Willie Peacock - Come Bah Yah

Topic: Political Versions
One path taken by “Kumbaya” into the Civil Rights Movement ran through Rust College.  The Black school was founded in 1866 by the northern Methodist Episcopal Church, and remains affiliated with the denomination. [1]  It is in the red county on the map below.

Willie Peacock was a student at Rust in the early 1960s, where he sang with the school’s a capella choir. [2]  In the spring of 1962, James Bevel and Sam Block visited the campus to recruit volunteers for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. [3]  This was the time when SNCC and the Congress of Racial Equality were riding buses from Washington, DC, into the deep South.  Many, including Bevel, were arrested in Jackson, Mississippi, in late May. [4]  The unintended consequence: he stayed to begin organizing voter registration in Tallahatchie County where Peacock was raised.  It is the middle dot on the map.

The following spring Peacock began working in Holly Springs, the home of Rust.  Frank Smith came from SNCC offices in Atlanta, Georgia, and taught them how to conduct meetings. [5]  The group got better training in June, [6] after Bob Moses and Block went to the Highlander Folk School. [7]  As mentioned in the post for 5 October 2017, Guy Carawan was teaching people how to adapt old spirituals to the Civil Rights movement.

Block began organizing in Greenwood in Mississippi’s Leflore county, the lower dot on the map below.  In 1955, Robert Patterson had founded the White Citizens’ Council in response to the Supreme Court overturning school segregation in 1954 there. [8]  Fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was murdered on 28 August 1955 north of town. [9]

 Block held his first public meeting in the Elks Hall in June.  It was the first time he tried teaching the Freedom Songs he had learned from Moses.  He noticed the attendees “liked those songs, they identified with them.” [10]

After the Elks was closed to SNCC, he held his next meeting at the First Christian Church. [11]  Block later told an interviewer what he

“remembered the most about that meeting that we had that night were the songs that we were singing.  And asked when we were going to have another meeting and sing those songs.  And I began to then see the music itself as being a real important organizing tool to really begin to bring people together.  Not only just as an organizing tool to bring them together, but also as an organizing tool to serve sort of as an organizational glue of holding them together.” [12]

Peacock joined him in August, after he finished his course work at Rust.  When physical threats became too severe, they began working in Sunflower County, the long county west of Leflore.  The police stopped their bus and, while they were being interrogated, a woman begin singing.  Peacock recalled Fanie Lou Hamer’s “voice stood out way above everybody else’s.” [13]

The Leflore County Board of Supervisors responded to SNCC by opting out of the Federal Surplus Commodity Food Program that supplied food to plantation workers in the winter.  Bobby Smith noted that local cotton growers had begun buying machinery [14] after so many adults fled the county for jobs elsewhere in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s. [15]  Land owners no longer needed sharecroppers, and families moved into Greenwood and became low-paid, seasonal laborers.  Without their small plots of land, they no longer could grow their own food and were dependent on the government when their cash was depleted. [16]

The county board upheld its decision in November of 1962. [17]  Block and Peacock notified SNCC headquarters. [18]  The unintended consequence: Moses’ appeals for help attracted the attention of Dick Gregory in Chicago.  By then the African-American comedian was working for Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Club. [19]  He filled an airplane with the goods he collected, and sent them to SNCC to distribute in February. [20]

Peacock was placed in charge of food distribution in Leflore County.  He recalled they often had to sneak into plantations at night, and always left voter registration forms. [21]  Once they had assurance they would not go hungry, Blacks began to listen.  Block recalled they had Hamer lead the singing. [22]

Soon after, whites burned the SNCC offices in Greenwood and framed Block for arson.  On February 28 they shot at Moses’ car.  In March, the county began arresting protestors, who were singing on the march, and siccing dogs on them.  The unintended consequence: The New York Times published photographs. [23]

In early April, Gregory came to Greenwood and spoke at the only church still willing to host a public meeting, the Wesley Methodist Church. [24]  Until then only the Christian Church and Methodist had dared hold meetings; [25] after he spoke thirty-one ministers signed a statement supporting the voter registration drive. [26]

National attention shifted to Martin Luther King, who was active in Birmingham, Alabama, in the spring, [27] but the day-to-day organizing continued around Greenwood.  On June 11, Medgar Evers was killed after leaving a SNCC meeting in Greenwood. [28]  The Klan attacked a memorial service in Itta Bena and the protestors were sentenced to chain gangs.  People now were singing in public at protests and at the prison farm. [29]

