James Weldon Johnson - Ring Shout

Topic: Origins - Ring Shout
I just came across another description of a ring shout.  This one was written by James Weldon Johnson in 1925, and reprinted with slight changes in 1933.

The preface to his Book of Spirituals drew upon both his boyhood experiences in a suburb of Jacksonville, Florida, and later research. [1]  The hard part is isolating those sections which represent his first-hand experience in the 1880s in LaVilla.

In his 1933 autobiography, [2] he mentioned three churches: one he attended that was a mile from his home, one a block away from his house, and the ones his father served as a minister.

As a child, he walked two blocks to his maternal grandmother’s house.  In his autobiography he mentioned the perils a small boy faced who knew things more by hearsay, than experience.  He said he did not cross the street until he passed the house of Mr. Cole who “everybody said was crazy.” [3]

Next he passed the houses of two older women.  He remembered: “we were a little bit afraid of Aunt Venie, too; for she was said to have fits.” [4]  He added she was “the champion of all ‘ring shouters’ at the “colored church on the corner.” [5]

He gives no evidence he ever went into the church.  Saint Paul was an African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), founded in 1869. [6]  The AME denomination was introduced into Jacksonville by Charles Pearce in 1866, with the permission of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. [7]

Johnson’s grandmother joined Mount Zion Methodist Church. [8]  It was organized by the Northern Methodist Episcopal Church in 1864.  The Methodists had split over slavery in 1844. [9]  The Southern branch was the one that proselytized slaves in South Carolina and Georgia, then shucked them off into the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church in 1870. [10]

The northern church sent its first missionary south to Beaufort. South Carolina, in 1862. [11]  During the war, the hierarchy began recruiting “disabled clergy” to send to the “warmer climates” to serve soldiers.  Sanford Swain went to Jacksonville in 1864 [12] where he began with Black soldiers. [13]  He organized Mount Zion in May of 1866 with both Black and white members. [14]

The difference between Saint Paul’s and Mount Zion was more than the difference between the Northern and Southern branches of the Methodist Church.  Neither of Johnson’s parents were ever slaves on plantations in this country.  His mother was raised in the Bahamas after England abolished slavery in 1833. [15]  Both her father and her grandfather were white. [16]

His father, James Johnson, was born free in Richmond, Virginia, and ran away to New York City when he was a teen. [17]  Less information exists about him.  Johnson admits he never heard his father “speak of his childhood and what lay back and beyond it.” [18]  He learned about his father’s religious conversion from his maternal grandmother. [19]

The elder Johnson was in his fifties when he became a Baptist minister.  His first assignment was in Fernandina, an old settlement thirty miles northeast of Jacksonville. [20]  Johnson remembered he and his brother went to visit him for “a few days at a time” [21] and that the church was “large.” [22]

By 1886, his father had found a pulpit in Jacksonville, and returned home.  Johnson described it as “little” [23].  In fact, it had some prestige in LaVilla.  Shiloh Baptist was built in 1875 by several prominent Blacks. [24]  When Johnson’s father was an alderman in 1872, the tax collector for the town was Samuel Spearing. [25]  Spearing supervised the Sunday School. [26]

Later, Johnson’s brother, Rosamond, was the choir director and organist for Bethel Baptist church. [27]

I am not sure that Johnson saw a ring shout when he was young, despite asserting in Spirituals that he remembered “remember seeing this dance many times when I was a boy.” [28]  His description matches that of many others, and include details someone who did not participate would not notice.

In his autobiography, he says something different.  There he wrote:

“When there was a ‘ring shout’ the weird music and the sound of thudding feet set the silences of the night vibrating and throbbing with a vague terror.  Many a time I woke suddenly and lay a long while strangely troubled by these sounds.” [29]

What is true in this statement is his reaction to the music.  It may not have been a “ring shout” but an emotional religious service.  He may not have known the difference as a child.  The only experience he mentions is a revival he attended when he was nine years old.  He contrasted the “decorum of the regular Sunday services” with “overlaid emotions” that came “to the surface.” [30]

I trust him on music because it was something he was attuned to as a child.  His mother had a good voice, [31] and both he and Rosamund took piano lessons. [32]  Drums were the one instrument he mentioned several times.  They may be all he recalled about his visit to the Bahamas with his mother when he was four years old. [33]

