Ring Shouts (Antebellum)

Topic: Ring Shout
The origins of dance are lost: it left no material artifacts. All we have are images from Egyptian tomb paintings and Greek vases that were filtered through the artistic styles of the time that may have distorted more than represented physical movements.

Once writing was invented, verbal descriptions survived. If they were made by observers, they were hindered by the difficulties of describing an activity that used so many muscles. If they were made by dancers, they may have been in the language of the trade with terms whose precise meanings have been lost.

Into the vacuum rushed many with theories based on extrapolations and views of culture. Some were insightful, some silly. A number revealed more about the writer than about dance.

Many believed the ring shout was the precursor of dance-like movements in contemporary African-American religious services. It’s generally agreed shouts emerged on plantations in the southern United States before the Civil War when Africans from different villages were thrown together in close quarters.

Lydia Parrish noted:

"Shouting appears to be of two types: Along the coast of Georgia and South Carolina the most popular form is the ring-shout, in which a number of dancers move counter-clockwise in a circle. Occasionally individuals are seen in church using the same rhythmic shout step. In North Carolina and Virginia, however, the solo performance is apparently the only form in use, and the ring-shout seems to be unknown." [1]

The surviving descriptions were made by outsiders - not just by whites, but by whites who did not live with slaves. The earliest I’ve seen quoted was made by George Whitefield, the English Methodist evangelist, when he was visiting the colonies.

On Saturday, the night of 2 January 1740, he and his companions got lost when they were riding from one plantation to another in South Carolina. The Stono Rebellion by slaves from Angola had occurred less than four months before, and whites were still afraid. [2] The travelers already had met some men they suspected were runaways, and so did not approach this group to ask directions. It was a new moon. [3]

"Soon after we saw another great Fire near the Road Side, but imagining there was another Nest of such Negroes, we made a Circuit into the Woods, and one of my Friends at a Distance observed them dancing round the Fire. The Moon shining bright, we soon found our way." [4]

Benjamin Henry Latrobe was born in England and trained as an engineer and architect. He immigrated to Virginia in 1796, and moved to Philadelphia the next year where he designed neo-classical buildings. In 1818, he visited New Orleans where the city was building a waterworks he had designed. [5] His observations were contained in his record for February 26 February 1819.

"[. . .] formed into circular groupes [sic] in the midst of four of which, which I examined (but there were more of them), was a ring, the largest not ten feet in diameter. In the first were two women dancing. They held each a coarse handkerchief extended by the corners in their hands & set to each other in a miserably dull & slow figure, hardly moving their feet or bodies. Most of the circles contained the same sort of dancers. One was larger, in which a ring of a dozen women walked, by way of dancing, round, the music in the center." [6]

Charles Lyell already had revolutionized geology [7] when he was asked to lecture in the United States in 1841. [8] On his second trip, the Scotsman visited a number of plantations in 1846, including one owned by James Hamilton Couper.

"Of dancing and music the negroes are passionately fond. On the Hopeton plantation above twenty violins have been silenced by the Methodist missionaries, yet it is notorious that the slaves were not given to drink or intemperance in their merry-makings.

"At the Methodist prayer-meetings, they are permitted to move round rapidly in a ring, joining hands in token of brotherly love, presenting the right hand and then the left, in which manœuver, I am told, they sometimes contrive to take enough exercise to serve as a substitute for the dance, it being a kind of spiritual boulanger, while the singing of psalms, in an out of chapel, compensates for the songs they have been required to renounce." [9]

Couper’s father, John Couper had left Glasgow for Philadelphia after the Revolution. He moved to South Carolina, then, with James Hamilton, another Scots immigrant, he moved again to Saint Simons Island in 1793. Hamilton returned to Philadelphia in 1826, and died in 1829. James Hamilton Couper managed Hamilton’s plantations for him, and, then, for himself. [10]

Saint Simons was off the coast of the Altamaha river. Macon, Georgia, was located near the fall line on a tributary of the river. In May 1850, Fredrika Bremer [11] attended a camp meeting there that had separate services for slaves and whites. Late in the evening the Swedish novelist walked around the slave area where "all the tents were still full of religious exaltation, each separate tent presenting some new phase." In one she observed

"women dancing the ‘holy dance’ for one of the newly converted. This dancing, however, having been forbidden by the preachers, ceased immediately on our entering the tent. I saw merely a rocking movement of women who held each other by the hand in a circle, singing the while." [12]

