Four-Line Format - Come by Here

Topic: Early Versions
The four-line AAAB format of "Come by Here" used "come by here" as the refrain for the three statement-refrain lines, and as the last line of each stanza. Folklorists found versions along the coast of South Carolina and Georgia, and in the contiguous areas of North Carolina and Florida. Unlike the six-line form, it was not commercially recorded in the 1920s.

The Society for the Preservation of Spirituals published nine verses in 1931. They combined an opening "somebody need you" with stanzas that cloaked death in metaphors of resurrection like "Gwine down tuh Jerdan" and "Soon een duh mawnin’." The unidentified singers repeated "Jedus duh call you" with "Yo’ fadduh duh call you." [1]

On the Georgia coast, H. Wylie knew eight verses in 1926. While his text was less explicitly about dying, it had two verses that referred to "the morning." [2] He used more incremental repetition: "somebody need you" was followed by "now I need you" and "sinners need you." He converted "come by here" into a separate verse. [3]

The version closest to "Kumbaya" was collected in Alliance, North Carolina, by Julian Parks Boyd in 1927. Unlike Wylie, who varied the pronouns he used with one verb, Minnie Lee used the pronoun "somebody" followed by adjectives or adjective phrases. The subjects were amplifications of the Charleston variant: "sick," "dying," and "in trouble." [4]

Ethel Best sang for John Lomax with a group of African-American women at the state prison farm in Raiford, Florida, in 1936. She grouped her AAAB quatrains into sets that began with "come by here" and ended with "well, it’s somebody needs you." The changing parts of her tripartite cantos included two known by Lee: "down in trouble" and "sick." The other was "somebody moanin’. [5]

While these performances varied in form from the ones with six lines discussed in the post for 25 November 2018, they all emphasized the word "need." These versions also were fairly specific that the need rose from sickness. The commercial artists used more generic terms for recordings intended for a wider audience that might listen to them at other times in their lives.

End Notes
These versions will be discussed in more detail in future posts.

1. Society for the Preservation of Spirituals. "Come by Yuh." The Carolina Low Country. New York: The Macmillan Co., 1931. 308-309.

2. The association of death with morning comes from Mary Magdalen and Mary’s visit to Christ’s tomb in the morning. The reference appears in Matthew 28:1, Luke 24:1, and John 20:1.

3. H. Wylie. "Somebody Needs You, Lord, Come by Here." Collected by Robert Winslow Gordon near Darien, Georgia, 1926. Archives of American Folk Song.

4. Minnie Lee. "O Lord, Won’t You Come by Here?" Collected by Julian Parks Boyd in Alliance, North Carolina, 1926. 658 in Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore. Volume 3. Folk Songs from North Carolina. Edited by Henry M. Belden and Arthur Palmer Hudson. Durham: Duke University Press, 1952.

5. Ethel Best. "Come by Here." Collected by John Lomax at Raiford State Farm, Florida, 1936. Archives of American Folk Song.