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

Notes

Notes Introduction. "We Never Let It Go By" 1. Interview, August 7, 1981. 2. Turner, Lorenzo Dow, Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect (1949; reprint, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1949). Turner defines the Arabic saut as "a religious ring dance in which the participants continue to perform until exhausted" and cites an Arabicverb, sauwata, meaning to run until exhausted (p. 202). Accounts ofthe North American coastal ring shout frequently describe the participants continuing until they tire. 3. Notes to On One Accord: Singing and Praying Bands of Tidewater Maryland and Delaware, Global Village CD 225; produced by Jonathan David and Michael Schlesinger, annotated by Jonathan David. 4. Interview, August 7, 1981. 5. Bessie Jones and Bess Lomax Hawes, Step It Down: Games, Plays, Songs, and Stories from the Afro-American Heritage (1972; reprint, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987), p. 143. 6. Another remarkable African survival has recently surfaced in Mclntosh County. Mary Moran, a seventy-five-year-old resident of the Harris Neck Community,a few miles north of Bolden, has remembered a funeral song in the Mende language of Sierra Leone that she learned from her late mother, Ameilia Dawley. Prompted by ethnomusicologist Cynthia Schmidts playing of a recording of Dawley made in the 1930s by Lorenzo Dow Turner, Ms. Moran was able to sing the song, which had been passed down by women through the generations since the forced voyage from Africa. Unlike the Bolden ring shout tradition, which was unbroken in community practice, Morans rare African song was held in inactive memory until recently. She has continued the chain of tradition by teaching it to her granddaughter; she also sings it in public performance, on at least one occasion during a program with the Mclntosh County Shouters. Jingle Davis, "Survival of the Gullah," Atlanta Journal-Constitution, November 7, 1996, G-l. 173 I. "Kneebone in the Wilderness" From The Griots, Folkways FE 4178, recorded by Samuel Charters. This powerful song presents a unique description of the slavetrade from an African perspective . The song is sung in Mandingo, but the terms "slave house" and "American Negroes " are sung in English. 1. Spoken introduction to "Kneebone Bend" by Lawrence McKiver, December 13, 1983. 2. Robert Farris Thompson, African Art in Motion (Los Angeles:University of California Press, 1974), 80-82. 3. Betty J. Crouther, "Iconography of a Henry Gudgell Walking Stick,"Southeastern College Art Conference Review vol. 12, no. 3, 1993; cites Patrick R. McNaughton , "Bamana Blacksmiths,"African Arts 12 (February 1979). 4. Thompson, African Art, 32. Thompson cites I. Schapera, The Early Cape Hottentots (Capetown, S. Afr.: Van Riebeek Society, n.d.), 139. 5. Ibid., 32. Lorna Marshall, "Kung Bushmen Religious Beliefs," Africa 2 (1962), 249. 6. James W Covington, The Seminoles of Florida (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993), 94. 7. Louis Capron, "The Medicine Bundles of the Florida Seminole and the Green Corn Dance," in Anthropological Papers 35, Smithsonian Institution Bulletin no. 151, reprinted in William Sturdevant, ed., A Seminole Source Book (New York: Garland Publishing, 1987), 197. 8. Frank G. Speck, "Ethnology of the YuchiIndians" in AnthropologicalPublications , University of Pennsylvania, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: University Museum, 1909), 124. 9. Elaine Nichols, ed., The Last Miles of the Way: African-American Homegoing Traditions, 1890-Present (Columbia: South Carolina State Museum, 1989). Nichols cites Stuckeys Slave Culture, 12, and Robert Farris Thompsons Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art (New York: Random House, 1983), 109-110. 10. Thompson, Flashof the Spirit, 108. II. Ibid, 111. 12. Georgia Writers' Project (Savannah Unit),Works Projects Administration, Drums and Shadows: Survival Studies Among the Georgia Coastal Negroes (1940; Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), 180. 13. Harold Courlander, Negro Folk Music, U.S.A. (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1963), 200. 14. Letitia Burwell, Plantation Reminiscences, 57, quoted in Dena J. Epstein, 174 Notes Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 130. 15. Stuckey,Slave Culture, 87. 16. Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion:The "Invisible Institution" in the Antebellum South (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1978), 72-73. 17. William Francis Allen,Charles Pickard Ware, Lucy McKim Garrison,Slave Songs of the United States, with a new introduction by W K. McNeil (1867; reprint, Baltimore: Clearfield Co.,1992), xii-xiii. 18. Erskine Clarke, Wrestlin Jacob (Atlanta:John Knox Press, 1979), 46-47. 19. Charles Colcock Jones, Suggestions, 39-40, quoted in Epstein, 201. 20. Epstein, 192-94. 21...