Why is Kumbaya a dirty word?

Subject: RE: Why is Kumbaya a dirty word?
From: Little Hawk
Date: 16 Feb 08 - 10:34 PM

Joan Baez never let cynicism mar her ideals nor cast doubt upon her youthful dreams. I can't say that of too many people. A song carries what you bring to it, specially a very simple song like Kumbaya. If you have nothing left to bring to it, well, then, don't blame the song.

Subject: RE: Why is Kumbaya a dirty word?
From: katlaughing
Date: 16 Feb 08 - 10:07 PM

There are those of us who lived in more rural settings and/or were a tad too young to be a hippie or a flower child or whatever counter culture thing was going on at the time. We learned Kumbaya and sang it as a family with beautiful "blood" harmonies. The great thing about it was it was meaningful, to us, and simple to sing along with...our friends could learn it and we all sang it in school, too. I don't think we were being pollyannaish, either. We knew about and supported what was happening in the South and elsewhere and as long as a person wasn't a mormon sheepherder^*, they were welcome in our family.

It bothers me when folks come along, many, many years later and still denigrate a song which my family and I loved so much. My sisters still sing it because they enjoy it. None of us even knew it was supposed to be "passe" until I came to Mudcat. Buck, thanks for the look back. I guess some us will remain hopelessly naive.

kat

^*A long story involving my ggrandfather, a non-mormon cattle man.

Subject: RE: Why is Kumbaya a dirty word?
From: Azizi
Date: 16 Feb 08 - 09:54 PM

Correction-

Instead, we should take off our rose colored "Kumbaya" glasses, and work for this goal. It's worth it.


**

Here's two YouTube versions of the song "Kumbaya"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3MiD_U4CHQ
Joan Baez - Kumbaya (1980)

**
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYWcL5YdYhM
Kumbaya Lord - You Gotta hear this version


This second link is to a YouTube video of a multiracial young choir singing a contemporary African American gospel version of Kumbaya.

Subject: RE: Why is Kumbaya a dirty word?
From: Azizi
Date: 16 Feb 08 - 09:37 PM

"Kumbaya" {a Gullah phrase meaning "Come By Here"} started out as a heart felt plea for God to intervene in the lives of enslaved people. "Some one's cryin, Lord. Come by here"... Someone needs you Lord. Come by here. Oh, Lord, come by here".

However, in the 1960s or earlier in the USA, this African American spiritual became popularized by singers such as Joan Baez, and Peter, Paul,& Mary who sung folk songs in support of civil rights and equality for all. As a result, this song was added to the folk song repertoires taught to children & youth summer campers. It seems to me-admittedly from the outside looking in-that the song Kumbaya was added to those campfire song repertoires as a tribute-token or not-to multiculturalism.

Over time, the song "Kumbaya" became a symbol of and a catch-phrase for Pollyanna-ish racial and ethnic unity.* That same desire for unity across racial, ethnic, religious, and other socially meaningful but ultimately meaningless boundaries is encapsulated in the question that Rodney King asked in 1992 when he was pleading for calm at a televised news conference during the Los Angeles riots- "People...Can't we all get along?"

Unfortunately, the song "Kumbaya" and, even more, the 21st century political colloquialism that people are having a "kumbaya moment" or "kumbaya experience" speaks to this fake sentiment of sweetness and light.

In my opinion, we should not just pretend that differences don't exist, and we shouldn't just act like we have reached a time in the world when personal racism and institutional racism {and classism and gender bias, and homophobia etc etc etc} does not exist. Instead, we take off our rose colored "Kumbaya" glasses, and work for this goal. It's worth it.

So why is "Kumbaya" a dirty word?

Imo, because if we pretend that we have reached the time when racial, ethnic, national, gender, religious, sexual orientation etc differences don't make any difference, we'll never really get to that time.


* "The Pollyanna principle or Pollyannaism describes the tendency for people to agree with positive statements describing them. It is sometimes called positivity bias. The phenomenon is similar to the Forer effect.

The concept as described by Matlin and Stang in 1978 used the archetype of Pollyanna, a young girl with infectious optimism".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollyanna_principle

Subject: RE: Why is Kumbaya a dirty word?
From: Joe Offer
Date: 16 Feb 08 - 08:09 PM

I have to agree with your opinion of Rod McKuen, Buck. No "redeeming social value" at all - but I DID know some really wonderful young women who loved him. I married one of them, soon found out there were some flaws in that wonderfulness (rather, she found out there were flaws in MY wonderfulness)...
-Joe-

Subject: RE: Why is Kumbaya a dirty word?
From: Amos
Date: 16 Feb 08 - 08:00 PM

There has been a lot of sneering, especially from those of a more rightward persuasion, against the courageous if simplistic sentiment that informed the days of Civil Rights and the birthing of the hippy and flower-child generations Moreso as the same generation began to discover capitalism and middle-class comforts.. It is often combined with invective against tree-huggers by those trying to make a profit from something not quite environmentally virtuous. There is no real reason for it to be sneered at except perhaps over-use and the simpleness of its sentiment.


