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Introduction: "We Never Did Let It Go By"
- University of Georgia Press
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Introduction :WeNeverDidLetItGoBy" The ring shout is the oldest African American performance tradition survivingon the North American continent. An impressive fusion of call-and-response singing, polyrhythmic percussion, and expressive and formalizeddancelike movements,it has had aprofound influence on African American music and religious practice. The integrity of the early form of the ring shout has survived in unbroken traditional practice from slavery times in the Bolden, or "Briar Patch," community in Mclntosh County on the coast of Georgia. First described by outside observers in the mid-nineteenth century and practiced by slaves and their descendants principally in the coastal regions of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, the southeastern ring shout was believed to have died out in active practice by the middle of the twentieth century. Remarkably,the close-knit Bolden community and its Mount Calvary Baptist Church have continued the shout annuallyto welcome in the New Year on Watch Night. Since 1980 an organized group from the communityhas also performed the shout away from home at churches, folk festivals, and universities, and this has reinforced local pride in the venerable practice. "The only people can shout is right here," shouter Catherine Campbell affirms. "Calvary was the stopping place of the shout because we kept the tradition going. We never did let it go by." 1 Lydia Parrish collected shout songs in Mclntosh County and published them in Slave Songs of the Georgia Sea Islands (1942). The shout also had survived near her home on St. Simons Island in Glynn County,just south of Mclntosh; but her informants there were self-conscious about performing the shout for her, and it was "years before [she]waspermitted to see the Sea Island Negroes indulge in this innocent pastime" (Parrish, 54). Yet Parrish was to some extent aware of the long history of discouragement of the shout by white missionaries and some individuals in the black clergy. The Georgia Sea Island Singers were organized by Parrish in order to perpetuate slave-song traditions, including the shout songs, through public performance even as the ring shout was fading in local practice. In 1980 Frankie and Doug Quimby of the Sea Island Singers and organizers of the Sea Island Festival heard reports of a community in Mclntosh County where Watch Night shouts were still being held to the beat of a broom on a wood floor. With the help of folklorists Fred Fussell and George Mitchell, the Quimbys located the shouters of Bolden, who were persuaded to form a group that would present the traditional practice at the festival on St. Simons that year. We were among those who saw the group, which was assembled by Lawrence McKiver, first perform the ring shout for the public on a wooden stage under the huge live oak trees; allthe elements of this presumed extinct tradition were presented conscientiously, much as the elements had been reported by nineteenth-century observers. McKiver,as lead singer or "songster ," began or "set" a song. At his side sat a "sticker" or "stick man," beating a broomstick on the floor in rhythm. Behind them a group of other singers, or "basers," answered McKiver s lines in call-and-response fashion, at the same time setting up counter-rhythms to the stick beat with clapping hands and patting feet. Then the "shouters," women dressed in the long dresses and head rags of their grandmothers' day, began to move in a counterclockwise circle, with a compelling hitching shuffle, often stooping or extending their arms in gestures pantomiming the content of the song being sung. This looked like dancing, but nonagenarian Deacon James Cook later explained the difference: "Back in the days of my coming on in the shout, if you cross your feet you were dancing, but if you solid, move on the square, you were shouting. But if you cross your feet you were turned out of the church because youwere doing something for the devil.... Soyou see those Introduction 2 [52.90.181.205] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 09:14 GMT) ladies didn't cross their feet, they shouted! And shouting is ... praising God with an order of thanksgiving."1 Like their slave ancestors, todays shouters apply the term "shout" specifically to the movements rather than to the vocal or accompanying percussive components of the shout tradition, and distinguish between shouters— those who step and move in the ring—and the singers, basers, and stickers. Lorenzo Dow Turner reported that the word is a Gullah dialect survivalof the Afro-Arabic saut...