Odetta - Kumbaya

Topic: Political versions
Odetta may be the only popular performer who kept "Kumbaya" in her repertoire after the end of the Vietnam war because peace to her was not a civic, but a spiritual state. She never recorded the song, and no one has uploaded a concert video to YouTube, although one performance tape does exist on the internet. Without those recordings, all that remains of her version are descriptions made at the time. They made clear, context for her was more important than content.

Graham Reid, who saw her in New Zealand in 1989, said she opened the concert by carrying incense and then asked the audience "to focus with her for a moment, and then join together in singing ‘Kumbaya,’ a spiritual whose Swahili title translates as ‘Come By Here.’ A gentle call for the Lord’s presence, the song functioned as a unifying force, conjuring up the spiritual energy that fueled Odetta’s performance." [1]

Toby Bielawski made similar comments about a show in a San Francisco coffee house in 1998:

"Suddenly, I had the feeling that we had all come not just to hear music, but to share a spiritual experience. As Odetta began her performance, leading us together through the familiar African spiritual ‘Kumbaya,’ a transformation took place: for over an hour that evening—which was, fittingly, a Sunday—the coffeehouse became a house of soul healing, a church of song for all denominations." [2]

She was a child of the great migration. Her parents moved from Birmingham, Alabama, to Los Angeles during the depression. Although she was trained there to sing opera, Odetta never believed a major opera house would cast a large African-American woman in an important role. While she was working instead in a road troupe for a musical comedy, she discovered the coffee houses of San Francisco where the folk music revival was developing in the early 1950s. [3]

She later said the "formal training was ‘a nice exercise, but it had nothing to do with my life’." [4] In fact, training for the stage influenced her approach to songs. Instead of assimilating every text into her own style, she tried "to recreate the feeling of her folk songs." [5]

Thus, her a capella version of "Kumbaya" captured on a tape from 1998 was meant to evoke the singing of Africans adjusting to plantation life in the American South. She shouted more than sang the lyrics. On her last repetition of the kumbaya burden, she inhaled strongly before singing the "kum" that began the lines. Zora Neale Hurston observed:

"Negro singing and formal speech are breathy. The audible breathing is part of the performance and various devices are resorted to to adorn the breath taking. Even the lack of breath is embellished with syllables. This is, of course, the very antithesis of white vocal art. European singing is considered good when each syllable floats out on a column of air, seeming not to have any mechanics at all. Breathing must be hidden. Negro song ornaments both the song and the mechanics." [6]

This vocal technique was not part of Odetta’s inherited musical vocabulary. Her classical training made smooth breathing instinctive, and, despite her early years in a Baptist church, her important childhood religious experiences came from a Congregational one. [7] She told Reid

"I do not call myself religious. I am suspicious of those who are the keepers of religion, and I am suspicious if someone says, ‘God told me to tell you....’ That means they’re trying to control me. And since we’re both children of God, why does He have your number and not mine? How come He just don’t call me up? Or She, thank you very much! But I’m highly spiritual. Religious, no. Spiritual, yes. And I think I couldn’t help but be, because of the magic and the healing that I’ve experienced in the music." [8]

She treated Civil Rights organizations with the same skepticism. She told Amy Goodman:

"I once tried to be — no, twice tried to be a joiner and belong to a group, because I know you need to do that in order to affect anything. And I had no patience with people going through their ego trips before they could even deal with the problem that we had gotten together with. And so, a long time ago I made the decision that I would be on the supportive end. And for all those brave ones who could sit through all that stuff and get something focused, I would go there and be supportive in whatever way I could." [9]

Instead of marching at Selma, Alabama, she sang at the concert for marchers camped the last night six miles from Montgomery. [10] Her most famous performance was Martin Luther King’s 1963 March on Washington where she sang on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, [11] but she also sang wherever she was invited.

Bernice Johnson Reagon heard her at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1962 between the time she had been expelled from Albany College and before she dropped out of Spelman to join the Freedom Singers. Instead of performing protest songs, Odetta sang "Prettiest chain that I have ever seen" and "Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho." Johnson Regaon recalled:

"One of the things that happens sometimes when you take root music and take it to the concert stage, something happens to it. You recognize it, but it’s been sort of shifted a bit. And Odetta did shift these songs, because these are songs that are work songs. But when she sang prison songs or work song, she still rendered the passion, the energy and the position and the function that those songs created for the people who sang them as a way of balancing their lives. She was just, the spring of 1962, what I needed to begin my life as a freedom fighter and as a Freedom Singer." [12]

Performers
Vocal Soloist: Odetta
Vocal Accompaniment: none
Instrumental Accompaniment: none

Rhythm Accompaniment: it sounded like she was hitting something metallic, but it was not picked up by the microphone and was very faint.

