Amy Robbins-Wilson - Kumbaya

Topic: Lullaby - Definition
Much of the problem in identifying the characteristics of lullabies comes from the fact they exist as both a function and a genre. [1] The latter is a mental abstraction, and varies by culture. The other is about as universal as anything in human experience, because it is driven by the needs of newborn infants.

Infants spend much of their first weeks sleeping, usually about sixteen hours a day broken into two to four hour-long segments. Their stomachs are still small, and they need constant feeding. [2] When they are about six to eight weeks old, they begin to sleep less during the day, and more in the night. [3] By three months, they sleep through the night. [4]

Their sleep goes through the same phases as adults, from drowsiness to non-REM sleep to REM sleep and back. Unlike adults, about half their sleep time is in the rapid-eye-movement phase associated with developments in their brains as they adjust to the non-uterine world. [5]

The ideal wake state is the quiet alert when their eyes are "wide and bright" and their breathing is regular. This is the period they can learn and should be fed. When they begin to be hungry or feel some other discomfort, their eyes lose their brightness, they become fussy, and breathe less regularly. If their needs are not recognized in the active alert state, they begin to cry and may not be able to eat. [6]

Crying is seen by physicians as a crisis situation, in which the first need is to calm the infant so it returns to an alert state when he or she can eat. [7] Pediatricians and nurses train young mothers to watch for signs of distress before crying begins. In the past, such knowledge was intuitive or passed among women.

The ability to deal with hunger or mild infections improved since World War II, so fewer babies in the United States continue crying because food is scarce or they are ill. In the past and in other countries, food for the mother may have been scarce and supplemental food and effective medicines less available. [8] In those cases, more time was spent calming the young.

One reason lullabies are so universal is infants socialize their parents in the first few days after their birth. When they need to be calmed, the only things that work seem to be body contact, slight movements, and soothing sounds. How parents calm and rock is cultural, and, infants very quickly adapt to those things offered that are satisfying, and nosily reject the others.

Scientists studying the behavior of prematurely born infants have determined music works by slowing the heartbeat and altering the oxygen levels in the blood. [9] Parents use lullabies in three situations. In crises, they use them to calm infants so they can be treated. Later, when infants need to be trained to sleep, they use lullabies to move them from the quiet alert state into drowsiness. They then may use lulling to put them so sleep.

Calming and lulling serve two different functions, and can be met differently. Calming can be done with any music that’s slow and quiet. No particular continuity needs to exist beyond mood. A parent can sing one song over and over, or several songs in a row. The Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia even suggested this was the time when they could use one of the commercial lullaby disks. [10]

When a child is in a crisis state or when a parent wants to sing an infant to sleep, the music differs in form, because it must continue uninterrupted until its goal has been met. When parents find a song that seems to work, then may begin to improvise words or substitute vocables to maintain the melody.

Calming may be a public event, but lulling is often an intensely private one. When folklorists collected lullabies, they almost always heard the ones used in calming. If singers happened to begin lulling, the collectors often thought it meant they had forgotten a section, and did not transcribe nonsense syllables that did not follow some syntactical pattern. [11]

Most of the lullaby versions of "Kumbaya" are on Amazon where they are included on discs intended for calming. Many of the versions on YouTube are essentially promotions for such products. There are no purely lulling versions.

The most interesting was posted by Amy Robbins-Wilson, as a promotion for a CD. On the professionally recorded version she sang a capella with no ornamentation. She drew out the final syllables of phrases to maintain the sound. She also eliminated any hard consonant sounds that would have interrupted the flow of music and attracted an infant’s attention.

On YouTube, she was demonstrating how to sing a lullaby. She began by rocking back and forth and singing the melody with lu lu’s. When she started to sing the one verse, she closed her eyes. She sang softly, with her mouth only slightly open. By the end she could barely be heard.

Performers
Vocal Soloist: Amy Robbins-Wilson
Vocal Group: none
Instrumental Accompaniment: none
Rhythm Accompaniment: none

Credits
She introduced her YouTube video by saying, "This is a lullaby from coastal South Carolina. It’s called kumbaya or come by here."

Notes on Lyrics
Language: English

Pronunciation: com by yah in statements, cum by yah in refrains; barely pronounced the hard /d/ in Lord.

Verses
CD: kumbaya, sleeping, singing
YouTube: lu lu, come by here

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

Basic Form: potentially open-ended, edited to fit expectations of CD buyers and YouTube watchers.

