An Introduction to America’s Music

CHAPTER 4 | THE MUSIC OF BLACK WORSHIP 101

The three Hebrew children from the fi ery furnace,

And why not deliver me too?

Spirituals thus can be understood as both religious expressions and calls for

action. In this way they anticipate the ties between black churches and the civil

rights movement of the twentieth century. (See chapter 9 for the later history of

the spiritual.)

A related feature of African American religious expression in the nineteenth

century was sacred dancing. One early description comes from the 1849 travel

account of James Dixon, a British missionary who visited a black church in Pitts-

burgh: “After the sermon the people sang some of their own peculiarly soft and

melancholy airs. This excited them; and we had a remarkable scene. They leaped,

I know not how high, and in a manner one would have thought impossible. But,

more than this, they danced to their own melody, and in perfect time.... This

looked strange to us sober people.” Dixon appears to be describing the shout,

or ring shout, a practice that continued among freed slaves after the Civil War.

The term “shout” was applied primarily to the dance, and only secondarily to the

music for the dance. Some scholars speculate that the name is derived from the

Arabic word saut (pronounced “shout”), denoting the counterclockwise proces-

sion around the Ka’aba in Mecca, pointing to Islam’s infl uence in West Africa

and, by extension, on the American slaves who came from there.

As preserved by groups in coastal Georgia to the present day, the shout con-

sists of several elements. A leader, or songster, sets the tune, and the other singers,

or basers, answer in call-and-response format and provide rhythmic hand clap-

ping. Beside the songster sits a sticker, who beats a broom handle or other suit-

able stick on the wooden fl oor; the sticker’s long-long-short (3 + 3 + 2) rhythmic

pattern, heard in “Jubilee” (LG 4.3), is identical to the Cuban dance rhythm called

the habanera, an indicator of Caribbean infl uence. (The habanera rhythm, also

called tresillo, will play an important role in jazz, rock, and salsa.) The shout-

ers shuffl e slowly in a counterclockwise ring, using arm gestures to pantomime

the words of the songster and basers. In “Jubilee,” a shout song that apparently

dates from around the time of emancipation in 1863, the songster sets a two-

phrase call, in which the fi rst phrase ends inconclusively and the second ends

on the keynote or tonic. The basers answer with a two-phrase response, their

second phrase also ending on the tonic. Hand claps and broomstick fi ll out a

Shouting versus Secular Dancing

In their own words

I

n a 1981 interview with folklorist Art

Rosenbaum, James Cook, a 98-year-old deacon

of a black congregation in McIntosh County,

Georgia, explained the differences between the

shouters’ motions and secular dancing:

Back in the days of my comin’ on in the shout,

if you cross yo’ feet you were dancin’, but if you

solid, move on the square, you were shoutin’.

But if you cross yo’ feet you were turned

out of the church because you were doin’

somethin’ for the devil.... So you see those

ladies didn’t cross they feet, they shouted! And

shouting is... praisin’ God with an order of

thanksgiving.

LG 4.3

the ring shout

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