Ring Shouts (Photographs)

Topic: Origins - Ring Shout
Lydia Parrish may have been the first to supplement her descriptions of ring shouts with published photographs. She was the wife of the painter Maxfield Parrish, who had abandoned her for his model sometime after 1905. Lydia began visiting Saint Simons island off the Georgia coast in 1909, [1] where she stayed at the Arnold House and made her first contacts with descendants of slaves who had worked on the plantations mentioned in the post for 18 September 2018. [2]

Willis Proctor managed the dining room [3] and Margaret cleaned her room. [4] His mother was born on Tom Spalding’s father’s plantation, Retreat, [5] when it was held by Thomas Butler King. [6] Proctor’s father was owned by Horace Bunch Gould, [7] who had purchased Black Banks located east of James Hamilton’s lands. [8] Parrish never gave Margaret’s last name.

By 1909, Saint Simons was undergoing its second economic transformation after the Civil War. Federal troops had occupied the island in February 1862, three months after taking Port Royal, South Carolina. Those men who weren’t in the Confederate army were arrested, and their families fled to the mainland with a few slaves. In August, abandoned slaves were sent to Hilton Head and Florida, as the navy commandeered the Frederica river. [9] Runaways were left to fend for themselves.

Caroline Couper Lovell remembered, after the war Saint Simons "seemed a lonely and desolate place, cut off almost entirely from the world. Most of the plantations had been abandoned, most of the houses had been burned or were in ruins, gardens and fields were reverted to jungle. Only one of two of the old families were left on the island, and these were in sadly reduced circumstances." [10]

Her mother’s birthplace, James Hamilton Couper’s Hopeton, was owned by outsiders who lived in Paris. [11] Her mother’s brother, Uncle Jimmie, managed the plantation for them and planted rice with the help of Irish ditch diggers. When this wasn’t profitable, the Corbins sold the plantation. [12]

Southern economic development after the war was controlled by railroads. The Macon and Brunswick lured William Dodge and William Eastman in 1869 with a promise of 300,000 acres of land between the fall line and Georgia coast. [13] Their Georgia Land and Lumber Company shipped logs and cut lumber down the Altamaha river to Darien. From there, the timber was taken to wharves along the Fredrica river at the south end of Saint Simons [14] on land purchased from James Hamilton’s plantation. [15] The timber was gone by the end of the century, and Hilton and Dodge closed its Saint Simons facility in 1903. [16]

During the period when Gascoigne Bluff above the river was an industrial center, amusement parks and resort hotels had opened. These became more sophisticated after the mill closed, and people like Parrish began visiting. She remembered when she first arrived "the island was a summer resort, and contact with city whites and their black servants had had its numbing influence; that the old-time singing had gone out of style, and spirituals weren’t sung any more." [17]

Parrish left her husband in 1911, [18] and made Saint Simon her winter home in 1912. [19] The Cater family owned the land of the other side of the Frederica river at the south end of the island. The antebellum owner, James Pettigrew Postell had died in 1898, and his wife, Anne Armstrong Cater, in 1911. They already had been selling parts of the Kelvin Grove plantation [20] where Margaret’s family had lived. [21] Parrish bought the land near the marsh for her house. [22]

She began collecting songs immediately, but found few of the African Americans were willing to sing for her. She recalled:

"After three musically barren winters I discovered, however, that a few Negroes remembered their old songs and could be induced to sing for me if I would make it worth their while. This was in 1915, and, ever since, I have been doing just that: making it worth their while." [23]

Seeing a shout took much longer than hearing secular songs. After nine years, [24] Margaret took her to the hall of the Queen of the South Society. [25] Parrish recalled "she wiggles her hips shamelessly, held her shoulders stiff–at the same time thrusting them forward–kept her feet flat on the floor, and, with the usual rhythmic heel-tapping, progressed with real style around the circle–goodness knows how. [26]

After that there were shouts in the cabin she had built in 1929. [27] Parrish was able to take a photograph of Margaret demonstrating "the correct position of arms and feet." She and another women had their elbows bent, but let their forearms swing from those pivots at waist level. A man beside them facing the other direction also had bent elbows, but his arms were lower. [28]

Parrish published a second photograph with an older man with his arms pulled back and his torso tilted forward. Both knees were bent, and one foot was completely off the ground with the toes near the floor. A tall man facing in the opposite direction had his elbows bent, his head forward, and one foot lifted a fraction of an inch from the floor. [29]

A third photograph showed middle-school-aged girls clapping their hands as they moved in a circle. One had her hands perpendicular when they made contact, while the other’s were horizontal. Like the adults, they had one heel raised from the floor. [30]

Unlike many of the people who described ring shouts before and after the Civil War, Parrish was able to observe them many times. Many of her comments substantiated what the photographs showed. She said Edith

