McDaniel. (Hymnary website.)

7. Erik Darling. "I’d Give My Life!" Palo Alto: Science and Behavior Books, Inc., 2008. 249-251.

8. Douglas Martin. "Tom Glazer, Folk Singer, Is Dead at 88." The New York Times, 26 February 2003.

9. Wikipedia. "Joan Baez."

10. Fred Hellerman. Quoted by Ray M. Lawless. Folksingers and Folksongs in America. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1965 second edition. 111.

11. Hellerman. 112.