The ring shout is a distinctive African American ritual dance originating with enslaved Africans in the southern United States where worshippers move in a counterclockwise circle while hand-clapping, foot-patting and shuffling, stick-beating to foreground the rhythm, and call-and-response singing. It is an oral tradition passed down in African American families since the era of slavery. Elders and religious leaders pass down songs and shouts to the younger generation. The practice of sacred circle dancing combines spirituals and rhythmic music, reflecting its Christian and African spiritual and cultural importance. Most scholars agree it is a "Black holy dance" that developed in the living quarters of enslaved African practitioners and Black Christian "praise houses" through a fusion of Central and West African spiritual traditions (like counterclockwise circle dances, polyrhythms, and ancestor veneration), and revivalistic Christian practices in either the eighteenth or nineteenth century. The ring shout is part of the Black musical tradition.
According to silver professor of history and African American studies Michael A. Gomez, "the West Central African use of ring ceremonies was the main source for the development of the ring shout and the minkisi the basis of hoodoo." 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. Musicologist and educator Eileen Southern traced the earliest observance of the ring shout to a 1819 observance of the secret African ritual dances that took place later in the Black quarters of Philadelphia after a Christian camp meeting. The ring shout was also observed being practiced among enslaved and free Black Americans during Christian revival services in the 1840s.
Early accounts also highlight that the ring shout was originally rebuked by white Christian clergy who claimed the dance to be "a relic of some African rite". Black clergy were also known to publicly disapprove of the dance in front of white observers but practiced it themselves in Black spaces. In addition to ring shout ceremonies being gatherings where enslaved Africans could seek comfort and relief from their everyday troubles, they were also a place where abolitionists, like Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, and Gullah Jack, could plot rebellions for freedom. Today, the ring shout continues as a pivotal part of Hoodoo tradition to invoke the ancestors through veneration and spirit possession. The shout is also observed by Black Americans in Christian churches of the Methodist, Baptist and Pentecostal denominations. In these settings, the dance may occur when a congregant experiences the New Birth or became entirely sanctified.
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. 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.
When describing the ring shout professor of world religion Clive Erricker stated: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.Pointing out the "Africanisms" of the Ring Shout, cultural sociologist and professor Katrina Hazzard-Donald asserted:The Ring Shout was a counter-clockwise, sacred circle dance that appears to have been done universally among African American bondsmen, and later among freedmen. “The Shout,” as it was known, used subdued stepping and hopping footwork performed with a system of gesture, spirit possession, individualized sacred dancing and specific music, particularly vocal shouting. The music accompanying the Ring Shout was performed by the Shouters themselves. Singing, tapping sticks, hand claps and foot stomps provided the musical backdrop, while subtle jerking motions in the dancers’ bodies provided an additional rhythmic anchor to the Shout. Shouters would later add other instruments as the worship became modernized and adapted to demographic changes in the African American population. The Ring Shout appeared on antebellum plantations, as well as in urban areas. It frequently puzzled whites who often viewed it with suspicion, disgust, fear and misinterpretation.A white observer of the ring shout wrote his account:Tonight I have been to a “shout” which seems to me certainly the remains of some old idol worship. The negroes sing a kind of chorus—three standing apart to lead and clap—and then all the others go shuffling ‘round in a circle following one another with not much regularity, turning round occasionally and bending the knees, and stamping so that the whole floor swings. In never saw anything so savage. They call it a religious ceremony, but it seems more like a regular frolic to me. As described by historians and folklorists Glenn Hinson and William Ferris:
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."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 what is known as a praise break.
Method of practice
The leader of the ring shout is called the songster who is responsible for calling out the lines for everyone to sing during the shout. Rhythms come from the sticker a person who uses a stick that hits the wooden floors to make a rhythmic sound. The songs sung during the ring shout reference the hardships of slavery and escape to freedom. Women sing what the songster calls out while dancing in a circle counterclockwise clapping their hands and shuffling their feet. Many ring shouters believe while performing this dance the legs and feet should not cross.
Historical documentation
Enslaved people practiced the ring shout in the Southern United States since the colonial period. While enslaved Africans of Igbo and Akan descent were the majority in Virginia and Maryland for a time, farther south in South Carolina and Georgia was dominated by Congo-Angolans, whose complex religious system and circular cosmology greatly influenced the African-based community. According to silver professor of history and African American studies Michael A. Gomez, "the West Central African use of ring ceremonies was the main source for the development of the ring shout and the minkisi the basis of hoodoo." When these ethnic groups learned that their spiritual beliefs echoed those of the Bambara and Temne/Mende groups, especially pertaining to reincarnation, they were able to transcend cultural barriers and form a hybridized Pan-African belief system that encompassed all of the points where their traditional beliefs intersected. Given all of the available evidence, Gomez concluded that "those participating in the [ring] shout during the eighteenth century were overwhelmingly non-Christian."
The enslaved did not document their experiences, as many were illiterate due to anti-literacy laws in the United States that made it crime to teach enslaved people to read and write. Slaveholders, government officials, missionaries, abolitionists, teachers, and Union Civil War soldiers all documented this practice in their writings from the 18th and 19th centuries. 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." Watson also reported on "a curious activity of the Negroes" that took place later 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. Though the ring shout was practiced semi-secretly after institutional church services, this African-derived worship practice remained central to early African American Christianity.
Southern also attested that "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, and Fulani ethnic groups in Congo Square (then referred to as Place Congo) in New Orleans, Louisiana. Musicologist Robert Palmer wrote about some accounts of the ring shout that date from the 1840s during the pinnacle of the revival-era in Christianity. Palmer stated that it was a "Black holy dance" that "developed with the widespread conversion of slaves to Christianity during the revival fervors of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries." 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." However, there is clear documentation of earlier accounts of the ring shout.