"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. 

According to the Library of Congress editor Stephen Winick, the song almost certainly originated among African Americans in the Southeastern United States. A Gullah version emerged early in its history, even if the song did not originate in that dialect.[1] The two oldest versions whose year of origin is known for certain were both collected in 1926, and both reside in the Library's American Folklife Center. No precise month or day was recorded for either version, so either may be the earliest known version of the song. 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. This version, collected in Alliance, North Carolina, is a manuscript featuring lyrics but no music. The other 1926 version was recorded on a wax cylinder by Robert Winslow Gordon