Shout Because You're Free

The African American Ring Shout Tradition in Coastal Georgia

Art Rosenbaum

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780820343617
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Musique folk

The ring shout is the oldest known African American performance tradition surviving on the North American continent. Performed for the purpose of religious worship, this fusion of dance, song, and percussion survives today in the Bolton Community of McIntosh County, Georgia. Incorporating oral history, first-person accounts, musical transcriptions, photographs, and drawings, Shout Because You're Free documents a group of performers known as the McIntosh County Shouters.

Derived from African practices, the ring shout combines call-and-response singing, the percussion of a stick or broom on a wood floor, and hand-clapping and foot-tapping. First described in depth by outside observers on the sea islands of South Carolina and Georgia during the Civil War, the ring shout was presumed to have died out in active practice until 1980, when the shouters in the Bolton community first came to the public's attention.

Shout Because You're Free is the result of sixteen years of research and fieldwork by Art and Margo Rosenbaum, authors of Folk Visions and Voices. The book includes descriptions of present-day community shouts, a chapter on the history of the shout's African origins, the recollections of early outside observers, and later folklorists' comments. In addition, the tunes and texts of twenty-five shout songs performed by the McIntosh County Shouters are transcribed by ethnomusicologist Johann S. Buis. Shout Because You're Free is a fascinating look at a unique living tradition that demonstrates ties to Africa, slavery, and Emancipation while interweaving these influences with worship and oneness with the spirit.

1 “Kneebone in the Wildernesss”

The History of the Shout in America

Anyone who had slaves they collected them all together and took them to

the places called Aladabara and Jufufe to sell them to the Portuguese.

Then the Portuguese put them in their ship and left there and went to

Jang Jang Bure.

When they left there they went right to the slave house to collect the

slaves there and take them to the Dutch.

Then the Dutch collected them and sent them to America.

It is because of this that slaves were plenty in America.

They called them American Negroes.

—from Toolongjang, sung by West African griot

Alhaji Fabala Kanuteh

By the late nineteenth century it was too late for African religion—and therefore for African culture—to be contained or reversed because its advocates were practically the entire black population in America. The essential features of the ring shout were present in one form or another, and hardly a state in the Union was without its practitioners following slavery. Moreover, the shout continued to be the principal context in which creativity occurred.

—Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture

According to Lawrence McKiver, “every bit of it is an African act. The old people, that’s what they tell me. Nobody does it but our kind of people. The shout… it’s just an African act. You can tell by the singing, tell by the song, tell by the beat, it’s actually an African beat. I think they come in 1722 when the blacks came over here. It came down through the generations. It used to be real popular one time. But it fall on back, fall on back. I don’t think no others got it, that I know of.”

“They brought it [the shout] here with them. My people,” said old Jim Cook. Lawrence McKiver is specific about the song they brought, “Knee-bone Bend,” and the dancelike movement that went with it: “That’s the oldest slave song that ever was sung by black people when they first come over from Africa over here. See, the song would say ‘kneebone in the wilderness,’ you see, they didn’t know where they was—so that was going to a place they … didn’t know nothing about, understand? So they would sing this song, ‘kneebone in the wilderness, kneebone in the valley,’ they was praying at the time, that’s why they say ‘kneebone bend,’ they was bending down, they was praying.… That’s the way my mama told it to me, and aunts. I had some old ancestors that put out these songs, you know.”¹ This oral testimony brings into focus a poignant image of the very moment of the disembarkment of African slaves in the New World. The act of kneeling has significance in the African tradition as well as in European Christianity.² The bent-knee posture in African dance and art “signaled the presence of supple life energies.”³ In the present day shout, the song text recalling supplication, and the bent-knee posture of the shouters as they move actively around the ring, unites the more receptive supplication and the active expression of life-affirming energy.

A history of the African roots of the shout must begin with the earliest reports of African dancing, particularly dancing in the service of religion, contemporaneous with the slave trade. Robert Farris Thompson cited Ten Thyne’s account of dancing in southern Africa in 1673: “They take the greatest delight in dancing. … If they have the least feeling for religion, it is in the observation of the dance that they must show it … with their bodies leaning forward, stamp on the ground vigorusly with their feet, lustily chanting in unison … and with a fixed expression on their faces.”⁴ Thompson relates this description, particularly as it concerns stance and posture, to a modern description of Bushmen dancing to the Southwest of the Cape in the Kalahari: “the ceremonial dance [is] a religious act, but, although very serious … is not piously solemn or constrained and it provides occasion for pleasure and aesthetic satisfaction … the men dance with knees bent and bodies carried with little motion, leaning forward. The steps are very precise. They are minute in size, advancing only two or three inches, but they are strongly stamped, and ten or twenty dancers stamping together produces a loud thud.”⁵ This last description parallels the movements of the shout as practiced today in McIntosh County, especially the small steps and incremental forward motion as well as the leaning stance.

