The Weavers - Kumbaya

Topic: Political Versions
"Kumbaya" did not enter camp tradition as a purely religious song, but as a song that could be easily learned and sung with timbraic or parallel harmony. One participant in Mudcat Café remembered:

"I understood it to have vaguely African origins, but this was just a point of interest without political overtones. It was simply, like Michael Row the Boat Ashore, an appealing (for awhile) spiritual that everyone could join in on." [1]

As Meself indicated, "Kumbaya" also had no political connotations when it first was introduced. When The Weavers first heard it, probably from Pete Seeger, [2] they said:

"It came to us as a song supposedly from Africa, and it had only the one word. The pretty tune suggested that it might be a lullaby, so we added a few lines to make it that." [3]

The New York- and Arkansas-bred singers may not have recognized the Midwestern use of "someone" as an elastic term that could shift between the speaker, the audience, and specific members of the group within a sentence. They supplied an antecedent to what they may have assumed was a dangling third-person pronoun. Their first stanza was still "someone’s sleeping," but the second was "trees are sleeping" and the third was "moon is smiling."

The group of two Jews, an unchurched Episcopalian, and the son of a Methodist minister excised the religious content when they made the refrain "kumbaya ya," and changed the last line to "na na kumbaya." Nana was a common name for a grandmother, [4] but more likely it came from the 1954 television version of Peter Pan, starring Mary Martin and Cyril Richard. The Darling family dog, who looked after Wendy and her brothers, was named Nana.

If the song had any polemical value in 1959, one of their members would have known. The group grew from 1930s political activities of Lee Hays and Pete Seeger. In the 1940s the two joined with Woody Guthrie and Millard Lampell in the Almanac Singers that performed at union and other political events. After Guthrie became ill and Lampell dropped out, Ronnie Gilbert and Fred Hellerman join in the reconstituted Weavers. At the time this album was recorded, Seeger had just left the group, and Erik Darling was taking his place.

Seeger’s uncle Allan was a romantic poet killed glorifying the adventure of fighting with the French Foreign Legion in World War I. Before he moved to Paris, he lived the Bohemian life in Greenwich Village and visited a boardinghouse where William Butler Yeats’ father presided. [5] Pete’s idea of a political song probably was drawn from Bertolt Brecht and Guthrie. Most were ballads that described events or were rallying cries to action.

Hays had more experience making simple changes in familiar songs. When he came of age, economic conditions in the Depression prevented him from going to college. Instead, he went to the Highlander Folk School, [6] which had been founded to train union organizers in the South. [7] He returned to his native Arkansas to organize sharecroppers and teach at Commonwealth College, [8] another school for activists. [9] He learned to substitute union words into hymns so they could "break into the hymn words if gun thugs should appear." [10]

Performers
Vocal Soloist: Ronnie Gilbert, contralto

Vocal Accompaniment: Lee Hays, bass; Fred Hellerman, baritone; Erik Darling, tenor

Instrumental Accompaniment: the usual configuration was Fred Hellerman on guitar and Erik Darling on banjo. Their songbook included a piano accompaniment and guitar chords.

Rhythm Accompaniment: none

Credits
Album
Hays, Hellerman, Darling, Gilbert
All songs Sanga Music Inc - B. M. I.

Songbook
New words and new music arrangement by Erik Darling, Ronnie Gilbert, Lee Hays and Fred Hellerman.

Copyright 1959 Sanga Music Inc., New York, N.Y.

Notes on Lyrics
Language: English

Pronunciation: on the refrains they pronounced the first syllable of kumbaya as "cum" and emphasized "by." When kumbaya was the verse, they sang and emphasized "koom."

Verses: kumbaya, sleeping, their own

Vocabulary:
Pronoun: someone and then nouns
Term for Deity: "na na" and "ya ya" were substituted
Special Terms: nana

Format: verse-burden
Verse Length: 5 lines
Verse Repetition Pattern: xAxxA
Line Meter: trochaic
Line Length: 7 syllables
Line Repetition Pattern: AAABB
Line Form: statement-refrain
Ending: additional repetition of last line
Literary Devices: incremental repetition

Notes on Music
Album
Opening Phrase: 1-3-5; they smoothed the syncopation into quarter quarter half half notes.

