What does “Kumbaya” mean and why should we care?

Race, culture, humor, politics, stereotypes, class, language – a few topics that come up around the song “Kumbaya”.

Kumbaya is pigeon English of the phrase “Come By Here”.  I came across an excellent arrangement of “Come By Here” in the GIA African American Church Music Series. It was done by Uzee Brown Jr.  As I meditated on the meaning of the song, I was struck by the cry of the oppressed for the Lord to hear and respond. It’s a lament and a statement of faith in a God who does see and hear and is able to intercede and deliver. However, it’s a song that is plagued by an unfair stereotype as a symbol of irrelevant and meaningless expressions of pseudo-unity.

Wikipedia led me to this excellent 2006 article by Jeffrey Weiss published in the Dallas Morning News. Here’s a few select quotes:

Sometime between 1922 and 1931, members of an organization called the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals collected a song from the South Carolina coast. “Come By Yuh,” as they called it, was sung in Gullah, the Creole dialect spoken by the former slaves living on the Sea Islands. [...]

Jump forward to the mid-1950s and the Cooperative Recreation Service, an Ohio-based publisher of songbooks for camps and scouts. Joe Hickerson, a folksinger and former director of acquisitions for the American Folklife Center, credits Lynn Rohrbough, the owner of Cooperative Recreation, with getting “Kumbaya” to the masses. If a camp wanted a music book with, say, 40 songs, Ms. Rohrbough would offer 30 from her stock inventory and add 10 new ones, Mr. Hickerson said. ”Kum By Yah” – described only as an “African” song – was part of the Rohrbough inventory by 1956. As a result, it showed up in countless books of camp songs used by the Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts and others. ”The camp counselors who played guitar liked it because it only has three chords,” Mr. Hickerson said. [...]

For the next 25 years, it was just one folksong among many. But in the early 1980s, something happened. “Kumbaya” became the English-speaking world’s favorite folksong to ridicule, the musical metaphor for corny camaraderie. How? Someone’s wondering, Lord. An extensive (and we do mean extensive) search of databases of newspapers, magazines and other sources turned up what may be the first ironic reference to “Kumbaya” in print, from Aug. 16, 1985. The line is from a Washington Post review by Rita Kempley of the comedy movie Volunteers: “Tom Hanks and John Candy make war on the Peace Corps inVolunteers, a belated lampoon of ’60s altruism and the idealistic young Kumbayahoos who went off to save the Third World.”

Read the article to get the whole story.

Anyhow, the whole topic seems to be a mixed bag of cultural misappropriation, political rhetoric, Baby-boomer nostalgia, commercialization of racial stereotypes, the American-style cross-pollination of  black and white music, to name a few. I’m not sure what to make of it all except to take the song for what it is, cultural baggage and all. In a lot of ways, this song tells a lot more about Black History than if a hypothetical slave-composed spiritual was unearthed by archaeologists in it’s original 19th century form. It tells a more complicated story that goes deeper than face value. Much of African American cultural has been either repackaged in a derogatory form for mass consumption (as in the Minstrel Shows) or (despite good intentions) has been dissected and sterilized by academic study. Kumbaya is an excellent example of a song that was made internationally available but in the process it was robbed of it’s meaning. What would the song have meant if it was left as the local prayer a few saints on the coast of South Carolina?

This makes my day

Help me reach 1000 blog comments

Currently, I only need 87 more comments in order to reach 1,000 comments on my blog. I started this blog shortly after I got married, moved to St Louis and started my job at New City Fellowship. I’ve moved host sites a couple of times before settling on WordPress, but all the comments from the past sites still remain. Here are a few of my favorite comment discussions from the past:

3D Music

The 150% person

This Song is Officially Retired

How Does It Feel To Be Black In America?

Fear and Loathing in Clayton

Here’s my first comment-fishing question: What kind of worship leading conversations need to be featured on this blog?

I’m not motivated.

