Celebrating African-American music at the Shed

FOR YEARS it was said that “Kumbaya”, a well-known American folk song, was written by a white man. In 1939 Marvin Frey, a young Pentecostal evangelist and songwriter—and one of 12 children born to German immigrants who settled in Oregon—registered the copyright on a chorus to a song he called “Come By Here”. These lyrics were taken by American missionaries to the Belgian Congo and Angola, where Christian choirs sang them in a local dialect as “Kum Ba Ya”.