Verse Repetition Pattern
CD: AxxA
YouTube: none

Ending: none
Unique Features: use of vocables in YouTube version

Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: 1-3-5
Tempo: slow

Basic Structure: strophic repetition, with no pauses between verses

Singing Style: one note to one syllable, with quick transition on final Lord. Final syllables were held until they faded away.

Notes on Performance
CD
The cover was peacock blue with a white circle in the center containing an outline drawing of angel wings.

YouTube
She was in a living room, with her hair was pulled back in a ponytail. Some strands had come loose, so she looked very much like a young mother trying to put a child to sleep.

Notes on Movement
Her rocking was in multiples of 3/4 time. She started phrases when she was erect, and held them until she had moved both forward and back so she was taking a breath just before she had returned to the erect position.

Audience Perceptions
Most of the comments on Amazon simply praised Robbins-Wilons’ singing. A few described their children’s reactions. One woman described her son moving from active alert to quiet alert to sleep:

"When I first put this cd on in the car Yukon, who’s was 4 1/2 months at the time, sat up still in his car seat. I looked back to see if he was ok, he wasn’t moving, his head was perfectly straight, usually he’s looking out the window, looking down, trying to chew on his car seat or devour a toy, ‘that’s strange,’ I thought, he was completely silent, no crying, no fussing, just absolutely silent, then I realized he was listening intently with every fiber of his body to the music, and after a good ten minutes of this he was sound asleep. Awesome!!!" [12]

Her comments made clear modern life had created another time when calming was needed with young children. Traffic is stressful for drivers and their passengers. The youngest are confined in carriers. It is one time parents cannot personally attend to upset infants. CD technology created a way they could be calmed by music that did not communicate the anxieties of the drivers.

Another woman indicated the need was not limited to the very young. She wrote: "My 3yo daughter has had ‘Lullaby and Goodnight’ for 3 weeks now and it has become without question our favorite music for rest time, nighttime, and quiet driving time." [13]

Notes on Performers
Robbins-Wilson majored in theater at Bates College, and continued studying voice to hone her skills as a music therapist "to use music to open transformational, healing spaces for listeners where they can find deep relaxation and peace." She had one son, and she, he, and her husband lived in coastal Maine. [14]

Availability
CD: Lullaby and Goodnight. Angelsong Creations. 6 August 2010.

YouTube: "How to Sing Kumbaya - Melody and First Verse." Uploaded by Amy Robbins-Wilson on 3 August 2009.

End Notes
1. Bess Lomax Hawes saw this difference as one of academic perspective: "is a song a function of its lexical content or its social usage?" Anthropologists chose the second, literary analysts the first. "Folksongs and Function: Some Thoughts on the American Lullaby." The Journal of American Folklore 87:140-148:1974. 141.

2. "Newborn-Sleep Patterns." Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia website.
3. "Baby Sleep Basics: Birth to 3 Months." Johnson and Johnson’s BabyCenter website.
4. Children’s Hospital.
5. Johnson and Johnson.

6. University of Washington, Nursing Child Assessment Satellite Training. "The Six States of Consciousness." University of Washington website.

7. Children’s Hospital.

8. Samuel B. Coles, an African-American missionary in Angola, had the importance of hunger brought to his attention by a friend who told him at midnight "not a baby in Gongo was crying." He asked "why should the babies be crying," and was told "they are not crying because their mothers and fathers have learned to work as you have been teaching them." Once aware of the difference, he noted he "had occasion to pass through a village where the people had not learned to work the river bottom with the plows and hoes we brought them. There the babies were hungry and crying constantly. Some of them were not even able to cry. They only whimpered." Preacher with a Plow. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957. 237-238.

9. A number of studies have been made of music therapy in newborn ICU’s. The results sometimes were contradictory because scientists were looking at infants with different health problems and had different measures of success. Ashley L Hodges and Lynda Law Wilson did a useful review of the literature between 1970 and 2010 in "Preterm Infants’ Responses to Music: an Integrative Literature Review." Southern Online Journal of Nursing Research 10(3).

10. Children’s Hospital. "Playing soft music while your baby is getting sleepy is also a good way to help establish a bedtime routine."

11. Hawes commented on the failure of collectors to report the use of humming. 143.
12. Gretchen Heilman Piper. Posted to Amazon on 30 September 2010.
13. Maureen R. Posted to Amazon on 3 October 2010.
14. "My Story." Her website