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The NY Times has a wonderful article out today tracing the origins of the the term, "Kumbaya," which has come to mean "lame hippie-dippie liberal naive hold-hands-and-sing" put-down:

One particular day in 1926, Robert Winslow Gordon captured the sound of someone identified only as H. Wylie, singing a lilting, swaying spiritual in the key of A. The lyrics told of people in despair and in trouble, calling on heaven for help, and beseeching God in the refrain, "Come by here."

With that wax cylinder, the oldest known recording of a spiritual titled for its recurring plea, Mr. Gordon set into motion a strange and revealing process of cultural appropriation, popularization and desecration. "Come By Here," a song deeply rooted in black Christianity's vision of a God who intercedes to deliver both solace and justice, by the 1960s became the pallid pop-folk sing-along "Kumbaya." And "Kumbaya," in turn, has lately been transformed into snarky shorthand for ridiculing a certain kind of idealism, a quest for common ground.

It's pretty amazing that this song could have morphed into something so far from its original intent:

The word nobody wants to own, the all-purpose put-down of the political moment, has a meaningful, indeed proud, heritage that hardly anyone seems to know or to honor. Only within black church circles can one, to this day, still hear "Come By Here" with the profundity that Mr. Gordon did almost a century ago.

The article goes to pin down the moment that the song was transformed into the '60's hippie-dippy anthem:

The mixed blessing of the movement was to introduce "Come By Here" to sympathetic whites who straddled the line between folk music and progressive politics. The Weavers, Peter Seeger, the Folksmiths, Joan Baez and Peter, Paul and Mary all recorded versions of the song.

By the late 1950s, though, it was being called "Kumbaya." Mr. Seeger, in liner notes to a 1959 album, claimed that America missionaries had brought "Come By Here" to Angola and it had returned retitled with an African word.

So, there it is: Pete Seeger either intentionally made up the story or he was unaware of its origin. Either way, it was introduced to a wider - mostly white - audience, not unlike much of black musical culture which is absorbed into the white mainstream:

Experts like Stephen P. Winick of the Library of Congress say that it is likely that the song traveled to Africa with missionaries, as many other spirituals did, but that no scholar has ever found an indigenous word "kumbaya" with a relevant meaning. More likely, experts suggest, is that in the Gullah patois of blacks on the Georgia coast, "Come By Here" sounded like "Kumbaya" to white ears.

"I find it troubling, but not surprising," said Glenn Hinson, a professor of folklore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who has studied the song. "Yet again, a product of African-American spirituality has been turned into a term of joking and derision. It's a distortion, and it's a sad reversal. The song in white hands was never grounded in faith. Its words were simplistic; its tune was breezy. And it was simplistically dismissed."

And as the article states,

So a nonsense word with vaguely African connotations replaced a specific, prayerful appeal. And, thanks to songbooks, records and the hootenanny boom, the black Christian petition for balm and righteousness became supplanted by a campfire paean to brotherhood.

Finally, click here for a page from the Library of Congress of MP3 recordings of a few of Mr. Gordon's wax cylinder recordings. They are indeed fascinating to listen to.

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