Ring Shout
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The oldest surviving African American performance tradition — a sacred "shout" moving counterclockwise in a ring, driven by call-and-response singing, a stick beating rhythm on a wood floor, clapped cross-rhythms, and a shuffling step in which the feet never cross or leave the floor. A songster leads each shout song, "basers" answer in response, and the stick man and clappers build interlocking polyrhythms beneath; the form is worship, history, and community memory at once, its songs carrying coded narratives from slavery. Musicologists treat the ring shout as a wellspring of African American music broadly — the rhythmic and participatory root beneath spirituals, gospel, and beyond.
History
Formed among enslaved communities as West and Central African ritual circle dance fused with Protestant worship, the shout survived in the praise houses of the Gullah Geechee coast of Georgia and South Carolina long after emancipation; John and Alan Lomax captured its sound for the Library of Congress in 1934 with "Run Old Jeremiah" in Jennings, Louisiana, and Alan Lomax's 1959–60 Sea Island sessions documented Bessie Jones and the Georgia Sea Island Singers shouting "Adam in the Garden" and "Kneebone Bend"; folklorists found the tradition still unbroken in Bolden (Briar Patch), Georgia in 1980, where descendants of the enslaved couple London and Amy Jenkins performed Watch Night shouts — as the McIntosh County Shouters, led by Lawrence McKiver, they recorded Slave Shout Songs from the Coast of Georgia for Folkways in 1984, received an NEA National Heritage Fellowship in 1993, were documented in Art Rosenbaum's book Shout Because You're Free, and returned to Smithsonian Folkways in 2017.
Defining artists
Essential listening
- Move, Daniel(1984) — The McIntosh County ShoutersSpotifyYouTube
- Blow, Gabriel(1984) — The McIntosh County ShoutersSpotifyYouTube
- Jubilee(1984) — The McIntosh County ShoutersSpotifyYouTube
- Read 'Em John(1984) — The McIntosh County ShoutersSpotifyYouTube
- Good Lord (Run Old Jeremiah)(1934) — Austin Coleman & Joe Washington BrownSpotifyYouTube
- Adam in the Garden(1959) — Bessie JonesSpotifyYouTube
Sources
- Smithsonian Folkways FW04344, "Slave Shout Songs from the Coast of Georgia" (1984), liner notes by Art Rosenbaum, https://folkways.si.edu/
- Smithsonian Folkways SFW40258, "Spirituals and Shout Songs from the Georgia Coast" (2017)
- Library of Congress, Lomax 1934 Jennings, Louisiana field recordings ("Run Old Jeremiah")
- Art Rosenbaum, "Shout Because You're Free: The African American Ring Shout Tradition in Coastal Georgia", University of Georgia Press, 1998