Tempo: slow
Songbook
Opening Phrase: 1-3-5
Time Signature: alternated between 3/2 and 2/2
Tempo: lullaby tempo
Key Signature: two sharps
Guitar Chords: D G A A⁷

Basic Structure: call-response
Harmonic Structure: parallel chords
Singing Style: One syllable to one note
Solo: Gilbert trilled the "ba" in kumbaya

Solo-Group Dynamics: on verses, Gilbert sang the statements and the group joined on the refrains and final lines. The entire group sang the kumbaya stanzas. The first and last repetitions were sung by two voices, either Gilbert and Darling, or Gilbert recording with herself.

Vocal-Orchestral Dynamics: the banjo played a high-low-high-low motif in the introduction and continued it softly during the singing. The guitar played the melody in place of a repetition of the burden between the second and third verses, with the banjo playing arpeggios and strumming chords. The banjo continued the high-low motif after the voices faded at the end.

Notes on Performers
Ronnie Gilbert was born in Brooklyn, New York, where her Jewish father had immigrated from Ukraine. Her mother was a Polish-born Jew. [11]

Fred Hellerman was born in Flatbush, New York, where his Jewish father had moved from Riga, Latvia. His mother’s Jewish parents also came from Riga. [12]

Erik Darling was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and raised in Canandaigua, New York. He spent his high school years with his mother in New York City. [13] Darling remembered his father’s church "had been Episcopalian, and he had found religion hypocritical, mean-spirited, and centered around exclusivity. The self-righteous, he thought, were a slap in the face of God, if there was one." [14]

Lee Hays was born to a Methodist minister in Little Rock, Arkansas. [15]

Availability
Album: Travelling On With The Weavers. Vanguard VRS 9043. 1958.

Reissue: Best Of The Vanguard Years. Vanguard 79580-2. 2001.

Reissue: Various Artists. Folk-Songs of the Civil Rights Movement. X5 Music Group. 17 September 2013.

YouTube: uploaded by The Orchard Enterprises, 25 December 2014.

Songbook: The Weavers Song Book. Edited by Ronnie Gilbert with musical arrangements by Robert De Cormier. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1960. 156-158.

End Notes
1. Meself. Mudcat Café website. "Holding Hands and Singing ‘Kumbaya’." Thread begun January 29, 2007. Comment added 18 February 2008.

2. Seeger had performed "Kumbaya" at Carnegie Hall on 27 December 1957. In "Goofing Off Suite." Pete Seeger and Sonny Terry. Folkways Records FA2412. Released 1958

3. Travelling On liner notes and songbook, page 156.

4. The Random House Dictionary suggested "nana" was used for a grandmother in the Northeastern United States, for a godmother in the Gulf states, and for a nursemaid in the Southeast. ("Nana." Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary. Quoted by Dictionary website, 2016.)

It might have been introduced into this country by Irish immigrants. The word was reported by a ten-year-old girl in England in 1844 for her nanny. (Emily Pepys. Diary entries for 9 March 1844 and 25 December 1844. Quoted in Oxford English Dictionary entry for "nana.")

The word grandmother made little sense in a lullaby, which would have been sung by a grandmother to an infant. It also was not clear if any of The Weavers would have grown up with the term. The Yiddish word for grandmother was some form of "Bubbe." (Sarah Bunin Benor. Jewish English Lexicon website.)

5. Wikipedia. "Alan Seeger."

6. John S. Wilson. "Lee Hays, a Co-founder of the Weavers, Dies." The New York Times, 27 August 1981.

7. Wikipedia. "Highlander Research and Education Center."

8. Wilson.

9. William H. Cobb. "Commonwealth College." Encyclopedia of Arkansas website. Last updated 27 February 2012.

10. Jeff Sharlet. "The Embattled Lee Hays." Oxford American, fall 2007.

11. Bruce Weber. "Ronnie Gilbert, Bold-Voiced Singer With The Weavers, Is Dead at 88." The New York Times, 6 June 2015.

12. William Grimes. "Fred Hellerman, Last of The Weavers Folk Group, Dies at 89." The New York Times, 2 September 2016.

13. William Grimes. "Erik Darling Dies at 74; Musician in The Weavers." The New York Times, 7 August 2008.

14. Erik Darling. "I’d Give My Life. Palo Alto: Science and Behavior Books, Inc. 2008. 6.

15. Wilson.