"Kum ba yah" ("Come by here") is an African-American spiritual of disputed origin, known to have been sung in the Gullah culture of the islands off South Carolina and Georgia, with ties to enslaved Central Africans.

In American politics, the song title gave rise to the phrase "sing Kumbaya", denoting unrealistic, excessively optimistic attempts at compromise.

One was submitted as a high-school collecting project by a student named Minnie Lee to her teacher, Julian P. Boyd, later a professor of history at Princeton University and president of the American Historical Association.

The other 1926 version was recorded on a wax cylinder by Robert Winslow Gordon, founder of what began as the Library of Congress Archive of Folk Song, which became the American Folklife Center.

The singer's name was H. Wylie, and the song was recorded within a few hours' drive of Darien, Georgia, although Gordon did not note the exact location.

[1] According to an article in Kodaly Envoy by Lum Chee-Hoo, some time between 1922 and 1931, members of the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals[2] collected a version from the South Carolina coast.

[3] "Come by Yuh", as they called it, was sung in Gullah, the creole language spoken by the formerly enslaved Africans and their descendants living on the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia, as well as the Bahamas.

[1] In May 1936, John Lomax, Gordon's successor as head of the Archive of Folk Song, discovered a woman named Ethel Best singing "Come by Here" with a group in Raiford, Florida.

[5] These facts contradict the longstanding copyright and authorship attribution to the white Anglo-American songwriter Reverend Marvin V. Frey (1918–1992),[3] who claimed to have written the song circa 1936 under the title "Come By Here", inspired, he said, by a prayer he heard delivered by "Mother Duffin", a storefront evangelist in Portland, Oregon.

In an interview at the Library of Congress quoted by Winick,[1] Frey said the change of the title to "Kum Ba Yah" came about in 1946, when a missionary family named Cunningham returned from Africa.

According to Frey, they brought back a partly translated version, and "Kum Ba Yah" was an African phrase from Angola (specifically in Luvale).

[1] The story of an African origin for the phrase circulated in several versions, spread also by the revival group the Folksmiths, whose liner notes for the song stated that "Kum Ba Yah" was brought to America from Angola.

[1] As Winick points out, however: According to Frey, then, the pronunciation "Kum Ba Yah" originated when Luvale-speaking people in Angola and Zaire translated "Come by Here" into their language.

[1] Saletan had learned it from Lynn Rohrbough, co-proprietor with his wife Katherine of the camp songbook publisher Cooperative Recreation Service, predecessor to World Around Songs.

Beginning in the 1990s and increasing in the following decades, references to "Kumbaya" or "singing 'Kumbaya'" entered idiomatic usage in the politics of the United States, often to suggest that someone other than the speaker is too conciliatory or eager to compromise.

[14][15] Richard Vatz has characterized these references to the song as sarcastic criticism of consensus "that allegedly does not examine the issues or is revelatory of cockeyed optimism.

"[14] For example, in discussing the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, U.S. President Barack Obama commented that the substantive disagreements between the parties "can't be reduced to somehow a matter of let's all hold hands and sing 'Kumbaya.

[15] Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee explained his skepticism that ideologically aligned candidates in the 2012 Republican Party presidential primaries would unite around a single individual by saying, "there's not going to be some magic moment at which three or four of these people sit around a campfire toasting marshmallows, singing 'Kumbaya' and giving the nod to one of their competitors.