"who, being a Murphy, is temperamental–every now and then she gives a stylized, angular performance as though copying the poses of the figures in Egyptian decorations. The way she holds her arms and hands is perfect. It positively hurts that I have no moving picture of her statuesque, rhythmic pauses, or the pause Gertrude makes with head and shoulders bowed slight forward, arms held close to her boy, elbows bent at right angles, forearms thrust out before her, and palms upturned in a supplicating gestures." [31]

The writer for The Continental Monthly had observed the same pause in 1867. "At the end of each stanza of the song the dancers stop short with a slight stamp on the last note, and then, putting the other foot forward, proceed through the next verse." [32]

More important than observing the movements, Parrish was able to record the texts and have musicians transcribe the tunes that were used, and thus documented the relationship between movement and music. She began by noting:

"No leader sings a song twice alike, and no two ever sing exactly the same version; yet the beat, the accent, and the tune remain so stable that leaders are unerringly followed. The words are in truth only the vehicle for carrying along the complicated rhythm." [33]

Parrish also noticed that, despite decades of intermixing by freedmen, local variations persisted, which probably dated back to unique cultures on individual plantations before the Civil War. The group who met at her cabin expanded through kinship networks, and more were able to come "when a causeway was put across the marshes in 1924." [34] Saint Simons was in Glynn County and Darien was in McIntosh County on the mainland. She wrote that one shout song, "Oh Eve—Where Is Adam?", was

"beaten out by the heels of the McIntosh County group in a way not approached by any other that I know. Shouters sometimes clap their hands; on St. Simon’s they always call for a broom handle, which, when knocked on the floor, provides an extemporaneous tom-tom. In McIntosh County, however, they are so proficient in tapping out the rhythm with their heels that they can dispense with both sticks and hand clapping. With their hands free, they are able to do things descriptive of the text which less skillful groups would not be at liberty to attempt." [35]

End Notes
1. Aurore Eaton. "Lydia Parrish Leaves NH for a Life in Georgia." [Manchester] New Hampshire Union Leader website. 16 December 2015.

2. Lydia Parrish. Slave Songs of the Georgia Sea Islands. New York: Creative Age Press, 1942. Reprint edition, Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1992. 55.

3. Benjamin Allen. Glynn County. Charleston: Arcadia Publishing, 2003.
4. Parrish. 55.
5. Allen. Spalding was discussed in the post for 18 September 2018.

6. "The Plantation Era and Christ Church, Frederica, Saint Simons Island, Georgia." Oatlands Plantation website. 4.

7. Allen.
8. Oatlands. 5. Hamilton was mentioned in the post for 18 September 2018.

9. Mary Downing Koon. "St. Simons Island." New Georgia Encyclopedia. 28 October 2006; last updated 26 July 2017.

10. Caroline Couper Lovell. The Light of Other Days. Macon: Mercer University Press, 1995; written in 1933 according to Michael Tormey. (Michael’s Museum website.) 46.

11. Lovell. 41.

12. Lovell. 42. Her uncle was James Maxwell Couper. (B. Long. "James Hamilton Couper." Find a Grave. 19 July 2008.)

13. Wilber W. Caldwell. The Courthouse and the Depot. Macon: Mercer University Press, 2001. 250.

14. Margaret Davis Cate. "Gascoigne Bluff." Glynn Gen website.
15. Oatlands. 3.
16. Cate.
17. Parrish. 9.
18. "Maxfield Parrish Art and Illustration." Art Passions website.
19. Eaton.
20. Carey C. Giudici. "Postell." Glynn County website.

21. Parrish. 76. "Margaret, one of my star shouters, was buried a few years ago at Kelvin Grove, in the old slave yard on the mouth."

22. Burnette Vanstory. Georgia’s Land of the Golden Isles. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1981. 201. Land of the Golden Isles was the title of a 1932 novel by Lovell.

23. Parrish. 9-10.
24. Parrish. 20.

25. Queen of the South was a degree of the Eastern Star, the women’s affiliate of the Masons. (Hiram United Sovereign Grand Lodge website.) In 1874, the first African-American Eastern Star chapter associated with Prince Hall was organized. (Wikipedia. "Order of the Eastern Star.") Allen did not include fraternal groups in his photo history of the island.

26. Parrish. 55.
27. Parrish. 10.
28. Photograph by Rutherford. In Parrish. Opposite 144.
29. Photograph by Maxfield Parrish, Jr. In Parrish. Opposite 128.
30. Photograph by Foresta Hodgson Woo. In Parrish. Opposite 145.
31. Parrish. 55-56.
32. The full quotation and citation appeared in the post for 25 September 2018.
33. Parrish. 85.
34. Parrish. xxiii.
35. Parrish. 85.