The unintended consequence: Pete Seeger arrived in Greenwood on July 6.  Bob Dylan and Theodor Bekel performed at his concert on a farm road. [30]  Albert Ribback became interested in recording the movement’s music.  He had lost his business in December 1962 when the FBI arrested Lenny Bruce at his Chicago nightclub. [31]  The Gate of Horn had been opened by Dylan’s agent in 1950s, and sold to Ribback in 1962 when Albert Grossman moved to New York. [32]

Sometime in the fall, Ribback recorded a meeting in a Greenwood Baptist church led by Peacock. [33]  Peacock begins by asking Hamer, and then Matthew Jones to sing. [34]  Bernice Johnson Reagon, who has heard the tape, [35] says the congregation joins with them. [36]

Hamer then starts “Go Tell It on the Mountain.” [37]  She is accompanied by hand claps, hums, and unison singing by the unidentified musical group.  Peacock then introduces the first of the evening’s speakers, a white man from California.  Dick Frye’s reference to “Wade in the Water” [38] prompts Hamer to sing it with occasional hand claps.  The tempo is slower as she sings solo verse lines and the group responds.  They come together on the burdens.

“Without a break,” Reagon says “Peacock leads a stirring rendition of “Come Bay Yah.” [39]  The singing is done by a group that is well-rehearsed, not by the audience.  Their tempo is even slower as they sing four-part harmony borrowed from the a capella tradition Peacock knew from Rust.  Although his voice is dominant, he is rarely a soloist like Hamer.  The tune is the 1-3-5 one John Blocher, Jr., transcribed for CRS.

The text is a mix.  After the “come bay yah” verse, the group sings three stanzas that substitute civil rights terms into the “somebody needs you.”  The best known is “we need freedom.”  The final verse is taken from CRS, “somebody’s crying.”  He shortens the middle syllable to make the text fit the tune.  They group ends by humming while he repeats “come bay yah.”

Guy Carawan lists Peacock as one of his sources for the collection he produced in 1963 for SNCC, but does not say who contributed which song. [40]  Carawan’s first verses begin with nouns (“churches are burning”) or the pronoun “somebody.”  The last two, which begin with “we,” are the ones Peacock sings.  Two years later, some unidentified person will lead the song at an organizational meeting before the march in Selma, Alabama. [41]

By the fall of 1963, Peacock’s version could have come from anywhere.  Joan Baez had recorded it in 1962. [42]  While her singing style did not appeal to Blacks, [43] Northern students were taking up singing when they appeared at protests.

Lynn Rohrbough included “Kum Ba Yah” in a number of songbooks he published for different Methodist groups.  The one most likely to be distributed widely in 1963 was Look Away: 56 Negro Folk Songs.  Walter Anderson, the African-American head of music at Antioch College, oversaw the revised edition. [44]  Unlike hardcover academic collections, the 6.75" x 3.75" booklet was easily hidden in a pocket, and highly portable.

Performers
Vocal Soloist: Willie Peacock
Vocal Group: unnamed group
Instrumental Accompaniment: none
Rhythm Accompaniment: none

Credits
Trad.-arr. W. Peacock

Notes on Lyrics
Language: English

Pronunciation:
Come: varies between “come” and “cum”
Here: yah
Justice: jastice
Third syllable of “somebody”: very short so fits the same musical space as “someone”

Verses: come by here, crying, others shared with Carawan
Pronoun: we, somebody
Term for Deity: Lord
Basic Form: four-verse song, framed by “Come bah yah”
Verse Repetition Pattern: AxxxA
Unique Features: use of first person

Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: 1-3-5
Tempo: very slow
Harmonic Structure: chordal harmony
Singing Style: generally, one syllable to one note
Ending: hums the melody

Notes on Performance
Occasion: meeting in Baptist church
Location: Greenwood, Mississippi, fall 1963

Audience Perceptions
The audience generally is not heard by the tape recorder.  However, on the stanza that sounds like “freedom’s heavy,” someone yells out “yessum” and claps.  That man or another says “yassir” on the last “come by here.”  While the group is humming the final iteration, a man says “yassir.”  At the end, some women say “amen.”

