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Preface
- University of Georgia Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Preface On a hot July afternoon in 1995, the annex building of the Mt. Calvary Baptist Church in Bolden, Georgia, did not ringwith the sound of the shout songs or resound to the beating of a stick on the wood floor; nor did that floor move to the force of a score of people moving counterclockwise in the ring shout, as we had seen it on four Watch Night (or New Years) shouts in the only community where the African American southeastern coastal ring shout is known to have survived. Instead, this day several members of the group that has become known as the Mclntosh County Shouters were sitting down with us at long folding tables that usually hold church suppers , to go over the manuscript of Shout Because You're Free. Lawrence McKiver, patriarch and lead songster, was there along with Odessa Young, the oldest of the women who currentlyperform the compelling circling movements of the shout in public performance . Awoman of great dignity, Odessa Young had overcome her reluctance to "talk"in order to help us tell the story ofthe shout correctly . Also there were Carletha Sullivan, a younger shouter who handles the business side of the tricky task of presenting a precious community tradition to the public, and Bettye Ector, an instructor at Coastal Georgia Community College in Brunswick, who is kin and neighbor to the shouters and who recently has become their ix presenter in public performances. Benjamin Reed, the "stick man/' was there, as were shouters Vertie Mclver and Venus Mclver. Though we had known the shouters of Bolden for sixteen years, we still needed to know how close we had come, in developing the manuscript, to "getting it right." Twoshouters expressed some concern about the historical chapter, wondering whether readers might get bogged down in detail and annotations before getting into the story of the present-day shouters. We said we pretty much had to go with this section, as our publisher had urged us to locate the Bolden shout tradition in its broader context. We asked the members present about our attempts to convey a sense ofthe Gullah dialect through phonetic spellings, which had greatly concerned a folklorist who had earlier reviewed the manuscript; the spellings posed no problem for our consultants, who expressed pride in the "flat speech"—their term for the dialect of their parents and grandparents—and the elements of that speech which they retain. We did decide to follow the modern practice of avoiding dialectical respellings and spell all speech in standard English while retaining morphological elements as we heard them. We have chosen to retain some phonetic spellings in the song texts to better suggest the sound of the words carried by melody. Of more concern to Carletha and Bettye were typos and misspellings of "regular" English in the body of the manuscript, which we said we would attend to. Also of concern were incorrect spellings of names and place namesin the community.For example,we had been told early on that the home of the shouters, a small community on the edge of Eulonia, wascalled "Bolden," and we spelled it that wayin early publications of our field work.On avisit a fewyears ago,we sawa newlyerected road sign reading "Bolton," and we assumed, incorrectly, that we had heard wrong earlier. Our consultants assured us that it was the road sign that was wrong—Bolden it is. (Nowthat sign is gone, but other newer onesmarking side roads have been erected to honor Reverend Nathan Palmer, nonagenarian songster, and to recognize "Briar Patch," the slave cemetery that gives the communityits other name.) Of greatest interest to our friends was that we more accurately describe the events and the roles of different individuals in the early 1980s when a group from the community formed to bring the shout to the public. There is an enormouspride in Bolden inhaving retained a tradition that, to their knowledge, has died out everywhere else, and in their well-received work outside the communityduring the past Preface X [44.197.251.102] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 06:01 GMT) sixteen years of performing. We have tried to satisfy the shouters' requests while at the same time acknowledging that elements of the shout, and other closely related traditions, do endure elsewhere. As it has developed, this book has assumed three voices: collectively, that of the shouters of Bolden, recounting their lives and their traditions in their own words; that of the author (for whose perceptions...