One of Couper’s neighbors on Saint Simon was Pierce Butler, who married an English actress, Fanny Kemble, in 1834. He was an absentee land owner, and spent only one winter there with Kemble. Butler sold most of his slaves in 1859 to pay debts. [13]

Another neighbor had been Tom Spalding, who sold his land in 1834 to start farming on nearby Sapelo Island. His slaves included those owned by his father on Saint Simons, and ones he purchased in Savannah and Charleston. [14]

Katie Brown was born about 1850 on his Sapelo Island plantation. [15] In the 1930s, she told WPA interviewers:

"harvest time was time for drums. Then they had big time. When harvest in, they had big gathering. They beat drum, rattle dry gourd with seeds in them, and beat big flat tin plates. They shout and move round in circle and look like march going to heaven. Harvest festival they call it." [15]

"harves time wuz time fuh drums. Den deh hab big time. Wen hahves in, dey hab big gadderin. Dey beat drum, rattle dry goad wid seed in um, an beat big flat tin plates. Dey shout an moob roun in succle an look lak mahch goin tuh heabm. Hahves festival, dey call it."

At most one knows two things from these descriptions. The shouts appeared very early and in different forms in New Orleans and in the South Carolina-Georgia lowlands. Beyond that, all the travelers described was a formation.

End Notes
I have not done research in this area and am grateful to the individuals mentioned below. I have read the original sources cited by them.

1. Lydia Parrish. Slave Songs of the Georgia Sea Islands. New York: Creative Age Press, 1942. Reprint edition, Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1992. 54.

2. The Stono Rebellion occurred 9-10 September 1739 southwest of Charleston. Wikipedia. "Stono Rebellion" and "Stono River."

3. Fred Espenak. "Phases of the Moon: 1701 to 1800." AstroPixels website.

4. George Whitefield. A continuation of the Reverend Mr. Whitefield’s journal, from his embarking after the embargo, to his arrival at Savannah in Georgia. London: W. Strahan, 1740. 78. Margaret Washington Creel brought this to my attention. "A Peculiar People." New York: New York University Press, 1988. 102.

5. Wikipedia. "Benjamin Henry Latrobe."

6. Benjamin Henry Latrobe. Impressions Respecting New Orleans, Diary and Sketches, 1818 – 1820. Edited by Samuel Wilson Jr. New York: Columbia University Press, 1951. Book 4, February 16-February 26, 1819. 49-51. Quoted by Katrina Hazzard-Donald. "Hoodoo Religion and American Dance Traditions: Rethinking the Ring Shout." The Journal of Pan African Studies 4:194-212:September 2011. 199.

7. Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (London: J. Murray, 1830) described forces that shaped the history of the planet, especially mountains. The book influenced Charles Darwin.

8. Richard W. Macomber. "Sir Charles Lyell, Baronet." Encyclopædia Britannica. Uploaded 27 May 1999; last updated 15 February 2018.

9. Charles Lyell. A Second Visit to the United States. NY: Harper and Brothers, 1849. 1:269-270. Quoted by Washington, 297-298, and by Sterling Stuckey. Slave Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013 edition. 22.

10. James M. Clifton. "Hopeton, Model Plantation of the Antebellum South." The Georgia Historical Quarterly 66:429-449:1982. 429-430.

11. Bremer hoped to replicate the experiences of Alexis de Tocqueville when she visited the United States. He had written Democracy in America for a French audience in 1835. (Wikipedia. "Fredrika Bremer.")

12. Fredrika Bremer. America of the Fifties: Letters of Fredrika Bremer. Edited by Adolph B. Benson. New York: The American-Scandinavian Foundation, 1924. 119. Letter dated 7 May 1850.

13. Stephen W. Berry. "Butler Family." New Georgia Encyclopedia. 3 September 2002. Last updated 3 September 2014.

14. Dylan E. Mulligan. "The Original Progressive Farmer: The Agricultural Legacy of Thomas Spalding of Sapelo." Honors thesis. Georgia Southern University, April 2015. 3.

15. Parrish. 131.

16. Georgia Writers Project. Dreams and Shadows: Survival Studies among the Georgia Coastal Negroes. Project director, Mary Granger. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1940. 152. Quoted by Michael A. Gomez. Exchanging Our Country Marks. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998. 266.