Radio Insider Reveals Devastating Impact of StopRush on Clear Channel

[Thucydides]

29. The Origins and meaning of the song Kumbaya...

The song is an African-American spiritual "that was collected in the 1920s from the Gullah — or Geechee — people of the South Carolina and Georgia coast," says Jeff Place of the Smithsonian Institution's Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. "The Gullah have always fascinated folklorists because they have kept major parts of their African language and speak in a unique English dialect to this day."

The exact evolution of the song is somewhat mysterious, but Samuel G. Freedman of Columbia University traced what may be the earliest recording of the song back to 1926 when a folklorist — using a primitive wax-cylinder recording device — captured the voice of a Georgia man singing it.

Writing in The New York Times in 2010, Freedman noted that "Kumbaya" is actually a soulful cry for divine intervention on behalf of oppressed people. "The people who were 'crying, my Lord,' " Freedman wrote, "were blacks suffering under the Jim Crow regime of lynch mobs and sharecropping."

This was a very good NPR piece, well worth the read.....
http://www.npr.org/2012/01/13/145059502/when-did-kumbaya-become-such-a-bad-thing

A beautiful interpretation of the song from the above article...