Notes on Performers
Peacock was born in Charleston, Mississippi, in 1937, and came of age after World War II when  Tallahatchie County was feeling the effects of the mass exodus of African Americans.  The population dropped 10.8% in the 1940s. [45]  When his older brother was arrested, a local landowner tricked the family into moving to his plantation with a promise to help. [46]  Peacock recalled: “I got a chance to see what slavery was probably like and [felt] like.” [47]

When he was considering working for SNCC in August 1962, he discovered his father was part of a secret network of World War II veterans, that included Amzie Moore.  As a youth he thought the two were just fellow members of the Prince Hall Masons.  He told an interviewer:

“All these people that I found out, about all these people who were involved, that I had no idea. And I grew up right there in Charleston, and I had no idea.” [48]

Secrecy and fear were commonplace.  In 1963, before King drew national attention to the South, Peacock said “we faced fears straight on that the population faced every day and just had a lot of fear.  The workers, the people who came down later, began to realize the kind of fear that people lived under.  Fear that most of the people who came down in ’64 had never had to live under in their whole life.  It was really unreal to most people, but this is the kind of stuff that the Mississippi staff had grown up under.” [49]

Block said Peacock turned to alcohol, and got so “drunk he couldn’t even stand up.  It just almost destroyed him.” [50]  In the summer of 1964, Peacock went to New York City to get himself together, then enrolled in Tuskegee Institute. [51]

His interests turned to celebrating African-American culture with a folk festival in Greenwood in 1965.  The next year he and Block went to California, where he converted to Islam.  After a brief return to Mississippi, he and his new wife moved to San Francisco in 1989.  He was working with “developmentally challenged children and adults” when he died in 2016. [52]

He had entered Rust on a music scholarship, and never abandoned music.  In California, he joined the “Vukani Mawethu Choir, which sang freedom songs of South Africa and performed concerts to raise funds to support the African National Congress.” [53]

His daughter best summarized his life: “he has a great legacy from throughout the ’60s, but to me, he was always just my dad, who loved to sing to me.” [54]

Availability
CD: Willie Peacock.  “Come Bah Yah.”  Voices of the Civil Rights Movement.  Smithsonian Folkways SF 40084.  1997.  Tape made by Moses Moon; recording produced by Bernice Johnson Reagon.

Graphics
Base map: David Benbennick.  “Marshall County, Mississippi.”  Uploaded to Wikimedia Commons on 12 February 2006.  Locations, from the top: Holly Springs, Charleston, and Greenwood, Mississippi.

End Notes
1.  Wikipedia.  “Rust College.”

2.  Leslie McLemore.  Cited by Dustin Cardon.  “Willie Wazir Peacock.”  Jackson Free Press, Jackson, Mississippi, 27 May 2016.

3.  Wazir (Willie B.) Peacock.  Interview by Bruce Hartford, July 2001, Civil Rights Movement Veterans Website.

4.  Wikipedia.  “Freedom Riders.”
5.  Peacock, interview.
6.  “Highlander Folk School.”  Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee website.

7.  Sam Block.  Interview by Joe Sinsheimer, 12 December 1986.  Digital Education Services website, 19 November 1998.  10.

8.  Wikipedia.  “Greenwood, Mississippi.”
9.  Wikipedia.  “Emmett Till.”
10.  Block.  15.

11.  Block.  17.  The formal name of the denomination is Christian Church (Disciples of Christ).  It is an offshoot of the Cane Ridge Revival discussed in the post for 8 November 2020.  The church’s activism in Africa is described in the post for 14 March 2021.

12.  Block.  18.

13.  Peacock, interview.  Hamer was raised on a plantation in Sunflower County, where she became literate and deeply versed in the Bible.  After she tried to register to vote, she was evicted by the plantation owner.  In June of 1963, she was arrested and beaten.  She remained active in politics in Mississippi until her death in 1977. [55]

14.  Bobby J. Smith II.  “Food and the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement: Re-reading the 1962-1963 Greenwood Food Blockade.”  Food Culture and Society: An International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research 23:1–17:April 2020.  5.  International Harvester introduced the first spindle-type cotton picker in 1942.  It was not commercially available until 1948, due to material shortages during and immediately after World War II. [56]

15.  Leflore County’s population dropped 3% in the 1940s and 9% in the 1950s. [57]
16.  Smith.  3.
17.  Smith.  5.
18. “Greenwood Food Blockade (Winter).”  Civil Rights Movement Veterans website.
19.  Wikipedia.  “Dick Gregory.”
20.  Smith.  8–9.
21.  Smith.  8.
22.  Block.  24.

