Shout Because You're Free: The African American Ring Shout Tradition

Photograph: In 2011, the Geechee Gullah Ring Shouters set the Guinness World Record for leading the largest recorded ring shout, during the “Word, Shout, Song” exhibit at the Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum in Washington, D. C.

Shout Because You're Free: The African American Ring Shout Tradition

A ritual of the GullahGeechee, who are the descendants of slaves brought to America from West Africa.

Those slaves worked on plantations in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Florida. After the Civil War, their culture was largely neglected until the 1990s, when a revival began.

The most venerable African American song and movement traditions — the "shout," also known as the "ring shout." The ring shout, associated with burial rituals in West Africa, persisted among African slaves and was perpetuated after emancipation in African American communities, where the fundamental counterclockwise movement of the participants used in religious ceremonies integrated Christian themes, expressed often in the form of spirituals. They move to the beat of clapping and a stick that is banged on a wooden surface. The stick takes the place of drums, because slaves were forbidden to beat drums on plantations in the 18th century

First written about by outside observers in 1845 and described during and after the Civil War, the shout was concentrated in coastal areas of South Carolina and Georgia. .

Before slavery ended, slaves who were from different African countries but worked on the same plantations created their own language and folk traditions in order to communicate easily with one another and to stick together.

The Creole language they devised is a mix of words and phrases from West African languages combined with words from European languages, including English.
After the end of the Civil War and slavery, many Gullah people rejected their traditions as they sought to assimilate into mainstream American culture.

The social and linguistic history of the Gullah people back to their ancestral homeland of Africa,
The language of the Gullah people, which was previously dismissed simply as “bad English,” and discovered that the dialect was actually a mix of 32 diverse African languages. The Gullah people have their roots among the 645,000 Africans captured, enslaved and brought to America between the 16th and 19th centuries.

There are only a handful of groups that practice the tradition in the U.S., these groups do their best to preserve and protect the culture of the Gullah people, who today live in areas of South Carolina and Georgia.

Part of the reason the tradition has faded out is that after the Civil War, many Gullah did their best to adapt to mainstream American culture in order to better fit in, often abandoning traditions like the Gullah language of Geechee and rituals such as the ring shout.

Being a Geechee was super unpopular–many were taught not to be Geechee, They were told ‘You’re too Geechee,
Because it wasn’t mainstream, and they were told they couldn’t get the better jobs, because they talked funny.

Most members of the remaining Ring Shout groups are direct descendants of enslaved Africans on American plantations.