Darien, Georgia is situated between Sapelo Island and St. Simons Island along the Georgia Coast, approximately 75 miles north Jacksonville Florida. Darien is home to two of the leading arts organizations preserving the Ring Shout Tradition, the Geechee Gullah Ring Shouters and the McIntosh County Shouters. The latter group released an album, Spirituals and Shout Songs from the Georgia Coast, on Smithsonian Folkways in 2017. The first part of the session will center around a live demonstration of each of the component parts of the Ring Shout, including the songster’s lead voice, supporting voices, clapping, stick beating and stomping, and ring movements (née dance). Audience members may be asked to participate through clapping and singing.

The Negro spiritual was a central medium slaves used to express the suffering of an inhuman existence. Saint Helena Island, one of the largest of the Sea Islands, has provided the most studied body of Negro spirituals first captured in the 1867 publication Slave Songs of the United States. This compilation contained Gullah Geechee-infused texts, rhythms and melodies of the enslaved that drew attention from white audiences, helping to inspire black college touring groups such as the Fisk Jubilee Singers and Hampton Singers. Over the past two decades, leading scholars have connected the Gullah Geechee culture to West and Central Africa, through lyrics and melody. In this presentation, I will discuss the early transcriptions by the Slave Songs editors and the Sierra Leone musicologist George Ballanta-Taylor, who visited Saint Helena Island in the early 1920s, giving insight into the manner in which the enslaved sang their songs. Finally, original transcriptions of song making throughout South Carolina Sea Islands region will be presented as a comparative analysis to the historical review and to contemporary spiritual arrangements. The audience will experience the extraordinary adaptability of the slave songs but also the immense rhythmic, linguistic, and melodic challenges often overlooked in their performance. Current Gullah Geechee research offers help to those teachers seeking authenticity in performing Negro spirituals and provides a wealth of unexplored music waiting to be studied by scholars.

In 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote that the Sea Island people are “touched and moulded less by the world about them than any others outside the Black Belt” (251­–2). The documentary film, The Language You Cry In (1988), traces a Gullah song passed down back to its origins in Sierra Leone. Though separated by 200 years and 5000 miles, the melody was immediately recognizable to Baindu Jabati, for whom even the lyrics were very familiar. Many of the features of West African melody are influence by language. According to Agawu, language and music are tied “as if by an umbilical cord” (2016). While the Gullah language is an English creole and many Gullah songs are intelligible for English language speakers, the melodic and rhythmic structure strongly suggest the aesthetics of West African ethnolinguistic cultures. For example, “Move, Daniel, move” as performed by the McIntosh County Shouters (https://youtu.be/V67IbXkibpQ), exhibits what Carter-Ényì and Àìná (2021) call pitch polarity, based on the notion of tonal counterpoint in Yorùbá chant advanced by Ọlátúnjí (1984). The example below, transcribed in Bb major, includes only the opening of the songster’s call (excluding vocal response and accompaniment). The first four measures are based on a single basic idea of one measure that is elaborated through an alternation of ending High (on ^3) and Low (on ^6) spanning the first four measures and completing two rotations of High-Low pitch polarity. The timeline expands in mm. 5–8 with a two-measure phrase ending High (^6) followed by a two-measure phrase ending Low (^1). African-centered methods to approaching the wealth of Gullah-Geechee sources will be proposed and the extent to which European models, such as sentences, are relevant to Africana (African and African Diaspora) musics will be discussed.