Ring shout

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The ring shout is a distinctive African American ritualistic dance originating with enslaved Africans in the southern United States where worshippers [1] move in a counterclockwise circle while hand-clapping, foot-patting and shuffling, stick-beating to foreground the rhythm, and call-and-response singing. [2] While its definitive origin is a topic of debate amongst scholars, most agree that it is a Black holy dance [3] that developed in Black Christian "praise houses" [2] through a fusion of Central and West African spiritual traditions (like counterclockwise circle dances, polyrhythms, and ancestor veneration), [1] [2] [4] and revivalistic Christian practices [2] [3] in either the eighteenth [5] [1] [4] or nineteenth century. [3]

Contents

Though it is not definitively known when the ring shout was first observed, there are several accounts of its existence. Methodist missionaries recorded the ritual in the 1800s. Their first observance was among newly-converted enslaved and free Black Americans during revival meetings in the 1840s. [3] Anthropologist Alonzo Johnson, who referred to ring shouts as "Africa-wide rituals," described an account in 1850 at a Christian camp meeting near Charleston, South Carolina by a European traveler who witnessed circles of enslaved women dancing the holy dance "especially among those converted to Christianity" and vast tents "of all imaginable forms and colours" positioned in a circle. [6] In these revivals, Christians would incorporate the act of "seeking Jesus" into existing Gullah-Geechee manifestations of African spiritual cultures like the ring shout, a intricate rite in the developing Black Christian culture. [4] [7] [8] [9]

Early accounts also highlight that the ring shout was originally rebuked by certain white Christian clergy who claimed the dance to be "a relic of some African rite". [1] [10] [11] Black clergy were also known to publicly disapprove of the dance in front of white observers but practiced it themselves in Black spaces. [1] Today, the ring shout continues as a pivotal part of Hoodoo tradition to invoke the ancestors through veneration and spirit possession. [1] [11] The ring shout is also observed by Black Americans in Christian churches of the Methodist, Baptist and Pentecostal denominations. [12] [2] [6] [13] Ring shouts may occur when a congregant experience the New Birth or became entirely sanctified. [6] [13]

Description

In African American folk spiritual traditions, a “shout” refers less to vocal volume than to a distinctive way of the spiritual performance. The “shout” can be characterized by collective participation, rhythmic movement, and repetition. Such practices are defined primarily by how they are performed rather than by fixed texts or musical forms. [14] In the traditional ring shout, participants move in a counterclockwise circle with their knees bent while hand-clapping, foot-patting and shuffling, time-keeping, and call-and-response singing with one person standing in the middle of the circle stick-beating to foreground the rhythm. [2]

As described by historians and folklorists Glenn Hinson and William Ferris:

The shout is not just sung; it is danced, and danced with the entire body. The dancers always move counterclockwise in a circle. During the shout, the dancers and singers always sing a song that takes a call-and-response form, with numerous repetitions that foreground the cooperative nature of the singing. These repeated passages favor rhythm over melody in a way that emphasizes the collaborative nature of the event. Finally, the worship continues for a long period and escalates in intensity. As this intensity mounts, the shouters feel the presence of the Spirit in their midst. The ring shout, properly speaking, becomes a physical, aesthetic, and spiritual expression of communion. Eyewitness observers of early ring shouts frequently reported that the shouts took place after the close of formal church services. [2]

Writer and activist James Weldon Johnson, remembering his observances of the ring shout, recounted and claimed:

When there was a "ring shout" the weird music and the sound of thudding feet set the silence of the night vibrating and throbbing with a vague terror. Many a time I woke suddenly and lay a long while strangely troubled by these sounds, the like of which my great-grandmother Sarah had heard as a child. The shouters, formed in a ring, men and women alternating, their bodies close together, moved round and round on shuffling feet that never left the floor. With the heel of the right foot they pounded out the fundamental beat of the dance and with their hands clapped out the varying rhythmical accents of the chant; for the music was, in fact, an African chant and the shout an African dance, whole pagan rite transplanted and adapted to Christian worship. Round and round the ring would go. One, two, three, four, five hours, the very monotony of sound and motion inducing an ecstatic frenzy. Aunt Venie, it seems, never, even after the hardest day of washing and ironing, missed a "ring shout." [11] [15]

When describing the ring shout professor of world religion Clive Erricker stated: [16]

