Walk With Me
Ring Shout as ritual and community -
Past and Present
The ring shout in the Gullah Geechee culture in the past was a means of creating community, giving a sense of autonomy, spiritual connection with each other, and significance to life events. As a ritual, it gave community members roles in the performance, a sense of shared identity through the songs and traditions used and passed along, and even as a form of judicial representation when as an enslaved person you had none. Without legal recognition, this community like other enslaved peoples in the United States had to create their own recognition (Small and Singleton-Prather 2014). Ring shouts could follow more than a Sunday church service and were often used to mark special events in community member’s lives such as marriages or funerals.
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The ring shout was often performed following rites of passage in the Gullah Geechee community, the most important being that of ‘seeking’, where a person went through a spiritual rebirth and baptism to become a member of the community. “Geechee praise societies used their congregationally valued travel genres to help members claim the authority of their own experience. […] Following ritual death and rebirth beneath living baptismal waters (“wen duh tide is goin’ out so duh watuh will wash duh sins away”), congregants often celebrated in a ring shout.” (Cartwright, 2013).
Outside of the physical space of the praise house, community members created through the ring shout ritual a liminal space for their sacred and secular needs that could not be shared with that of slave owners during regular church services. As Sims and Stephens outline about the purpose of space in a ritual, “For the duration of the ritual, the participants can change identity, become something other than what they typically are.” (Sims and Stephens 2011).
The space and insular practices observed in the ritual ring shout, represent the space enslaved people made for themselves, their spiritual needs, and their need to express their culture that would not have been accepted or recognized by the larger world. “[…] Despite the prohibition of dancing as heathenish and sinful, the slaves were able to reinterpret and “sanctify” their African tradition of dance in the “shout.” While North American slaves danced under the impulse of the Spirit of a “new” God, they danced in ways their fathers in Africa would have recognized.” (Rosenbaum 1998)
The modern day ring shout has transformed into a more openly expressive ritual. Performers no longer need to create cryptic songs, use particular instruments or dancing traditions to create a liminal space to obfuscate from dominant and outside Christian societies. Nor is it necessarily always performed in a praise house structure. As a secular expression of the ritual, ring shouts can take place after church services, during memorials for community members, during cultural festivals, or even as artistic expressions of African American identity.
The ring shout itself as a ritual has been transformed into different higher context expressions, with many ring shout songs adapted and used during Baptist services in gospel choirs as well as distinct dance elements from the ring shout finding their way into choir performances (performance of feet, hands, tambourines, in rhythm, call and response song structure).
Besides as a communal expression of spirituality, the ring shout in modern practice has come to represent for practitioners a way of honoring both their ancestors and their endurance during slavery. Performance of the ring shout is seen as a means of bringing the present day community together and keeping a connection to the past, a circle of continuity taken from the very nature of the ritual dance itself. These transformed expressions that carry on these traditions are an example that, “[…] tradition doesn’t always move in a straight line from past to present, one generation to the next. Tradition incorporates space as well as time: we share traditions from group to group, person to person, place to place—in the present—across and within groups.” (Sims and Stephens 2011).
As expressed by activist, artist, and Gullah Geechee community leader, Marquetta Goodwine, the ring shout and other rituals passed down in her community are celebrated as new traditions both honoring the past and strengthening the Gullah Geechee identity for the future.
“I dance, I sing, and I speak, I reach backward to the lives of my ancestors that came over during chattel enslavement by no choice of their own and find the drum in their spirit that caused them to march on through these fields and navigate this new landscape in such a way that their very teardrops and drops of blood that hit the soil here left a resounding echo and a pulsation that enters me as my feet connect with the sand in which their footsteps and their very bones are embedded. I am renewed.” (Goodwine 2024).