One might speculate that there may have been some influence of Native American practices in the development of the ring shout. From the first arrival of slaves from Africa and the Caribbean to the Southeast, there was contact between blacks and Native American peoples. Escaped slaves lived near and among the Seminoles of Florida. During the war with U.S. authorities in the 1830s, these blacks were allies of the Seminoles; when captured, some were returned to their owners to the North, others went West to live with deported Seminoles as free persons or slaves.⁶ In 1992, some “black Seminoles” from Texas met the McIntosh County Shouters of Bolden on a Black Arts Festival stage in Atlanta; the Texans recalled Watch Night shout traditions of their youth, which were closely related to the shouts of the Georgia coast. At some time there may have been some influence of the vocal, rhythmic, and dance traditions of the southeastern Indians on the African Americans. We have seen African characteristics in the shout movement, yet it is not unlike some aspects of Native American dance. An early twentieth-century description of the Seminole corn dance states that “for men, the dance is the characteristic double step of the Indian Dance.”⁷ And Frank W. Speck has described the dancing of the Yuchis, an Oklahoma people whose origin was along the border of Georgia and South Carolina, and who in the Southeast had held slaves and were of mixed blood: “The movement was from right to left, contra-clockwise. The steps of the dancers were short, the motion being chiefly in the leg below the knee. In general effect the dance steps look more like shuffling.”⁸ Certainly counterclockwise circle dancing is characteristic of many cultures, but whether the similarities in the characteristic Native American double step and the shuffling “two step” of the ring shout are causal or coincidental awaits further study.

Moving in a counterclockwise circle is characteristic of African dance, though as we have noted is not confined to African practice. Elaine Nichols notes that similar forms to African circle dances

were called ring shouts or plantation walk-arounds in black American culture. In Africa they were essential in rituals honoring the dead…. Robert F. Thompson and Sterling Stuckey offer a clue to the importance of moving in a circle around the grave. The grave is the most sacred point upon which a person can take an oath or affirm that “life is a shared process with the dead below the river or the sea.” “Drawing or signing a point” on the ground summons the power of God and the ancestors. It is not inconceivable that the ring shout or counterclockwise movement around the grave represented such an oath or statement for Africans in the New World. This is especially true when one considers Thompson’s statement that when combined with singing, marking the point causes the power of God to descend upon that exact spot.

Nichols further suggests that “used in this fashion, the ring shout is suggestive of a form of ‘ground writing’ or drawing symbols on the ground as a means of communicating with God and the ancestors.”⁹ Thompson describes the cosmogram of Kongo culture as a circle with four points signifying the four moments of the sun, “the continuity of human life” with “God … at the top, the dead at the bottom, and water in between.”¹⁰ While one must be cautious about connecting all Afro-Atlantic counterclockwise circle dances with this cosmogram, Thompson does draw a parallel between the “mystic ground-drawings in Cuba” and “the development of Afro-Christian crosses, chalked on the floor as critical ‘points’ among the Trinidad Shouters.”¹¹ And Nichols’s association of circle dances with funerals is substantiated on the Georgia coast with the account of slave funerals by ex-slave Ben Sullivan of St. Simons Island: “Now, ole man Dembo he use tuh beat huh drum tuh duh fewnul, but Mr. Couper he stop dat. He say he dohn wahn drums beatin roun duh dead. But I watch em hab a fewnul. I gits behine duh bush an hide an see what dey does. Dey go in a long pruhcession tuh duh buryin ground an dey beat duh drums long duh way an dey submit duh body tuh duh groun. Den dey dance roun in a ring an dey motion wid duh hans. Dey sing duh body tuh duh grabe an den dey let it down an den dey succle roun in duh dance.”¹²

Harold Courlander cites this and similar accounts as putting to rest “any doubt that…‘shouting’ was in reality dancing.”¹³ He further surmises that New Orleans funeral processions to the accompaniment of brass bands grew out of the practice of drum beating in funeral processions.