A

Subject: RE: Why is Kumbaya a dirty word?
From: BuckMulligan
Date: 16 Feb 08 - 07:59 PM

Thanks John, interesting take. You're right, we did take ourselves and the music too seriously. But there was some bad shit happening, and it pissed us off. And we did think we should do something about it, and some of the music expressed that for us and made us think there were enough of us to have a shot at doing something about the bad shit. Silly.

Subject: RE: Why is Kumbaya a dirty word?
From: John Hardly
Date: 16 Feb 08 - 07:46 PM

David Wilcox wrote a wonderful song -- "Farther To Fall". In the song he talks about walking on a railroad track as a tighrope walker might. Then he notes that as the track goes over a high bridge tressel, suddenly much greater care is taken in the walking.

As he points out in the song:

The balance is no harder, after all
It's just that we have farther to fall.

It's not that there aren't a plethora of lame-ass songs -- just as lame-ass as Kumbaya. These come to mind...

Honey
I've Never Been To Me
Havin' My Baby
Anything by ABBA
Anything by KC & The Sunshine Band

...and we can simply laugh all of those off. They were never taken seriously. As banal as they were, they never pretended to be otherwise.

The folkscare people took themselves and their music WAY more seriously than was warranted by the quality of most of the music. And Kumbaya is one of the most glaring examples of "Farther To Fall" -- people out to change the world -- oblivious to the banality of the song.

Yee gods it was silly.

Subject: RE: Why is Kumbaya a dirty word?
From: BuckMulligan
Date: 16 Feb 08 - 07:44 PM

Well, maybe Joe, but Rod McKuen?

Ick....

Subject: RE: Why is Kumbaya a dirty word?
From: Little Hawk
Date: 16 Feb 08 - 07:33 PM

"familiarity breeds contempt"

That's why. It's unfortunate that people are so fickle, but that's what it amounts to.

Subject: RE: Why is Kumbaya a dirty word?
From: Joe Offer
Date: 16 Feb 08 - 07:30 PM

I dunno, Buck. I think it's a nice song - but it's a nice song that got sung far too often, and it got worn out. It's nice, but not extraordinary; and it takes an extraordinary song to withstand the destruction of overuse.

Still, it brings back sweet memories of my youth, when many beautiful, sincere young women sang the song in my presence. Their thoughts were pure and sincere as they sang, and I suppose my thoughts at the time were somewhat baser....

There were many other songs of the same ilk - "Today," and every single song written by Rod McKuen. They might have been pretty good songs, but they were destroyed by lovely young women who sang them with an overdose of sincerity.

-Joe-

Subject: RE: Why is Kumbaya a dirty word?
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 16 Feb 08 - 07:20 PM

To quote Richard Thompson "How Will I Ever Be Simple Again". (Here)

Sometimes people get embarrassed at how they have turned out along the years. And when we feel embarrassed, sneering is one way to deal with it.

Subject: RE: Why is Kumbaya a dirty word?
From: BuckMulligan
Date: 16 Feb 08 - 07:06 PM

Yes, quite probably, thanks should have identified the locus.

Subject: RE: Why is Kumbaya a dirty word?
From: Leadfingers
Date: 16 Feb 08 - 07:05 PM

That is obviously an Americanism ! Never had any feedback in UK about Kumbaya , except that it is Dialect !

Subject: Why is Kumbaya a dirty word?
From: BuckMulligan
Date: 16 Feb 08 - 07:01 PM

The preamble to this ponder is that at lost holiday time (Christmas/Hanukkah in our family) I received (mirabile dictu!) a USB-output-equipped turntable, and I've been delightedly and delightfully ripping my old vinyl - cracks & pops and all, since they're part of what these discs mean to me - in odd moments, especially on weekend evenings.

So tonight I'm ripping "Joan Baez In Concert" on Vanguard, from late 1962. (Jesus Christ, that's 45 years ago). It's a very old disc, from the original issue - there was a reissue later that appended "Part I" and added three other tracks not present here.

One of the tracks is (natch) "Kumbaya" and it (also natch) got me to thinking about the disrepute that some of our sentiments from the time & place have fallen, and how those sentiments have been tagged with the title of this particular song, as in "Kumbaya moment" said with a sneer, or a least a slightly snide, supercilious snigger (is there a special word for alliteration that contains more than one phoneme, as in "sn"?)

Anyway, I'm guilty of such sniggery myself. I look back at us, poking our cheapo guitars in student lounges and valiantly imitating the wheezes of the early Dylan, whose wheezes should not have been imitated (but whose words should of course have been sung over & over again, as they have been).

But hearing JB singing Kumbaya, in a concert setting, and hearing the audience response - remember when it was not only ok, but expected, to sing along? Remember when it was not only ok, but expected, for an artist to sing a bunch of songs you knew well enough to sing along with, whether he or she had written them or not? Shit... - anyway, hearing the audience response, from people who are my contemporaries, and my slight seniors, and who are grandparents now as I am, and many of whom of course are long dead, I wonder what's so snickery about "Kumbaya?" What's wrong with the way we felt then? Interesting ponder, that.