For a long time, people thought the song “Kumbaya” was composed by a white evangelical in 1936. But there is a recording from 1926 of a man singing it. Specifically, a Gullah Geechee man named H. Wylie. The chorus means “come by here” which in the Gullah Geechee creole language sounds like “cum-bay-ya.” With time that pronounciation slowly morphed in the kumbaya most of us recognize today.
Gullah is a unique creole language spoken along the Sea Islands and adjacent coastal areas of South Carolina and Georgia. Gullah language began as a simplified form of communication among people of different languages including European slave traders, slave owners and diverse African ethnic groups, taking words and vocabulary from English and a variety of African languages – a creole. Gullah Geechee language is the only distinctly African creole language in the United States. And now Kumbaya has been recognized as Georgia’s first state historical song by Georgia’s state legislature.
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