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.
Showing posts with label ~ Origins. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ~ Origins. Show all posts
Sunday, February 12, 2023
James Weldon Johnson - Ring Shout
Sunday, March 31, 2019
Mende, Sande, and Poro
Topic: Origins - Africa
The Gola were considered the oldest ethnic group in Liberia, although they recalled their ancestors met others when they arrived. [1] The above demographic map was made in 1947, and showed their then current location near the border with Sierra Leone.
Warren d’Azevedo discovered "certain of their traditions make reference to former matrilineality in terms such as ‘we were ruled by women and looked to our mothers’." [2] When he interviewed them in the middle-1950s, they told him that before the Portuguese arrived
"vast regions of the interior of what is now Liberia and Sierra Leone were dense uninhabited forests. They themselves were a small isolated group in the mountains of what is now northeastern Liberia. Large game such as elephant, water buffalo, and hippopotamus were profuse and their hunting parties made extensive excursions. They also view themselves as having been at one time a great hunting people, and that this was true of most of the early tribes of the forest. It is noteworthy in this regard that the content of Gola myth and other traditions is highly explicit about matters of hunting, fishing, and gathering, but vague and inconsistent about agriculture" [3] which he associated with matrilineal societies.
The meeting of Gola and Mandé speakers occurred when Songhai attacked the Mali Empire. As mentioned in the post for 24 March 2019, it seized the Taghaza mines in 1493. That probably led the Vai to move along the Atlantic coast looking for a replacement source. [4] The Mandé speakers were settled around Cape Mount near the modern Liberian-Sierra Leone border by about 1500. [5]
The Mandé-speaking Mane began moving into modern Liberia some time after. John Fage noted they
"were military bands that systematically attacked and overcame the villages of each group they came across. Some of them would stay behind to organize these conquests into small kingdoms, while others, reinforced by auxiliaries recruited from among their victims, would proceed farther west to repeat the pattern." [6]
The Mane reached the Vai at Cape Mount in 1545, [7] then move northwest parallel to the coast. Walter Rodney noted the lançados, who purchased slaves for Portuguese ships, "hovered like vultures in every river, waiting to take hold of the victims of the struggles. So numerous were the unfortunates, that the boats sometimes rejected further offers of slaves after they had gorged themselves full." [8]
Margaret Washington reported the Gola response:
"In the beginning was Sande, a women’s society which governed, and was the custodian of ritual and of the spiritual powers necessary to defense ancestral interest. The initiation and training of women was a central task involving the entire community. And into these days of ‘peace and perfect order’ came terrible wars, but women resisted the men’s mobilization for defense. Thus the men invented a forest monster—the ‘Great Spirit of Poro’ (a mask form) which frightened the women. This spirit provided men with the power to wrest control of the country, take away the sons, teach them the art of war and of politics, and to enforce loyalty exclusively among males, via the secret bush initiation." [9]
The new settlements, with their mix of Mane and local people, became the Mende. According to Wikipedia, they
"say that their original members were hunters and fishers who populated the area sparsely in small peaceful settlements; they say that their leaders came later, in a recent historical period, bringing with them the arts of war, and also building larger, more permanent villages. This history receives support from the facts that their population consists of two different racial types, and their language and culture show signs of a layering of two different forms: they have both matrilineal and patrilineal inheritance, for instance." [10]
In the late 1600s, power within Gola society still was divided between the male Poro and the female Sande in their communities, which were called fuwa. D’Azevedo said they alternated
"‘ownership of the country’ every four and three years respectively. These alternations were coincided in all the Gola fuwa so that women were said to ‘own’ the Gola for three years, and then ‘turn the people over’ to the Poro for four years. In these periods each society was to hold its ‘bush’ for initiation and training of the young. The graduation of the youth and the subsequent turning over of ‘ownership of the land’ to the other society are ritual events of great importance among the Gola and all the ‘Poro tribes’ today." [11]
The equilibrium, such as it was, ended when the English entered into slave trade. In 1702, groups living southeast of the Vai complained they "had been there, with two large vessels and had ravaged the country, destroyed all their canoes, plundered their houses, and carried off some of their people as slaves." [12]
People in smaller settlements moved into the territories of their neighbors, where they were welcomed as defense recruits. D’Azevedo recorded the "Gola were engaged in a major tribal dispersion" and "they soon became a majority in many of these expanding chiefdoms, and their dependent villages began to welcome, in turn, migrants and refugees from all interior tribes." [13]
Everywhere the Gola settled, they took their Poro and Sande societies. With time, Poro became integrated into their hosts’ leadership structures. The local societies served a function similar to the Masons or fraternal lodges like the Elks or Veterans of Foreign Wars: they recognized members from other communities by the marks made during initiations, and thus formed a unifying net over settlements reconstituted from destroyed communities both in Liberia, and among the Mende in modern Sierra Leone.