Even before death, a circle dance around a dying person was evidently an African practice surviving in slave culture. “Aunt Fanny,” a Virginia cook and devout Christian, permitted, in the words of her horrified mistress, “Negroes … to perform their religious rites around [her] death bed. Joining hands they performed a savage dance, shouting wildly around the bed. This was horrible to hear and see, especially as in this family every effort had been made to instruct their negro dependants in the truths of religion…. After the savage dance and rites were over … I went and said to her ‘we are afraid the noise and dancing have made you worse.’

“Speaking feebly, she replied: ‘Honey, that kind of religion suits us black folks better than your kind.’”¹⁴

Todays shouters of Bolden have not ascribed any special symbolic meaning to the counterclockwise circle, nor do they recall the shout or any dancelike movement being made before death or in funerals. They do clearly regard the shout as a way of honoring God and of evoking at the very least thoughts of departed ancestors and are thus not far removed from significances deeply embedded in their practices, meanings linking them with African tradition and belief. Sterling Stuckey considers the slave ring shout to be “above all, devoted to the ancestral spirits, to reciprocity between the living and the dead.”¹⁵

Though the component elements of the shout are African and the oral tradition of today’s shouters is unequivocal about the African origin of the shout, we can never know precisely what form of the evolving tradition was practiced by the first slaves in America. Christian elements were absent, as the slaves were Christianized later; the Gullah dialect had yet to develop; drums were likely to have been used, but we cannot guess what other percussive intruments may have been used, besides clapping and foot tapping that could be produced by the human body. As the slaves were Christianized in the late eighteenth century and during the Great Revival Period of the early nineteenth century, the African practices we call the shout fused with the religious orientation of the newly converted slaves. Albert J. Raboteau has described this fusion of African practice and Protestant revivalism:

In the ring shout and allied patterns of ecstatic behavior, the African heritage of dance found expression in the evangelical religion of the American slaves. To be sure, there are significant differences between the kind of spirit possession found in West Africa and in the shouting experience of American revivalism. Different theological meanings are expressed and experienced in each. But similar patterns of response—rhythmic clapping, ring-dancing, styles of singing, all of which reveal the slaves’ African religious background. The shout is a convincing example of [Melville] Herskovits’ theory of reinterpretation of African traditions; for the situation of the camp-meeting revival, where enthusiastic and ecstatic religious behavior was encouraged, presented a congenial setting for slaves to merge African patterns of response with Christian interpretations of the experience of spirit possession, an experience shared by both blacks and whites. The Protestant revivalist tradition, accepted by the slaves and their descendants in the United States, proved in this instance to be amenable to the influence of African styles of behavior. Despite the prohibition of dancing as heathenish and sinful, the slaves were able to reinterpret and “sanctify” their African tradition of dance in the “shout.” While North American slaves danced under the impulse of the Spirit of a “new” God, they danced in ways their fathers in Africa would have recognized. The “holy dance” of the shout may very well have been a two-way bridge connecting the core of West African religions—possession by the gods—to the core of evangelical Protestantism—experience of conversion.¹⁶

Certainly Raboteau is correct in seeing the fervor of the Protestant revivalism as a catalyst for the adaptation of African religious practices to Christian worship, yet there was another current in the movement to Christianize the slaves that ran counter to African-derived traditions. In slavery times the shout was often practiced clandestinely, as white and black clergy often disapproved of it (although it has been suggested that black preachers at times publicly disapproved of the shout while they were more supportive of its practice away from the eyes of white observers). In an early description of the ring shout, William Francis Allen quoted an article from the New York Nation of May 30, 1867, which called the shout “a ceremony which the white clergymen are inclined to discountenance, and even some of the colored elders … try sometimes to put on a face of discouragement.”¹⁷ It was not only the ring shout and the songs associated with it, but also other black spirituals that were suppressed by white missionaries, such as Charles Colcock Jones, who were attempting to instill more orthodox forms of worship into the beliefs of converted slaves. In Liberty County, Georgia (just to the north of McIntosh County) in the 1840s, Jones found the slave songs “too African, dangerously extravagant,” according to Erskine Clarke. “And perhaps … he heard hidden within these songs both resistance to subordination and profound spiritual insights that cut through his pretensions, that his own heart could not face…. At any rate, Jones rejected them all and sought to replace them with the hymns of white Protestantism. ‘One great advant...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: “We Never Did Let It Go By”
• 1. “Kneebone in the Wilderness”: The History of the Shout in America
• 2. “One Family of People”: The Shouters of Bolden
• 3. Lawrence McKiver, Boss Songster
• 4. The Shout Songs
• Transcribers Note
• Historical Essay. The Ring Shout: Revisiting the Islamic and African Issues of a Christian “Holy Dance”
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index