From the Hymnal to Your Dulcimer! Kum Ba Yah!

Hello Everyone,

             This week we are going to look at a very familiar song; “Kum ba Yah”. It is an African-American spiritual song that was written in the 1930s. It gained most of its popularity in the 1960’s as folk sings like Joan Baez sang it. Today, most of us know “Kum ba yah” as the most likely song to be played by the guy who brought a guitar to the camp fire.

            There are two stories of the origin of the Hymn. The first story began in the 1920’s when a group called the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals collected a song on the west coast of  South Carolina that resembles the “kum ba yah” we sing today. “Come be yah” was the songs name and it sung in “Gullah” (A Creole language that mixed was mixed with Hebrew and pidgin). Between 1926 and 1928 four songs we recorded with the refrain “Come by yah” attached to them.

             The second origin story began in 1936, as a man named Reverend Marvin V. Frey claimed he was inspired to write the hymn after hearing a prayer that was delivered by "Mother Duffin" (who was a storefront evangelist in Portland, Oregon). Frey eventually published the hymn in 1936. but didn’t change the name of the hymn to “Kum ba yah” till 1936 when he hear that a missionary family had sung his song in Africa, but changed the words for the African locals.

            The second story was the long standing answer to “who wrote kum ba yah???” for decades. The fact that recordings of this hymn were made two decades before Frey even changed the name can’t be ignored, and completely contradict his story.  I hope you all enjoy the arrangement of this familiar hymn and I’ll see you next week!

God bless,

-Ben

Video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6l_NZGdf_Y8

Sheet Music

http://thedulcimerhymnal.com/dulcimer-sheet-music