Songfacts®:

• This spiritual song originates from the 1920s. It has been traced to the African-American Gullah people, who live on the Sea Islands just off the states of South Carolina and Georgia. In their Creole dialect "kumbaya" means simply "come by here" and this tune began as a Gullah spiritual where the former slaves living on the Sea Islands sang the lyric "Come by here, my Lord, come by here." It is thought that American missionaries taught the song to locals in Angola, and it was in the African country where it was rediscovered. The spiritual was brought back to America where it became a popular tune in the folk revival and civil rights movements of the 1960s and a standard campfire song.
• Peter Seeger recorded "Kumbaya" in 1958, but it was Joan Baez's live version in 1962 that really helped boost its popularity. In 1969 the vocal group The Sandpipers took this song to #38 in the UK singles charts.
• Thanks in large part to Baez, "Kumbaya" is associated with nonviolent protest, often sung by groups of people at demonstrations in a show of unity. Baez sang it at many protests, most famously when she fought to end the Vietnam War. Twice, she and other activists were arrested for blocking the entrance of a military induction center in Oakland - footage of Baez leading the group in "Kumbaya" during the second one made the news.
• In America, as protest movements abated in the '80s, "Kumbaya" became a cliché used to poke fun at hippie types. It was used more derisively over the next decades as a sign of wimpiness - "sitting around singing 'Kumbaya'" meant becoming a doormat instead of taking aggressive action. Politicians started using it as a taunt against their rivals, and it was written into lots of TV and movie dialogue in this sense.