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

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.