Kumbaya???

Question

what is the origin of kumbaya... you know the camp song. this girl told me that these miners who were dieing made it up, but if they are dead how do we know the song?

Answer 1

According to Wikipedia it is a spiritual song of the 1930's . . .it means "Come by here". . .there is no mention of it being a miners song. . .

Answer 2

There are a lot of stories about the origins of this song (the dying miners one is one I hadn't heard).

One account is that the Reverend Marvin V. Frey wrote it in the 1930's under the title "Come By Here" and it first appeared in 1936 in his list of sheet lyrics. He changed the title in 1946 when a group of Missionaries from Africa decided to sing it on tour.

However, another group has a prior claim, who called themselves "The Society for the Protection of Spirituals" and what they did was to collect old slave songs. They claimed it was from a Creole dialect called Gullah, and it also translates as "Come By Here".

The founder of the American Folklore Center, Robert Winslow Gordon, also had the song recorded on a wax phonograph cylinder in 1936. Gordon recorded Ethel Best singing "Come By Here" in Raiford, Florida, which contains the lyrics.

In Aramaic, "Qum bi haya" means "Arise with life" and this is from the language that Christ spoke.

Nobody actually knows the origins of the song, but your miner song isn't among them.

Answer 3

the slavemasters heard them singing as they died trapped and suffocating but they didn't want to get their hands dirty and there were always more slaves. You know how those diamond mine owners are...