The historical origin of tarrying in the United States can be found in the black Christian practice of the ring-shout. The names ranged from Rocking Daniel and the Rope Dance to Ring. It was considered crucial for the invocation of the Holy Spirit in order for the conversion of sinners to occur: 'sinners won't get converted unless there is a ring.' During a ring-shout, a ring is formed arounda group of people who sing, the ring moving in a counter-clockwise direction. For the ring, shouts of encouragement are given to those encircled. This ring-shout is a spiritual exercise to prepare people for conversion or another by God. The ring-shout could also be a prayer form resembling the rehearsal of God acts in an enacted prayer; these liturgical re-enactments of biblical events included a Jericho march, a re-enactment of 'Joshua's army marching around the walls Jericho' or an Exodus march, that marching of Israel out of Egypt. [16]

In the modern Black Church and in Pentecostal churches, the shout consists of a person dancing a two-step while swinging their arms and sometimes jubilantly leaping into the air intermittently. If one or more people join it, it becomes a praise break. [17]

Origin

The origin of the ring shout is a subject of debate amongst scholars. According to musicologist Robert Palmer, some of the first written accounts of the ring shout date from the 1840s, during the pinnacle of the revival-era in Christianity. Palmer stated that it "developed with the widespread conversion of slaves to Christianity during the revival fervors of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries." [3] He further wrote that the "earliest accounts date from the 1840s; more vivid descriptions from the twentieth century leave little doubt that the dancing and stamping constituted a kind of drumming, especially when worshipers had a wooden church floor to stamp on." [3] The ring shout is believed to have then gained ground among Methodists of the holiness movement. [18] [19]

However, many other scholars also point to an African origin of the ring shout, suggesting that enslaved people developed the dance from their traditional African spiritual practices. According to musicologist and educator Eileen Southern, whose research focused on the history of Black American music, the first written account of the ring shout occurred in 1819 Philadelphia by leading Methodist church father John Fanning Watson who complained that the illiterate Black people of the society were composing and singing their own forms of hymns that he considered "a growing evil." [20] Watson also reported on "a curious activity of the Negroes" that took place after church services in the Black quarters, where he observed them patting off rhythms against their thighs, doing a "shuffle step" dance and singing. Southern contends that "this is the earliest account of a religious dance ceremony of African origin, the ring shout" that later came to be described by many. [20] Southern also attested that "And during the period when Watson was writing" in the early 1800s, similar ring shouts were also being practiced by enslaved Africans from the Bakongo, Mandinka, Mina, Fulani, and other ethnic groups in Congo Square (then referred to as Place Congo) in New Orleans, Louisiana. [20]

The Kongo cosmogram may have inspired the ring shout in African-American communities. It is a sacred dance performed to become possessed by the Holy Spirit or ancestral spirits. Kongo Cosmogram 3.png
The Kongo cosmogram may have inspired the ring shout in African-American communities. It is a sacred dance performed to become possessed by the Holy Spirit or ancestral spirits.

Erricker stated the Black Pentecostal Church echoed from "the African religious heritage" through the ring shout, as well as Christian tradition through its other practices. [16] Hinson and Ferris also described the ring shout as an "African-derived worship practice" that developed in and remained central to the African American church. They also highlighted that the bended-knee stance in the ring shout was common in African spiritual practices. [2] Likewise, cultural historian Peter H. Wood asserted that the "knee-bone bend" that was observed in ring shouts came from the African belief that the bending of the knees meant that you were alive and that straight legs were for the dead. He further theorized that ring shouts began by enslaved Africans as a way to honor life and bless their labor in the fields. [23]

Some scholars, such as Africanist and art historian Robert Farris Thompson, also assert that the ring shout dance is specifically derived from Kongo counterclockwise dances that were performed to symbolize the sun circling the earth. [22] Thompson further stated that the circle represented "the idea balancing of the vitality of the world of the living with the visionaries of the world of the dead," which also reflective the moving of the souls on the Kongo cosmogram. [6] Historian and Smithsonian Museum curator Elaine Nichols suggested that the ring shout developed as a form of "ground-writing" and drawing symbols on the ground with the feet to communicate with God and the ancestors. [1] The circular symbols with four points were believed to be associated "with protective ancestral powers and can be traced back to Kongo religious beliefs, from Central Africa, in the four moments of the soul: birth, life, death, and rebirth." [2] Philosopher and academic yonTande Whitney Vern Hunter described the ring shout as "an eighteenth century worship custom developed and practiced by enslaved Africans in the American South. Historically, the Ring Shout maintains an ancestral lineage connecting to the ring and circle dances of West-Central Africa." [4]