Later, he said he wanted to be a drummer in a brass band, and recalled the skills of Martin who “could beat a continuous and unbroken roll on his muffled drum all the way from the church to the cemetery.”  He added “I lost my ambition to be a drummer, but drums have never lost their tumultuous effect on me.” [34]

The question is why would Johnson write beyond his experience.  By 1925, he had become politically active with the NAACP, while his brother wrote popular music.  Rosamund created the piano arrangements for the Spirituals collection.  No doubt the two compared notes when James was writing the “Preface” where he took on the persona of an expert.  He broaches the ring shouts at the end of his discussion to distinguish them from spirituals.

“This term ‘shout songs’ has no reference to the loud, jubilant Spirituals, which are often so termed by writers on Negro music; it has reference to the songs or, better, the chants used to accompany the ‘ring shout’.” [35]

This led to a description of ring shouts.  In his autobiography, he introduces part of his 1925 descriptions to explain the word “shout” after he said Aunt Vinnie was a “shouter.”  Again, he may have felt a need to define a term for his less-informed readers.

If Johnson did see ring shouts when he was young, it was in one of the churches were his father was pastor. Rosamond was more likely to have seen them after James left for school in Atlanta in 1887.

End Notes
1.  James Weldon Johnson.  The Book of American Negro Spirituals.  New York: The Viking Press, 1925.

2.  James Weldon Johnson.  Along This Way.  New York: The Viking Press, 1933.  129–604 in James Weldon Johnson, edited by William L. Andrews.  New York: Library Classics of the United States, 2004.

3.  Johnson, autobiography.  157.
4.  Johnson, autobiography.  157.
5.  Johnson, autobiography.  158.

6.  Teresa Stepzinski.  “St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal Church celebrates 150 years of serving God and Jacksonville.”  Jacksonville website, 15 September 2019.

7.  John R. Scott.  “Introduction of African Methodism into East Florida.”  168-174 in Proceedings of the Quatro-Centennial Conference of the African M. E. Church of South Carolina, edited by Benjamin W. Arnett.  Xenia, Ohio: Aldine Printing. House, 1890.  173.

8.  Johnson, autobiography.  143.  Mount Zion is now Ebenezer United Methodist Church.

9.  John T. Foster Jr. and Sarah Whitmer Foster.  “The Last Shall Be First: Northern Methodists in Reconstruction Jacksonville.”  The Florida Historical Quarterly 70(3):265–280:January 1992.  269.

10.  The Colored Methodist Episcopal Church is discussed in the post for 15 November 2020.

11.  Foster.  269.
12.  Foster.  268.
13.  Foster.  270-271.
14.  Foster.  272.
15.  Johnson, autobiography.  135.
16.  Johnson, autobiography.  136.
17.  Johnson, autobiography.  137.
18.  Johnson, autobiography.  137.
19.  Johnson, autobiography.  163.
20.  Johnson, autobiography.  190.
21.  Johnson, autobiography.  193.
22.  Johnson, autobiography.  190.
23.  Johnson, autobiography.  198-199.

24.  Patricia Drozd Kenney.  “LaVilla, Florida, 1866-1887: Reconstruction Dreams and the Formation of a Black Community.”  MA thesis.  University of Florida, 1990.  57.

25.  Kenney.  34.
26.  Kenney.  57.

27.  Charlie Patton.  Jacksonville Native Left a Huge Legacy, But Nothing Marks It.”  The Florida Times-Union, Jacksonville, Florida, 15 June 2012.  He said Johnson was the organist in the 1890s.

28.  Johnson, Spirituals.  33.
29.  Johnson, autobiography.  158.
30.  Johnson, autobiography.  161.
31.  Johnson, autobiography.  137.
32.  Johnson, autobiography.  147.
33.  Johnson, autobiography.  179.
34.  Johnson, autobiography.  197.

35.  Johnson, Spirituals.  33.  Rosamond added to the confusion.  His version of “Dry Bones” was advertised as a shout song in 1938. [36]

36.  J. Rosamond Johnson.  “Dry Bones: Descriptive, Characteristic Shout Song.”  New York: Handy Brothers, 1938.