Edited by Azizi Powell
This is Part I of at three part pancocojams series about ring shouts in the United States.
This post presents excerpts from a Wikipedia page about historical documentation of ring shouts in the 18th Century and 19th century United States.
Click https://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2026/09/historical-documentation-of-ring-shouts_0146841011.html for Part II of this pancocojams series. That post presents excerpts from a Wikipedia page and other online sources about historical documentation, recollections, and anecdotal accountings of ring shouts in the 20th century and in the 21st century United States.
Click https://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2026/09/videos-of-african-american-ring-shouts_01862185101.html for Part III of this pancocojams series. That post showcases YouTube videos of ring shouts and YouTube videos of religious activities that developed from ring shouts.
These videos showcase traditional ring shouts, the Winnsboro Easter Rock, and the custom in some churches of the choir marching around the sanctuary. In the churches that follow this custom, that "march around" occurs during the portion of the church service that is dedicated to the collection/offering (i.e. receiving money from church members and other attendees of the church service).
The content of this post is presented for historical, socio-cultural, and educational purposes.
All copyrights remain with their owners.
Thanks to all those who are quoted in this post.
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EXCERPT ABOUT RING SHOUTS IN THE UNITED STATES (in the 18th century & the 19th century)
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_shout
"The ring shout is a distinctive African American ritual
dance originating with enslaved Africans in the southern United States where
worshippers move in a counterclockwise circle while hand-clapping, foot-patting
and shuffling, stick-beating to foreground the rhythm, and call-and-response
singing.[1][2][3] It is an oral tradition passed down in African American
families since the era of slavery. Elders and religious leaders pass down songs
and shouts to the younger generation. The practice of sacred circle dancing
combines spirituals and rhythmic music, reflecting its Christian and African
spiritual and cultural importance. Most scholars agree it is a "Black holy
dance"[4] that developed in the living quarters of enslaved African
practitioners[5] and Black Christian "praise houses"[3] through a
fusion of Central and West African spiritual traditions (like counterclockwise
circle dances, polyrhythms, and ancestor veneration),[1][3][6] and revivalistic
Christian practices[3][4] in either the eighteenth[7][1][6] or nineteenth
century.[4] The ring shout is part of the Black musical tradition.[8]
[...]
As described by historians and folklorists Glenn Hinson and
William Ferris:
"The shout is not just sung; it is danced, and danced with the entire body. The dancers always move counterclockwise in a circle. During the shout, the dancers and singers always sing a song that takes a call-and-response form, with numerous repetitions that foreground the cooperative nature of the singing. These repeated passages favor rhythm over melody in a way that emphasizes the collaborative nature of the event. Finally, the worship continues for a long period and escalates in intensity. As this intensity mounts, the shouters feel the presence of the Spirit in their midst. The ring shout, properly speaking, becomes a physical, aesthetic, and spiritual expression of communion. Eyewitness observers of early ring shouts frequently reported that the shouts took place after the close of formal church services.[3]"
Historical documentation
[…]
The Ring Shout was a counter-clockwise, sacred circle dance that appears to have been done universally among African American bondsmen, and later among freedmen. “The Shout,” as it was known, used subdued stepping and hopping footwork performed with a system of gesture, spirit possession, individualized sacred dancing and specific music, particularly vocal shouting. The music accompanying the Ring Shout was performed by the Shouters themselves. Singing, tapping sticks, hand claps and foot stomps provided the musical backdrop, while subtle jerking motions in the dancers’ bodies provided an additional rhythmic anchor to the Shout. Shouters would later add other instruments as the worship became modernized and adapted to demographic changes in the African American population. The Ring Shout appeared on antebellum plantations, as well as in urban areas. It frequently puzzled whites who often viewed it with suspicion, disgust, fear and misinterpretation.[23]
[…]
