Ring shout

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A shout, ring shout, Hallelujah march or victory march is a Christian religious practice in which worshipers move in a circle while praying and clapping their hands, sometimes shuffling and stomping their feet as well. [1] Despite the name, shouting aloud is not an essential part of the ritual march, which varies by congregation and locality.

Contents

Hallelujah Marches are associated with the Baptist, Methodist (especially in congregations aligned with the holiness movement), and Pentecostal branches of Christianity. [2] [3] The earliest accounts of the practice date to the 1840s, where the ring shout was described as being a form of revivalistic Christian worship. [4] Certain authors claim that the ring shout may be inspired by cultural practices in Africa that became incorporated as a part of Christian worship and imbued with new theological meaning. [5] [6] Ring shouts may occur when a congregant experienced the New Birth or became entirely sanctified. [7] [8] Ring shouts may also occur when the congregation perceives the presence of the Holy Spirit during worship. [9]

African slaves in the West Indies and the United States partook in ring shouts upon their conversion to Christianity. [7] The ring shout was has been practiced in some Black churches into the 20th century, and it continues to the present among the Gullah people of the Sea Islands and in "singing and praying bands" associated with many Methodist congregations in Tidewater Maryland and Delaware, which have a large African American membership. [10]

Hallelujah Marches have a strong association with Christian tent meetings and camp meetings, in which the New Birth and entire sanctification are promulgated. [11] [12] [13] They have been practiced by Christians of various ethnic and racial backgrounds. [7]

A more modern form, known still as a "shout" (or "praise break"), is practiced in many Pentecostal churches, along with black churches of various denominations, to the present day. Traditionally, ushers in Arkansas and Mississippi form a circle around the church member and allows them to shout within the circle.

Description

"Shouting" often took place during or after a Christian prayer meeting or worship service. Men and women moved in a circle in a counterclockwise direction, shuffling their feet, clapping, and often spontaneously singing or praying aloud. Robert Palmer states that it "developed with the widespread conversion of slaves to Christianity during the revival fervors of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries." [4] He further writes that the "earliest accounts date from the 1840s; more vivid descriptions from the twentieth century leave little doubt that the dancing and stamping constituted a kind of drumming, especially when worshipers had a wooden church floor to stamp on." [4] Ring shouts have often used as an act of praise when a person accepts the message of Christianity. [4] As such, they are also known as "Hallelujah Marches", with the word Hallelujah meaning "Praise Jahweh". [14] The term "Victory March" has been used to reference the Christian concept of actively serving God and living victoriously over sin. [1]

In Jamaica and Trinidad the shout was usually performed around a special second altar near the center of a church building. In the Sea Islands of Georgia and South Carolina, shouters formed a circle outdoors, around the church building itself. [15] In some cases, enslaved people retreated into the woods at night to perform shouts, often for hours at a time, with participants leaving the circle as they became exhausted. [16] [17] In the twentieth century, churchgoers (especially those of the Methodist and Pentecostal traditions) in the United States performed shouts by forming a circle around the pulpit, in the space in front of the altar, or around the nave. [3] [18]

Ring shouts were sometimes held in honour of the dead. This custom has been practiced by traditional bands of carnival revelers in New Orleans. [19]

Origin

The Kongo cosmogram may have inspired the ring shout in African-American communities and in Jamaica. It is a sacred dance performed to become possessed by the Holy Spirit or ancestral spirits. Kongo Cosmogram 3.png
The Kongo cosmogram may have inspired the ring shout in African-American communities and in Jamaica. It is a sacred dance performed to become possessed by the Holy Spirit or ancestral spirits.

According to musicologist Robert Palmer, the first written accounts of the ring shout date from the 1840s, during the pinnacle of Christian revivalism. The stamping on the church floor and clapping in a circle was described as a kind of "drumming," and 19th-century writers described it as accompanying the conversion of slaves to Christianity. [4]

The ring shout gained ground among Methodists of the holiness movement. [22] Certain authors posit that the Christian ring shout may be assumed to be derived from African dance, and scholars usually point out the presence of melodic elements such as call-and-response singing and heterophony, [23] as well as rhythmic elements such as tresillo and "hamboned" rhythm, and aesthetic elements such as counter-clockwise dancing and ecstasy, [24] [25] [26] which makes the ring shouts of Christianity similar to ceremonies among people like the Bakongo, Igbos, Yoruba, Ibibio, Efik, Bahumono. [27] A minority of scholars have suggested that the ritual may have originated among enslaved Muslims from West Africa as an imitation of tawaf , the mass procession around the Kaaba that is an essential part of the Hajj. If so, the word "shout" may come from Arabic shawṭ, meaning "a single run", such as a single circumambulation of the Kaaba, or an open space of ground for running. [28] [29]