In his autobiography, A.M.E. Bishop Daniel Alexander Payne observed that some referred to the ring shout as a "Voudoo Dance." [24] An 1867 Sea Islands account of the ring shout that was reprinted by W.F. Allen stated "It is not unlikely that this remarkable religious ceremony is a relic of some African dance." [24] Folklorists John and Alan Lomax who recorded the parallels of ring shouts performed in Louisiana, Texas, Georgia, the Bahamas, and Haiti said in 1934, "This shout pattern is demonstrably West African in origin." [24] Harold Courlander, another observer, maintained that "circular movement, shuffling steps and stamping, postures and gestures, the manner of standing, the way the arms are held out for balance or pressed against the sides, the movements of the shoulder, all are African in conception and derivation." [24]

Sociolinguist and renowned researcher Lorenzo Dow Turner theorized that the ritual may have originated among enslaved Muslims from West Africa as an imitation of tawaf , the mass procession around the Kaaba that is an essential part of the Hajj. If so, he proposed that the word shout may come from Arabic shawṭ, which means in this context a single circumambulation of the Kaaba. [1] [25]

Ring shouts were sometimes held in honour of the dead. This custom has been practiced by traditional bands of carnival revelers in New Orleans. [26]

Influence

Distinguished Professor Emeritus of history Sterling Stuckey asserted that ring shout was a unifying element of Africans in the American colonies, from which field hollers, work songs, and spirituals evolved, followed by blues and jazz. [27] [28] Music educator, archivist, and historian Samuel A. Floyd Jr. further contended that many of the stylistic elements observed during the ring shout later laid the foundations of various black music styles developed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. According to Floyd, "...all of the defining elements of black music are present in the ring...". [29] : 52 

These basic elements of ring shouts included calls, cries, and hollers; blue notes; call-and-response; and various rhythmic aspects. Examples of black music that would evolve from the ring include, but are not limited to, Afro-American burial music of New Orleans, the Blues, the Afro-American Symphony, as well as the music that has accompanied various dance forms also present in Afro-American culture. [29]

The ring shout continues today in Georgia with the McIntosh County Shouters. [30]