Enslaved people practiced the ring shout in the Southern United States since the colonial period.[27] While enslaved Africans of Igbo and Akan descent were the majority in Virginia and Maryland for a time, farther south in South Carolina and Georgia was dominated by Congo-Angolans, whose complex religious system and circular cosmology greatly influenced the African-based community.[9] According to silver professor of history and African American studies Michael A. Gomez, "the West Central African use of ring ceremonies was the main source for the development of the ring shout and the minkisi* the basis of hoodoo."[9] When these ethnic groups learned that their spiritual beliefs echoed those of the Bambara and Temne/Mende groups, especially pertaining to reincarnation, they were able to transcend cultural barriers and form a hybridized Pan-African belief system that encompassed all of the points where their traditional beliefs intersected.[9] Given all of the available evidence, Gomez concluded that "those participating in the [ring] shout during the eighteenth century were overwhelmingly non-Christian."[9]
The enslaved did not document their experiences, as many were illiterate due to anti-literacy laws in the United States that made it crime to teach enslaved people to read and write. Slaveholders, government officials, missionaries, abolitionists, teachers, and Union Civil War soldiers all documented this practice in their writings from the 18th and 19th centuries.[28] According to musicologist and educator Eileen Southern, whose research focused on the history of Black American music, the first written account of the ring shout occurred in 1819 Philadelphia by leading Methodist church father John Fanning Watson who complained that the illiterate Black people of the society were composing and singing their own forms of hymns that he considered "a growing evil."[5] Watson also reported on "a curious activity of the Negroes" that took place later after church services in the Black quarters, where he observed them patting off rhythms against their thighs, doing a "shuffle step" dance and singing. Southern contends that "this is the earliest account of a religious dance ceremony of African origin, the ring shout" that later came to be described by many.[5] Though the ring shout was practiced semi-secretly after institutional church services, this African-derived worship practice remained central to early African American Christianity.[3]
Southern also attested that "during the period when Watson was writing" in the early 1800s, similar ring shouts were also being practiced by enslaved Africans from the Bakongo, Mandinka, Mina, and Fulani ethnic groups in Congo Square (then referred to as Place Congo) in New Orleans, Louisiana.[5] Musicologist Robert Palmer wrote about some accounts of the ring shout that date from the 1840s during the pinnacle of the revival-era in Christianity. Palmer stated that it was a "Black holy dance" that "developed with the widespread conversion of slaves to Christianity during the revival fervors of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries."[4] He further wrote 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] However, there is clear documentation of earlier accounts of the ring shout.[5]
Charlotte Forten was a Black abolitionist teacher from
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania who taught freedmen at the Penn School on St. Helena
Island in South Carolina from 1862 to 1863 and documented several ring shout
experiences in praise houses. Forten wrote she enjoyed the singing and the
"shout" from her students and the local residents.[29][30] In 1862,
Laura Towne, an abolitionist teacher from Pennsylvania and founder of the Penn
School, also wrote about the ring shout in praise houses but said the practice
was "the remains of some old idol worship" and called it
savage.[31][32] Union Civil War soldier, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, commander
of the 1st South Carolina Colored Infantry Regiment, documented spirituals and
ring shout practices among the 1st South Carolina soldiers at army
camps.[33][34] An 1867 Sea Islands account of the ring shout that was reprinted
by W.F. Allen stated "It is not unlikely that this remarkable religious
ceremony is a relic of some African dance."[35] Folklorists and
musicologists John and Alan Lomax who recorded the parallels of ring shouts
performed in Louisiana, Texas, Georgia, the Bahamas, and Haiti said in 1934,
"This shout pattern is demonstrably West African in origin."[35]
Anthropologist Harold Courlander, another observer, maintained that the
"circular movement, shuffling steps and stamping, postures and gestures,
the manner of standing, the way the arms are held out for balance or pressed
against the sides, the movements of the shoulder, all are African in conception
and derivation."[35]
There were a few formerly enslaved persons who documented religious practices of the enslaved they were, Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, and Harriet Jacobs. According to research from Professor Jermaine Archer who read the slave narratives of these individuals, circle dancing, shouting, and conjure were practiced in Tennessee, Maryland, and other Southern states in the antebellum era.[36] Harriet Tubman told biographer Sarah Bradford her experience participating in a ring shout ceremony in Gullah Geechee communities in South Carolina. During the American Civil War, Northerners and Union soldiers witnessed the ring shout for the first time. Black Sea Islanders only allowed the Northerners to watch the shout and did not allow them to participate."...