23.  Jon Greenbaum.  “Looking Back on 1963 Fifty Years Later.”  American Bar Association Human Rights Magazine, 1 January 2014.

24.  Bill Hudson.  “Dick Gregory 1963.”  Photograph, Associated Press Images website.

25.  Block thought the main reason the Christian and Methodist churches took risks is their clergy are part of hierarchical, national organizations.  Baptist churches are independent and choose to affiliate with the National Baptist Convention.  Ministers later told Block that whites threatened to burn their churches if they supported him. [58]  He overlooks the fact that John Wesley and the original Methodist church were against slavery.  The Southern churches seceded from the denomination over slavery in 1846, but after the reunification in 1939, the Northern view prevailed, for the most part, within the hierarchy.

26.  “Dick Gregory.”  Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee website.

27.  Bevel masterminded the Birmingham Children’s Crusade.  In response, Eugene Connor, better known as Bull Connor, “used high-pressure water jets and police dogs against protesters.” [59]

28.  Block.  51.

29.  “Struggle for the Vote Continues in Mississippi (July-Aug).”  Civil Rights Movement Veterans website.

30.  “Northern Folk Singers Help out at Negro Festival in Mississippi.”  The New York Times, 7 July 1963.

31. Wendy Shay.  “Guide to the Moses Moon Collection.”  Smithsonian Institution website, 2011.

32.  Kenan Heise.  “Moses Moon, Owned the Gate of Horn.”  Chicago Tribune, Chicago, Illinois, 13 August 1993.  Ribback later changed his name to Moon.

33.  Bernice Johnson Reagon.  “Let the Church Sing “Freedom’.”  Black Music Research Journal 7:105–118:1987.  108.

34.  Reagon.  109.

35.  Reagon produced the excerpt of the tape that includes Peacock for the Smithsonian.  Her early version of “Come by Hyar” is discussed in the post for 14 October 2017.

36.  Reagon.  109.  Jones was from Danville, Virginia, and Knoxville, Tennessee.
37.  Reagon.  111.
38.  Reagon.  112.
39.  Reagon.  113.

40.  Carawan.  “Contributors.”  112 in Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee.  We Shall Overcome!, edited by Guy and Candie Carawan.  New York: Oak Publications, 1963.

41.  See the post for 11 October 2017.  The use of complete sentences rather than the statement-refrain of “Kumbaya” is often an indicator the person has heard the song, but has not absorbed the poetic tradition.  Other examples are the verses in the Roman Catholic hymnal described in the post for 16 August 2020 and the version arranged by Walter Meador.  A copy of the latter appears in the post for 9 May 2021.

42.  Joan Baez.  “Kumbaya, My Lord.”  Joan Baez in Concert.  Vanguard VRS9112.  1962.  This is discussed in the post for 9 October 2017.

43.  She said that when she toured the South in the summer of 1962, she demanded her concerts be open to African Americans.  However, none came because they had never heard of her.  She had to perform at Black colleges to be heard. [60]

44.  “Kum Ba Yah.”  27 in Look Away: 56 Negro Folk Songs, edited by Walter F. Anderson.  Delaware, Ohio: Cooperative Recreation Service, 1963.  Unfortunately, only the publication year is known for this and Carawan’s collection.  Without knowing more precisely when they were issued, any chronology must be treated as tentative.

45.  Wikipedia.  “Tallahatchie County, Mississippi.”
46.  Cardon.

47.  Willie Peacock.  Quoted by “Willie Peacock.”  Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee website.  Bracketed information in original.

48.  Peacock, interview.
49.  Peacock, interview.
50.  Block.  72.
51.  Peacock, interview.
52.  Cardon.
53.  Cardon.
54.  Della Hill.  Quoted by Cardon.
55.  Wikipedia.  “Fannie Lou Hamer.”
56.  Bill Ganzel.  “Cotton Harvesting.”  Living History Farm website, 2007.
57.  Wikipedia.  “Leflore County, Mississippi.”
58.  Block.  39–41.
59.  Wikipedia, “Martin Luther King Jr.”
60.  Joan Baez. And a Voice to Sing With.  New York: Summit Books, 1987.  103.