In the bleak midwinter…I’m back in the office without an once of motivation to get to work. I have a virtual stack of emails to sort through, read and respond. I have 2 months of Sundays to create assignments. I have a couple of Sundays to plan worship services for. I have a new choir season to plan and purchase resources for. We are hosting the Reconciliation and Justice Conference here in 4 weeks. I have a 3 foot high stack of Christmas music that needs to be sorted and filed. Basically I have lots to do and no motivation to do it. 

On the up side, I got a new guitar  this morning. Someone donated it to Steve St Pierre and he passed it on to me. Apparently, it was found in the dumpster behind a Toys R Us. It doesn’t play at all, but check out the paint job – pink with flames! 

My 2012 goals.

I’m celebrating the New Year by eating glazed ham and asparagus. I hope to accomplish at least one of the following in 2012: adopt, go to Africa (probably Kinshasa, DRC) and spend less time complaining. 

What I know will happen this year: the kingdom will advance and the promises of God will remain.

Why were there no angels in the stable?

Something occurred to me this weekend for the first time about the Nativity. There’s no angel at the stable. The angels, God’s appointed messengers or “heralds” of his kingdom breaking out were not at the stable, but out in the fields. I’ve never thought about it. Sunday, Tony Myles sermon brought up the fact that as the shepherds came to the stable bringing news of their run-in with a heavenly host, Mary pondered and treasured this message in her heart.

The angel, Gabriel, was there 9 months earlier to announce to Mary God’s plan. However, at the moment when Mary was going into labor and there was no home or inn available, God’s messengers were absent. If you were Mary and Joseph, wouldn’t it have been nice to get a little update from God, to touch base with the leadership, to make sure that this apparent set-back was not going to be a problem. Instead, Mary and Joseph had to trust in the messages they had previously received that despite the circumstances, they were still walking in the way of the kingdom.

How many times have I been super-excited about God’s kingdom, a feeling of direct confirmation from the Holy Spirit that I know what to do and where to be, and then 9 months later (or 9 minutes) I’m feeling lost and confused? I’d love to get a message from Gabriel right about then, “Yes, Jesus is on the throne, and you are in the right place!” Instead, I cry out for confirmation and the I’m met with “Sorry, there’s no room in the inn, but we’ve got a stable where you can have that baby.”

Still,  despite the absence of angels at the stable, God did deliver a message of confirmation to Mary and Joseph through the shepherds. They come to the stable looking for the sign of a baby lying in a manger. Upon finding the sign, the share with the new parents the announcement of the angels – a second hand confirmation of the kingdom. Often, the Lord uses a second hand confirmation through a fellow member of the kingdom who can see what you are doing and who shares with you their honest appreciation for how the kingdom is expressed in your life. I can often disregard these encouragements as platitudes or flattery. “If you could see things from my perspective, then you would know that this is not as ‘righteous’ as it looks” I think to myself.

The point is, I’m encourage to think of Mary and Joseph in a place of crisis in their “ministry” where they can’t see God’s kingdom at all. Then God sends encouragement in the form of fellow believers. So, maybe I need to look for more opportunities to encourage my friends with how clearly I can see the kingdom being expressed in them.

Tomorrow @6:30p – NCF Advent Concert

Rejoice!

a concert for Advent season

TOMORROW NIGHT! 6:30p @ New City Fellowship in University City 1483 82nd Boulevard, St Louis MO 63132

Featuring music by the New City Fellowship Choir, Special Ensembles, The Freedom School Choir, and more.

Psalm 24

Of David. A psalm.

¹ The earth is the LORD’s, and everything in it, 
   the world, and all who live in it; 
² for he founded it on the seas 
   and established it on the waters.

³ Who may ascend the mountain of the LORD? 
   Who may stand in his holy place? 
⁴ The one who has clean hands and a pure heart, 
   who does not trust in an idol 
   or swear by a false god.

⁵ They will receive blessing from the LORD 
   and vindication from God their Savior. 
⁶ Such is the generation of those who seek him, 
   who seek your face, God of Jacob.

