Shout Because You're Free The African American Ring Shout Tradition in Coastal Georgia (review)

had been identified. Certainly, the inclusion of this minimal information in the captions would not have detracted from the layout. These minor suggestions aside, this is altogether a handsome and informative volume. Wootten's oeuvre is successful artistically, and Cotten's collection of her evocative images provides remarkable documentation ofrural life in the South of the 1930s and 1940s. Shout Because You're Free The African American Ring Shout Tradition in Coastal Georgia By Art Rosenbaum The University of Georgia Press, 1998 190 pp. Cloth, $24.95 Reviewed by Dale Volberg Roed, freelance writer and musician residing in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and coauthor with John Shelton Reed of 1001 Things Everyone Should Know about the South. She currendy is preparing the catalog for the exhibition of the Everette James collection of southern women artists, 1840—1940. When I was a child I learned a spiritual that goes like this: I got shoes; you got shoes; All God's children got shoes. When I get to Heaven, gonna put on my shoes, Gonna shout all over God's Heaven . . . I never even wondered what shoes had to do with shouting all over God's heaven. Now I know. For a long time southern folklorists have been eagerly awaiting the results of Art Rosenbaum's sixteen years ofwork on the ring shout. It was worth the wait. This is a splendid addition to the growing literature documentingAfrican cultural survivals in the South. It's hard to get much closer to Africa than the ring shout, a direct descendant ofAfrican religious dance, and in the U.S. it survives as a living tradition only in Mcintosh County, Georgia, within two miles ofInterstate 95. In the shout, worshipers move in a counterclockwise circle, following the directions of a lead singer. They do a distinctive shuffling step in which the back foot does not pass the front foot, which would be considered dancing. (The preachers of the Great Revival strongly condemned secular dance, so the ring shout was carefully redefined as not-dancing.) Worshipers use a separate group 78 southern cultures, Fall 1999 : Reviews of shout songs that have a typically African melodic shape and are as distinctive as the step. Though I would have liked more detail about the African musical characteristics, Rosenbaum does explain that the songs use the familiar pattern of call and response as well as the less common sound ofAfrican heterophony, exacdy as described in 1 867 by William Frances Allen's Slave Songs in the UnitedStates: "There is no singing in parts, as we understand it, and yet no two appear to be singing the same thing." A "beater" adds a strong and highly complex rhythm (usually by a broom stick beaten on the wooden floor) to the shouters' clapping and strong heel and toe rhythms. The book manages to be both graceful and elegant while juggling the general history of the shout, the specific history ofits survival in Mcintosh County (including a great amount of oral history about the community and the shout), discussion of the African components of the music and the dance, and hypotheses about the possible Arabic influence on the music and the name itself (perhaps from the Arabic sout). It includes transcriptions ofthe entire body oftwenty-five Mcintosh County shout songs, documentary photographs ofthe performers in worship and in public performance, ten highly evocative drawings by Mr. Rosenbaum ofthe shouters in their praise house, and a fine and enticing bibliography . It raises a lot ofquestions, especially about self-conscious preservation of culture, but it answers a lot more. ShoutBecause You're Free should appeal to a broad popular and academic audience . Musicians, folklorists, cultural historians, sociologists and anthropologists, students of religion, and general readers, especially southerners, should find it fascinating. It is blessedly jargon free. To document this unique cultural phenomenon, Rosenbaum has also made a half-hour film, Down Yonder: TheMcintosh CountyShouters (available on video, along with two other films about old-time music in Georgia, from the University of Georgia Center for Continuing Education), and a recording, TheMcintosh County Shouters: SlaveSongsfromthe CoastofGeorgia (Folkways fe 4344, available on cassette or cd). above: The "ring shout, " rendered byArtRosenbaum. From Shout Because You're...