Influence

Sterling Stuckey in his book, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory & the Foundations of Black America (1987, ISBN   0195042654) argues that ring shout was a unifying element of Africans in American colonies, from which field hollers, work songs, and spirituals evolved, followed by blues and jazz. [30] In his article, "Ring Shout! Literary Studies, Historical Studies, and Black Music Inquiry", Samuel A. Floyd Jr. argues that many of the stylistic elements observed during the ring shout later laid the foundations of various black music styles developed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. According to Floyd, "...all of the defining elements of black music are present in the ring...". [31] : 52 

These basic elements of ring shouts included calls, cries, and hollers; blue notes; call-and-response; and various rhythmic aspects. Examples of black music that would evolve from the ring include, but are not limited to, Afro-American burial music of New Orleans, the Blues, the Afro-American Symphony, as well as the music that has accompanied various dance forms also present in Afro-American culture. [31]

The ring shout has developed into the modern "shout" (or "praise break") tradition now seen across the globe. Though augmented and interracialized by the Pentecostal tradition in the early 1900s and spreading to various denominations and churches thereafter, it is still primarily practiced among Christians of West African descent.

The ring shout continues today in Georgia with the McIntosh County Shouters. [32]

See also

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References

  1. 1 2 Holland, Nina (22 May 2020). Go Back with Me: A Nostalgic Recall of Early 1940 Life in West Virginia. WestBow Press. ISBN   978-1-9736-9171-6. That promoted the Pentecostal folks to jin in and so began a victory march around the perimter of the church. It was a glorious time, with everyone joining into, either the marching, or the singing, or the clapping of hands.
  2. ↑ Ingersol, Stan (1 December 2009). "A Photojournal of Compassion". Holiness Today. Retrieved 17 July 2024.
  3. 1 2 Bowie, Lenard C. (30 January 2012). African American Musical Heritage: An Appreciation, Historical Summary, and Guide to Music Fundamentals. Bowie. p. 244. ISBN   978-1-4653-0575-6. Ring shouts often lasted for hours on end. The shout was a central part of Holiness and Pentecostal services.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 Palmer, Robert (1981). Deep Blues. Penguin Books Ltd.: Middlesex, Eng. p.  38. ISBN   0-14-006223-8..
  5. ↑ Knowles, Mark (3 June 2002). Tap Roots: The Early History of Tap Dancing. McFarland. p. 59. ISBN   978-0-7864-1267-9.
  6. ↑ Hunter, TaTande Whitney V. (August 2023). "The "Ring Shout": A Corporeal Conjuring of Black-Togetherness". Dance Research Journal. 55 (2): 44–57. doi:10.1017/S0149767723000268. Yes, groups that sustain the Ring Shout as "authentic" to the Gullah-Geechee culture are mostly Christian based in their religious affiliation. However, the very practice of assembling and traveling along the sacred circle goes deep into the cultural history of the various African peoples that are sources of the indigenous culture of the Gullah-Geechee, specifically, people of African descent from the West and West-Central African regions.
  7. 1 2 3 Johnson, Alonzo; Jersild, Paul T. (1996). Ain't Gonna Lay My 'ligion Down: African American Religion in the South. Univ of South Carolina Press. p. 62. ISBN   978-1-57003-109-0. The symbolic importance of the ring or circle in Negro spiritual expression is underscored in European traveler Fredrika Bremer's account of an interracial evangelical camp meeting near Charleston, South Carolina in 1850, where she witnessed amng slaves, mostly from South Carolina, circles of women dancing "the holy dance" for the newly converted; circles of people holding hands, rocking and singing joyously; and even a "vast" circle of tents "of all imaginable forms and colours." ... The continued observance of the ring shout ritual throughout the slave community, especially among those 'converted' to Christianity, demonstrates beyond question the tenacious power and influence of the slaves' African cultural inheritance.
  8. ↑ Lincoln, C. Eric; Mamiya, Lawrence H. (7 November 1990). The Black Church in the African American Experience. Duke University Press. p. 365. ISBN   978-0-8223-1073-0. What is indisputable, however, is that the shout serves as a testimony to the shouter's felt sense of Spirit Baptism or sanctification.
