Ring Shout

Ring Shout

A ring shout is a religious ritual, used by African slaves, to declare a oneness to God, call out to the ancestors, and to speak to each other. It's a counterclockwise dance-like movement, call-and-response singing, and percussion consisting of hand claps, and a stick beating the rhythm on the ground or the floor. 

The ring shout was often performed after the slave owner's Christian service. It is said that the Gullah/Geechee, of Georgia and South Carolina, ring shouters made a circle around the church building. Often times, the slaves went into the woods at night to perform shouts, for hours, until they were exhausted. 

A ring shout is performed when a songster begins or sets a song starting off slow, then speeds up the tempo. The singers, or basers answers the songster in a call-and response. There is a stick-man, who sits next to the songster, will beat a simple rhythm with a wood stick, sometimes a broom, the basers will use hand clapping and foot patting to add rhythm. 

The earliest known records of the ring shout are circa 1840. Today, the shouting that is done in some churches come from the ring shout. 


Below you can watch the McIntosh County Shouters perform a traditional ring shout

Blue Bottle Tree

      

The blue bottle tree is another one of those southern tradition that many people don't know the complete history of.  Having a blue bottle tree in the yard is a old Gullah/Geechee custom. The trees are used to capture evil haints for getting into one's home. The haints are lured inside the bottle by light reflected thru the blue bottle at dusk. Once the haints are inside the bottle they are trapped. What happens to them are up for debate. Some say that they are trapped in the bottles forever, and the noise you hear are the haints moaning, and crying. Others say that once the sun rises the haints are vaporized by the sun's light. 

Today, people use different color bottles, but blue was the choosen by the Gullah/Geechee people for a reason. The Gullah/Geechees used blue because of their belief that the color blue wards off evil spirits. 

Do you know anyone with a blue bottle tree in their yard?

 

Who are the Geechee People?

The Gullah/Geechee people are the descendants of slaves, brought over
from West and Central Africa, that live in the coastal regions of
South Carolina, Georgia, portions of Florida, and North Carolina-known
to some as the Gullah corridor.  In Georgia there are sub- groups of
the Gullah/Geechee people, the Saltwater Geechees, and the Freshwater
Geechees. The Gullah/Geechee is one of the oldest surviving cultures
in the US. 

The Gullah/Geechee Corridor 

Picture Source: National Park Service 

 A brief history:

   During the eighteenth century, plantation owners in South Carolina
and Georgia wanted slaves who could grow rice in the humid subtropical
climate of the Sea Islands.  Due to the difficulty of growing
rice, and the fact that the slaves had some resistance to diseases, such
as malaria and yellow fever, the owners of the plantations paid higher
prices for slaves from Western Africa. West Africa is sometimes
referred to as the rice coast. The slave owners, who were susceptible
to yellow fever and malaria, mostly lived inland for most of the year,
while leaving the slaves on the Sea Islands, such as St. Simons
Island, St. Helena Island, Hilton Head Island, and Sapelo Island. When
the slaves were freed after the Civil War, many Gullah bought the land
on which they worked on and continued their agrarian way of life. This
would be their life for the next one hundred years. As time moved on,
the Gullah/Geechee people moved to the mainland, for example
Charleston, SC, and Savannah, Georgia, then on to other areas.

  The Sea Islands of South Carolina, and Georgia.

Picture source: Wikipedia

 The Language:

  The Africans, captured from Sierra Leone, Angola, Liberia, and other
countries, were held together as they began to develop a pidgin
language. The language or dialect that the Gullah/Geechee people speak
is also referred to as Gullah, and/or Geechee. This language is the
blending of the pidgin language with English, spoken by the slave
masters, and over 4000 different African words, from many different
tribes. The Gullah language is heavily influenced by Sierra Leone
Krio.

There are several theories about where the word Gullah actually comes
from.  Some believe that the word Gullah came from Angola. Others
believe the word came from the tribe of Gola, which is near the border
of Liberia and Sierra Leone, where the Mende, and Vai territories come
together. Yet others believe that the word, "Gullah" could also draw
from Gallinas, which is another name for the Vai, or posibbly from
Galo, which is the Mende word for the Vai people.