⁷ Lift up your heads, you gates; 
   be lifted up, you ancient doors, 
   that the King of glory may come in. 
⁸ Who is this King of glory? 
   The LORD strong and mighty, 
   the LORD mighty in battle. 
⁹ Lift up your heads, you gates; 
   lift them up, you ancient doors, 
   that the King of glory may come in. 
¹⁰ Who is he, this King of glory? 
   The LORD Almighty— 
   he is the King of glory.

Austin Stone – A well executed worship resource site

Thanks to my friend Chris Hatch, I heard about this church, Austin Stone. They are using video and sharing their music through their website in a way that empowers many other churches to perform their songs. It’s a cool business model, but it’s also an interesting model for how the church can share it’s songs in the digital age. Watching the videos, I am struck with a few random thoughts (2 positive and 1 critical).

Theology is important to my generation. Despite the accusations of traditionalists, the music of post-modern Christians is expected to have theological meat to it. It might not sound the same as Isaac Watts, but theology is not something we want to ignore.

There is an art to writing piano, guitar, and drum parts. (also bass, but there were no tutorials for that. Check out this video for bass tips.) You can see from the tutorials that these musicians are doing a lot more than strumming the four chords. When you go in the studio and take time to craft a song, you have to think about every guitar or drum part as a composer.

Your cultural is invisible to you and blatant to the rest of us. It’s great to see how this church is living out the gospel in their context. If you are not from their culture, you might notice that they dress different, sing different, think different, etc. When I listen to most “modern worship” recordings these days, I am struck by their mono-cultural nature. Did you notice the vintage keys and antique piano? Why not use a Phantom? All the guitar parts are a wash with delay and chimey distortion – where’s the funk or the blues? I’m not saying that they needed to include that stuff, but I am saying that this music is not designed to reach across cultural barriers. It seems to be comfortably easing into a singular cultural expression, but they are probably not doing that intentionally. Right?

True confession: I am totally jealous of this website. I love the video tutorials, the chart downloads, the minimalist design. They have nailed what we imagined our ncfmusic.com site to be like.

Advent songs from the Black Gospel Tradition

As a cross-cultural church, we are always looking for good resources for music from outside the mainstream. When I go to the usual websites, hymnals or whatever it can be difficult to locate unique gospel music resources for Christmas. Here’s a few that I’ve come across that you might enjoy:

 

The Classics

Go Tell It On The Mountain (we’ve been using the Norman Hutchins Arrangement)

Jesus Oh What A Wonderful Child (Mississippi Choir – more changes than we play, but an excellent groove)

Rise Up Shepherd and Follow (We do this a lot more R&Bish, but I’m loving this churchy sound on the clip)

Mary Had A Baby (this clip is brilliant)

Deeper Cuts

Poor Little Jesus (I prefer the Goldgate Quartet’s version of this tune, but I couldn’t find a youtube clip. This version is pretty sweat as well.)

Behold The Star (here’s a Morehouse/Spelman clip for my friend, Darwin)

Contemporary Choir Tunes

Rejoice – Richard Smallwood (Smallwood is the king of cool changes, polyphony, and scripture-based text)

Emmanuel – Norman Hutchins (This is a song inviting adoration – simple and effective)

O Come – Israel Houghton (this is basically a “Thriller” groove for Advent)

Now Behold The Lamb – Kirk Franklin (Deeply meaningful song)

Great Joy – Broadway Inspirational Voices (We’re singing the arrangement of Hark The Herald that is on this recording, but the whole octavo is nice)

O Holy Night – Richard Smallwood (from the same recording as “Rejoice”)

Originals written by James Ward

These songs come from my dad’s choir at New City Fellowship in Chattanooga, Tennessee. You can purchase music for them at his website jameswardmusic.com

Bring Your Praise To The King

Christ Is Born

Angel Carol

 Joyful News

 

 

A Piano Master Class with Bob Kauflin

Piano players, band leaders and other curious church musicians: rhis is worth viewing if you have an hour to invest in your gifts.