African Drumming in early America (Part 2): The Ring-Shout

Though Christian missionaries and slave owners tried to take away the African drum, at least in some instances within early America, they could definitely not take away African rhythm.(1) Enslaved Africans simply substituted hand clapping, body slapping, foot stomping and tapping ("pattin' juba," which may have influenced later tap dancing) to produce New World rhythms as they mixed with various African musical forms and elements of white music.

The chants, hollers, call and responses, work songs, praise songs, spirituals, and even black preaching grew out of the rhythms of the African drum. These rhythmic musical forms, though not accompanied by the African drum, were often enhanced with clapping, stomping, patting the body, which was probably one of the earliest forms of drumming in human history.

One of the earliest forms of African rhythm to survive into the New World was the ring shout. Theomusicologist Jon Michael Spencer asserts:

Certainly the drum was a sacred instrument theologically pertinent to African ritual, but it was not so crucial an instrument that its absence prevented the continuation of Africa-wide rituals as the ring-shout.(2)

Spencer goes on to say that the ring-shout dance was the first evidence of the drumbeats of Africa surviving the diaspora. The ring, common to many African societies, was a symbol of community, solidarity, affirmation, and catharsis.(3)In the New World the ring-shout was also known as "shout," "glory shout," "holy dance" and "walk in Egypt." Shout refers to the movements rather than the loud vocalizations. In southwestern Louisiana among the Creole of color it is called "jure" or "testifying shouts."

Shouts were performed outside the worship service, best on wooden floors (for resonance), and during the winter season. The ring shout can be described as:

a circle of people moving single file (usually counter-clockwise) around a central point, to the accompaniment of singing, stamping, and heel clicking. On some instances, tap (in effect, drum) on the floor rhythmically with sticks to produce percussive effects. The steps are akin to a shuffle, with free foot movement prohibited, and little versatility permitted. Sometimes, the clear defined single file gives way to a sort of amorphous crowd moving around a central point. The tempo may build up gradually, singing interspersed with exclamations characteristic of some other Negro (sic) church services, until it reaches a tense peak close to an ecstatic breaking point. At the high point of the excitement, such exclamations as "Oh, Lord!" and "Yes, Lord!" turn into nonsense sound and cries; seemingly wild emotional responses, they nevertheless are related to the music as a whole.(4)

For a video sample of the ring shout from McIntosh County, Georgia:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9lNZabFiLg

Book on the ring-shout: Art Rosenbaum, Johann S. Buis, and Margo Newmark Rosenbaum, Shout Because You're Free: The African-American Ring-Shout Tradition in Coastal Georgia. University of Georgia Pres, 1998.



1. Ronald Radano proposes, against the grain of some other ethnomusicologists, that the fading of the African drum in the New World was not because it was banned or was any more a threat to whites than other black performances, but rather Radona claims that drumming may well have died out due to acculturation. Ronald Michael Radano, Lying Up a Nation: Race and Black Music. University of Chicago Press, 2003, 101-102.
2. Jon Michael Spencer, Re-searching Black Music. University of Tennessee Press, 1996, 12.
3. Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., The Power of Black Music: Interpreting Its History from Africa to the United States. Oxford University Press, 1995, 21.
4. Floyd, 42-43.