between 1922 and 1931, members of the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals collected a version from the South Carolina coast. "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. It is possible this is the earliest version, if it was collected before 1926. Because the individual songs in this society's publications are not dated, however, it cannot be dated with certainty to before 1931. 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. These facts contradict the longstanding copyright and authorship attribution to the white Anglo-American songwriter, Reverend Marvin V. Frey. Frey (1918–1992) said he wrote 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. It first appeared in this version in Revival Choruses of Marvin V. Frey, a lyric sheet printed in that city in 1939. In an interview at the Library of Congress quoted by Winick, Frey said the change of the title to "Kum Ba Yah" came about in 1946, when a missionary family named Cunningham returned from Africa where they had sung Frey's version. According to Frey, they brought back a partly translated version, and "Kum Ba Yah" was an African phrase from Angola (specifically in Luvale). Frey said the Cunninghams then toured America singing the song with the text "Kum Ba Yah". 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. As Winick points out, however: Although it is often said that the song originated in Gullah, Winick further points out that the Boyd manuscript, which may be the earliest version of the song, was probably not collected from a Gullah speaker. A 45 rpm recording in a contemporary gospel style was released in 1958 by Little Sugar and the Hightower Brothers as "Come by Here", on the Savoy label (backed with "At the Golden Gate"). Folk music revival and Civil Rights Movement The Folksmiths,