Kumbaya has been bowdlerised by anglo-American church groups on the Left, but this is because there has been a scapegoating agenda by the Reactionaries to ignore the part about "someone's crying" and inhumanely denigrating the needs of the poor and disenfranchised. Somehow, when Peter, Paul and Mary sang it, it took on the veneer of "white bread" and lost the powerful surge from the African American roots. (Gullah).

Rick Perry's particular brand of racism is revealed by his derogatory use of the word, "kumbaya" which echoes the main stream media's scorn for those of us on the Left and their contempt for those who served in the Peace Corps, (a government sponsored agency).

I sense Frank Luntz in back of this vicious reframing of musical humanity, a typical Reactionary ploy. Notice I don't use the term "Right Wing" because there is nothing right about what these so-called " conservatives" do. Notice I don't even use the word "conservative" to characterize these radical reactionaries that are dominating our US congress now. To denigrate the song because it has been reframed as an empty idea of "can't we all get along?" is to deny the power that this song has had in the African American community. This attack is another white man's trick to diss black people.

Unfortunately, there are those on Mudcat who have bought into the reframing and decided to condemn the progressive young people's perhaps erroneous white bread interpretation of the song, which they show in sneering fashion by dismissing it's power altogether.
It's typical of the folk song snobbery that you see here occasionally by pseudo-purists.

Kumbaya is a religious appeal on a folk level, which I have to acknowledge as being part of the power of the African American community regardless of my hope that some day this important community will grow beyond the religious straight jacket of their institutions.

In the meantime, Kumbaya is a sincere folk music expressive song that attempts to reach out to human values such as healing and nurturing, something that some Mudcat pseudo-folkies are so eager to trash as being mundane.