Spiritual and religious meanings
African spirituality
See also: Kongo cosmogram
Cultural sociologist and professor Katrina Hazzard-Donald
asserts that the "Ring Shout was imported from an intermediary religious
form, the old Hoodoo religion: an early Americanization of a number of
different African traditional religions. This was an intermediary religious
form that developed among North American bondsmen prior to their widespread and
in depth Christianization."[23] Hazzard-Donald further compiled a list of
eight spiritual traits that "an overwhelming majority of African
captives" held when they were imported to the United States: 1)
counter-clockwise sacred circle dancing, 2) ancestor reverence, 3) belief in
the spiritual cause of malady, 4) water immersion, 5) spirit possession, 6)
animal sacrifice, 7) naturopathic medicine, and 8) divination.[2]
[…]
Some scholars, such as Africanist and art historian Robert Farris Thompson, also assert that the ring shout dance is specifically derived from Kongo counterclockwise dances that were performed in Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to symbolize the sun circling the earth.[19] …Philosopher and academic yonTande Whitney Vern Hunter described the ring shout as "an eighteenth century worship custom developed and practiced by enslaved Africans in the American South. Historically, the Ring Shout maintains an ancestral lineage connecting to the ring and circle dances of West-Central Africa."[6][47][48]
[…]
During slavery and after emancipation, other African American communities practiced the ring shout during funerals, a tradition that is similar to West African burial rituals in Sierra Leone.[60][61] Harriet Tubman attended a Black funeral in the South Carolina Lowcountry and they performed the ring shout which Tubman called a "spiritual shuffel."[62] In the Sea Islands, Gullah Geechee people create music during the ring shout using wooden sticks and clapping their hands singing Christian spirituals.[63] They also formed a circle and marched around a grave singing and shaking hands.[64]
[...]
Christian
See also: Spirituals, African-American music, African American Christianity during Slavery, and Black church
During slavery and after emancipation, ring shouts were practiced in praise houses.
During the antebellum period, enslaved Christians in South
Carolina constructed praise houses. Serving as symbols of resistance to the
slaveholders’ oppressive Christianity, these small wooden structures
demonstrated the religion of the enslaved. Enslaved Christians favored
additional space over altars, kneelers, pulpits, and chairs and pews because it
provided more room to perform the ring shouts.[72][73] These shouts have been
identified as surviving remnants of African religious rhythm and dance.[74] During
the shout, the manifestation of the one God, the Holy Spirit, is brought down
into the church.[74] Historian John Blassingame researched through the
narratives of former slaves and wrote about the religious beliefs of the
enslaved on plantations. Enslaved people performed the ring shout to "have
a joyful noise unto the God of their salvation."[75] The Oxford Handbook
of Methodist Studies notes the use of the ring shout among Methodists in
instances where individuals experienced the New Birth:[76]
The last dimension was the use of hymn singing as part of more complex rituals to create dramatic conversion experiences. One such ritual was the ring shout. Probably beginning in the simple practice of gathering around mourners to pray, the ring shout eventually developed into a form of circular singing, dancing, praying, and shouting (Taves 1999: 99–101). The ring shout was stylized musical ritual used to evoke religious experience. Anglicans in America realized the competition of Methodist hymn singing and sometimes sought to respond by introducing Methodist hymns into parish worship (Cameron 1985: 17).[76]
In other areas of the South, slaves held church services in
their praise houses because some Methodist ministers disapproved of enslaved
peoples shouts and dances.[77] Although praise houses functioned as places of
worship on the plantation, their main purpose was to limit enslaved Africans’
interactions with people from other plantations. The praise house became a
local community hub for the enslaved, symbolizing their form of religious and
cultural expression.
[...]
Scholarly research
Sociolinguist and researcher Lorenzo Dow Turner theorized
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, he proposed that the word shout may come
from Arabic shawṭ, which means in this context a single circumambulation of the
Kaaba.[1][35][123]
Influence
Professor Emeritus of history Sterling Stuckey asserted that ring shout was a unifying element of Africans in the American colonies, from which field hollers, work songs, and spirituals evolved, followed by blues and jazz.[124][125] Music educator, archivist, and historian Samuel A. Floyd Jr. further contended 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...".[126]: 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.[126]
The ring shout continues today in Georgia with the McIntosh County Shouters.[127]"...
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This concludes Part I of this pancocojams series.
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