See also

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Rosenbaum, Art (2012-03-15). Shout Because You're Free: The African American Ring Shout Tradition in Coastal Georgia. University of Georgia Press. pp. 3, 20–22, 167, 168–170. ISBN   978-0-8203-4361-7.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Hinson, Glenn; Ferris, William; Wilson, Charles Reagan (2010-01-01). The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Volume 14: Folklife. Univ of North Carolina Press. pp. 207, 230, 289, 257–358. ISBN   978-0-8078-9855-0.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Palmer, Robert (1982). Deep blues. Internet Archive. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England ; New York, N.Y. : Penguin Books. p. 38. ISBN   978-0-14-006223-6.
  4. 1 2 3 4 Hunter, yaTande Whitney Vern (2019). "Sublime Embodiment: The Phenomenological Aesthetics of a Black Liberational Spirituality". Digital Maine Repository: Maine State University Library. p. 104. Retrieved 2025-01-17.
  5. ↑ Musical Traditions, Issues 2-4. Keith Summers. 1984. p. 45. ...ring shout's slavery-period origins, and make reference to this in spoken introductions to their performances indicating the longevity of the tradition
  6. 1 2 3 4 Johnson, Alonzo; Jersild, Paul T. (1996). Ain't Gonna Lay My 'ligion Down: African American Religion in the South. Univ of South Carolina Press. pp. 39, 62. ISBN   978-1-57003-109-0. The symbolic importance of the ring or circle in Negro spiritual expression is underscored in European traveler Fredrika Bremer's account of an interracial evangelical camp meeting near Charleston, South Carolina in 1850, where she witnessed among slaves, mostly from South Carolina, circles of women dancing "the holy dance" for the newly converted; circles of people holding hands, rocking and singing joyously; and even a "vast" circle of tents "of all imaginable forms and colours." ... The continued observance of the ring shout ritual throughout the slave community, especially among those 'converted' to Christianity, demonstrates beyond question the tenacious power and influence of the slaves' African cultural inheritance.
  7. ↑ Brown, Ras Michael (2012-08-27). African-Atlantic Cultures and the South Carolina Lowcountry. Cambridge University Press. p. 211. ISBN   978-1-107-02409-0.
  8. ↑ Knowles, Mark (3 June 2002). Tap Roots: The Early History of Tap Dancing. McFarland. p. 59. ISBN   978-0-7864-1267-9.
  9. ↑ Hunter, yaTande Whitney Vern (August 2023). "The "Ring Shout": A Corporeal Conjuring of Black-Togetherness". Dance Research Journal. 55 (2): 44–57. doi:10.1017/S0149767723000268.
  10. ↑ Chireau, Yvonne Patricia (2003-10-02). Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition. University of California Press. p. 125. ISBN   978-0-520-20987-9.
  11. 1 2 3 Holloway, Joseph E. (2005-08-03). Africanisms in American Culture, Second Edition. Indiana University Press. pp. 235–238. ISBN   978-0-253-21749-3.
  12. ↑ West, Cornel (14 August 2000). The Cornel West Reader. Basic Books. p. 62. ISBN   978-0-465-09110-2. Protestant evangelical conversion experiences closely resembled the "ring shout"
  13. 1 2 Lincoln, C. Eric; Mamiya, Lawrence H. (1990). The Black Church in the African American Experience. Duke University Press. p. 365. ISBN   978-0-8223-1057-0.
  14. ↑ Burnim, Mellonee V. (2014). "Spirituals". In Burnim; Maultsby (eds.). African American Music: An Introduction (2nd ed.). Routledge.
  15. ↑ Colburn, David; Landers, Jane (2018-02-26). The African American Heritage of Florida. University Press of Florida. p. 71. ISBN   978-1-947372-69-6.
  16. 1 2 3 Erricker, Clive; Erricker, Jane (2001-08-01). Contemporary Spiritualities: Social and Religious Contexts. A&C Black. pp. 173, 177. ISBN   978-0-8264-4948-1.
  17. ↑ Kemp, Kathryn (2018-12-07). "When Gospel Music Sparked a 'Worship War'". Christianity Today. Retrieved 2026-01-20.
  18. ↑ Bowie, Lenard C. (30 January 2012). African American Musical Heritage: An Appreciation, Historical Summary, and Guide to Music Fundamentals. Bowie. p. 244. ISBN   978-1-4653-0575-6. Ring shouts often lasted for hours on end. The shout was a central part of Holiness and Pentecostal services.
  19. ↑ Callahan, Richard J. (2008). New Territories, New Perspectives: The Religious Impact of the Louisiana Purchase. University of Missouri Press. p. 139. ISBN   978-0-8262-6626-2.
  20. 1 2 3 Southern, Eileen (1997). The Music of Black Americans: A History. W. W. Norton & Company. pp. 78, 87–88, 136. ISBN   978-0-393-03843-9.
  21. ↑ Opala, Joseph. "Gullah Customs and Traditions" (PDF). Yale University. Retrieved 11 June 2022.
  22. 1 2 Murphy (1994). Working the Spirit Ceremonies of the African Diaspora. Beacon Press. pp. 147–155, 171–175. ISBN   978-0-8070-1221-5.
  23. ↑ Bob Boross -My Jazz and Tap Dance Life (2023-01-25). Dance 111 - Ring Shout . Retrieved 2026-01-20– via YouTube.
  24. 1 2 3 4 Raboteau, Albert J. (2004-10-07). Slave Religion: The "Invisible Institution" in the Antebellum South. Oxford University Press, USA. pp. 67–71. ISBN   978-0-19-517413-7.
  25. ↑ Diouf, Sylviane A. (1998). Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas. NYU Press. p. 69. ISBN   978-0-8147-1904-6.
  26. ↑ Lomax, Alan (Summer 1938). "Jelly Roll Morton on the Mardi Gras Indians (1938)". YouTube. Archived from the original on Jun 15, 2023.
  27. ↑ Stuckey, Sterling (1987). Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America. Oxford University Press. ISBN   978-0-19-504265-8.
  28. ↑ "The Whitman Sisters: Why We May Never Silence Them"
  29. 1 2 Floyd Jr., Samuel (2002). "Ring Shout! Literary Studies, Historical Studies, and Black Music Inquiry". Black Music Research Journal. 22. Center for Black Music Research - Columbia College of Chicago and University of Illinois Press: 49–70 – via JSTOR.
  30. ↑ Snithsonian Staff. ""Jubilee" by the McIntosh County Shouters". Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. Smithsonian Institution.
  31. ↑ "Q&A: P. Djèlí Clark, Author of 'Ring Shout' | The Nerd Daily". The Nerd Daily. 2020-10-11. Archived from the original on 2021-04-27. Retrieved 2026-01-22.
  32. ↑ Gullah Geechee Nation (2022-09-29). Queen Sugar Gullah/Geechee Ring Shout . Retrieved 2026-01-21– via YouTube.
  33. ↑ Muhammad, Stacey (2022-09-20), "Slowly and Always Irregularly", Queen Sugar, Rutina Wesley, Kofi Siriboe, Bianca Lawson, retrieved 2026-01-21

Bibliography

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