  9. ↑ Lincoln, C. Eric; Mamiya, Lawrence H. (7 November 1990). The Black Church in the African American Experience. Duke University Press. p. 365. ISBN   978-0-8223-1073-0. If the dancing continues without the music, it is assumed that it is genuine and induced by the Holy Spirit. But if it ceases, apparently it was not so holy after all and was merely rhythmically induced.
  10. ↑ David, Jonathan C. (2007). Together Let Us Sweetly Live: The Singing and Praying Bands. Champaign IL: University of Illinois Press. ISBN   978-0-252-07419-6.
  11. ↑ Ingersol, Stan (1 December 2009). "The Closer: Phineas Bresee and Church Union". Holiness Today. Retrieved 17 July 2024. Committed to uniting the regional churches, Bresee secured concessions from the Southerners and from his own group, and on October 13, at 10:40 in the morning, the vote to merge the denominations was taken, followed by scenes of great joy and a "Hallelujah March" around the meeting tent.
  12. ↑ Satterfield, Ray; Cope, Daniel (2018). A Heritage of Holiness: The Story of Allegheny Wesleyan Methodism. Salem: Allegheny Press. p. 133. At the close of the altar service the camp closed with the largest and most glorious "Hallelujah March" we have ever witnessed.
  13. ↑ "Salvation Army Old Orchard Beach Camp Meeting". The Sacramento Union . Sacramento, California. 20 July 1885. p. 2. Retrieved 17 July 2024. The Salvation Army opened its national campmeeting here to-day with a "knee drill at 7 a. m., followed by the hallelujah march.
  14. ↑ Young, Carlton R. (1993). Companion to the United Methodist Hymnal. Abingdon Press. p. 204. ISBN   978-0-687-09260-4. Alleluia is the Latin form of Hallelujah, an acclamation formed by joining "Hallelu" (to praise) with the first syllable in a Hebrew name for God, Yahweh.
  15. ↑ Sylviane A. Diouf, Servants of Allah, 68-9.
  16. ↑ Glocke (2011). "Dancin' on the Shoulders of Our Ancestors: An Introduction" (PDF). Journal of Pan African Studies. 4 (6). Retrieved 23 September 2023.
  17. ↑ Silvia King, quoted in Zita Allen, "From Slave Ships to Center Stage", https://web.archive.org/web/20070203082227/https://www.pbs.org/wnet/freetodance/behind/behind_slaveships.html, 2001, accessed 8 July 2007
  18. ↑ Lydia Parrish, Slave Songs, 54, quoted in Diouf, Sylviane (2013). Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas. NYU Press. p. 68. ISBN   978-1-4798-4711-2.
  19. ↑ Lomax, Alan (Summer 1938). "Jelly Roll Morton on the Mardi Gras Indians (1938)". YouTube. Archived from the original on Jun 15, 2023.
  20. ↑ Opala, Joseph. "Gullah Customs and Traditions" (PDF). Yale University. Retrieved 11 June 2022.
  21. ↑ Murphy (1994). Working the Spirit Ceremonies of the African Diaspora. Beacon Press. pp. 147–155, 171–175. ISBN   9780807012215.
  22. ↑ Callahan, Richard J. (2008). New Territories, New Perspectives: The Religious Impact of the Louisiana Purchase. University of Missouri Press. p. 139. ISBN   978-0-8262-6626-2.
  23. ↑ Shout Because You're Free: The African American Ring Shout Tradition in Coastal Georgia. University of Georgia Press. 1 October 2013. p. 171. ISBN   978-0-8203-4611-3.
  24. ↑ Shout Because You're Free: The African American Ring Shout Tradition in Coastal Georgia. University of Georgia Press. 1 October 2013. pp. 168–170. ISBN   978-0-8203-4611-3.
  25. ↑ Leslie M. Alexander; Leslie Alexander; Walter C. Rucker (28 February 2010). Encyclopedia of African American History. ABC-CLIO. pp. 247–248. ISBN   978-1-85109-769-2.
  26. ↑ Paul Finkelman (6 April 2006). Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass Three-volume Set. Oxford University Press, USA. pp. 363–364. ISBN   978-0-19-516777-1.
  27. ↑ Sterling Stuckey (23 April 1987). Slave Culture : Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America. Oxford University Press, USA. pp. 10–11. ISBN   978-0-19-802124-7.
  28. ↑ Diouf, Servants of Allah, 69. Lorenzo Dow Turner proposed the theory, and Lydia Parrish first reported it in 1942. Turner's translation of shaut (sic) as "to move around the Kaaba ... until exhausted" is inaccurate, according to Diouf, as neither sha'wt nor tawaf implies exhaustion.
  29. ↑ Lane, Arabic -English Lexicon (1863) p. 1619.
  30. ↑ "The Whitman Sisters: Why We May Never Silence Them"
  31. 1 2 Floyd Jr., Samuel (2002). "Ring Shout! Literary Studies, Historical Studies, and Black Music Inquiry". Black Music Research Journal. 22. Center for Black Music Research - Columbia College of Chicago and University of Illinois Press: 49–70. doi:10.2307/1519943. JSTOR   1519943.
  32. ↑ Snithsonian Staff. ""Jubilee" by the McIntosh County Shouters". Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. Smithsonian Institution.

Bibliography

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