Credits
In Berkeley she said it was a " song from the Georgia Sea Island, Cum By ya, My Lord. That is a patois of come by here, my Lord, help me, will you, help me."

Notes on Lyrics
Language: English

Pronunciation: cum-BY-yah with strong emphasis on second syllable

Verses: kumbaya, needs you

Theme: the peace she sought in "Kumbaya" was not the simple peace of someone escaping war or fighting for civil rights, but the equipoise required to overcome the destructive emotions created by both. As she told the Auckland audience before they sang it together:

"Even if all of us live right next door to each other, we come from different places. So-and-so burned the toast this morning, the kids were slow in getting ready: your focus has been taken away into doing other things. And I, too, have come from another—let’s call it life. So then we get together in one room to do something together, and we all focus on this one thing—the music—and from there, we can go anywhere." [13]

Vocabulary:
Pronoun: someone
Term for Deity: Lord
Special Terms: none

Format: verse-burden
Verse Repetition Pattern: AxA
Line Length: 8 syllables
Ending: none
Unique Features: none

Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: first note on 1, rest on 5
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: strophic

Singing Style: neither sung nor spoken; rougher sound than Bernice Johnson Reagon discussed in the post for 14 October 2017.

Notes on Performance
Occasion: Benefit concert for Seva Foundation, 15 May 1998

Location: Berkeley Community Theatre, Berkeley, California

Notes on Audience
The microphone picked up applause but did not record any other sounds from the audience. Her comment "I hear ya, I hear ya" was the only indication they joined in singing.

Notes on Performers
Odetta was not simply a musical actress donning African-influenced stage costumes; she had a robust voice and a strong sense of music. Rhythm was more important than melody. When she asked the audience to sing with her in Berkeley she told them:

"It’s filled with those of you whose friends and neighbors and teachers told you ‘you shouldn’t sing because you were not in the right key,’ or whatever. Forget them and sing in whatever key you’re gonna sing in. [pause] I’m strict on rhythm, but [end of tape]." [14]

Hurston noted the resulting dissonance was traditional: "The harmony of the true spiritual is not regular. The dissonances are important and not to be ironed out by the trained musician." [15] She added, "The real Negro singer cares nothing about pitch. The first notes just burst out and the rest of the church join in—fired by the same inner urge. Every man trying to express himself through song. Every man for himself. Hence the harmony and disharmony, the shifting keys and broken time that makes up the spiritual." [16]

Availability
The Seva Foundation uploaded tapes to its Concert Vault website. You have to pay for a monthly membership, but can get free access for a few days and cancel anytime.

The presentation was confusing. It listed three items: Kumbaya - 3:10, Maybe She Go/Sitting Here in Limbo - 8:20, and (Something Inside) So Strong - 4:14. The first was actually a 31 second introduction by an unidentified man. The second was a 1.18 minute welcome by Odetta, similar in tone to the performance described by Reid. The last was three verses of "Kumbaya" in 1.27 minutes ending with applause.

It was enough to let you hear her style, if not enough to apprehend her version.

End Notes
1. Graham Reid. "Odetta: A Legend Ignored. Elsewhere website. 17 January 2011.

2. Toby Bielawski. "The Wisdom and Music of Odetta." Radiance website. Winter 1999.

3. Randy Lewis and Mike Boehm. "Odetta Holmes Dies at 77; Folk Singer Championed Black History, Civil Rights." Los Angeles Times, 3 December 2008.

4. "Odetta." Biography website. Last updated 8 December 2014.

5. "Baby in the Cradle. Time, 5 December 1960. Quoted by Tim Weiner. "Odetta, Voice of Civil Rights Movement, Dies at 77." The New York Times, 3 December 2008.

6. Zora Neale Hurston. "Spirituals and Neo-Spirituals." 79-84 in The Sanctified Church. Berkeley: Turtle Island, 1983. 81-82.

7. Reid.

8. Odetta. Quoted by Reid.

9. Odetta. Interview with Amy Godman. Speaking for Ourselves. 20 December 1986. Replayed by Goodman. "Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon Remembers Musical Icon Odetta (1930-2008)." Democracy Now! 30 December 2008.

10. John Shearer. "How The Selma March Was Covered In The 1965 Chattanooga Papers." The Chattanoongan [Tennessee] website. 23 March 2015.

11. Odetta, Biography.

12. Bernice Johnson Reagon. Interview with Amy Goodman. Democracy Now! 30 December 2008.

13. Reid.

14. Odetta. Quoted by Reid.

15. Hurston. 80.

16. Hurston. 80-81.