Graphics
George Schwab. "Tribes of the Liberian Hinterland." 20 in Tribes of the Liberian Hinterland. Cambridge: Peabody Museum, 1947. Uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by Metilsteiner on 3 April 2015. The book reported fieldwork done with the groups marked by dots.
End Notes
1. "Culture." Liberia Past and Present website.
2. Warren d’Azevedo. "The Setting of Gola Society and Culture: Some Theoretical Implications of Variation in Time and Space." Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers, 1959. 56.
3. D’Azevedo, Setting. 54-55.
4. Yves Person. "The Coastal Peoples: from Casamance to the Ivory Coast Lagoons." 301-323 in D. T. Niane. Africa from the Twelfth to the Sixteenth Century. Paris: UNESCO, 1984. 318.
5. Ayodeji Olukoju. Culture and Customs of Liberia. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2006. 9.
6. John D. Fage. "Western Africa." In Encyclopædia Britannica. Last updated 29 March 2016.
7. Fage.
8. Walter Rodney. A History of the Upper Guinea Coast 1545 to 1800. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970. 120. His source was A. de Almada. "Tratado Breve dos Rios de Guiné." Momenta Missionaria Africana, Africa Ocidental, 1569-1700. Series 2, 3:363, 364.
9. Margaret Washington Creel. "A Peculiar People." New York: New York University Press, 1988. 51. Her sources were Warren d’Azevedo, "Gola, Poro and Sande: Primal Tasks in Social Custodianship," Ethnologische Zeitschrift Zürich I:15-16:1980, and d’Azevedo, Setting.
10. Wikipedia. "History of Sierra Leone." Its source was Kenneth Little. The Mende of Sierra Leone. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951. He, in turn, cited F. W. H Migeod "on the Mende racial mixture." Migeod. A View of Sierra Leone. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, and Company, 1926.
11. D’Azevedo, Setting. 56.
12. Willem Bosman. Nauwkeurige Beschryving van de Guinese Goud-, Tand- en Slave-Kusk. Translated as A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea. London: James Knapton, 1705. 475. Quoted by Hugh Thomas. The Slave Trade. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997. 379.
13. D’Azevedo, Setting. 58.
Sunday, March 24, 2019
The Gold Trade
Topic: Origins - Africa
The Sande and Poro societies were uniquely positioned to provide a framework for community in plantation slave quarters because they had been modified by social disruptions caused by Europe’s direct contact with sub-Saharan Africa.
For centuries the relationship between the two economies had been gold. When the African continent was forming, the Mann Shield grew by absorbing volcanos that had erupted on its perimeter. Gold formed in greenstone belts on the terranes and then was laid on the surface between 2.100 and 2.200 billion years ago. [1]
The Futa Jallon, the deep rose on the Man Shield, laid to the west. The sandstone block rose "sharply from the coastal plain in a series of abrupt faults." The plateaus were broken by deep valleys and the remnants of "ancient volcanism." [2] The rivers that flowed from the futa exposed the gold beneath. The Bambuk field was near the headwaters of the Sénégal river, the Boire along the upper Niger, and the Lobi along the Black Volta.
Timothy Garrard thought the transport of gold north from the Bambuk field had begun by 296 when Carthage opened a mint [3] in what today is Libya. By then, camels capable of crossing the Sahara had been introduced. He believed one reason the Umayyad Muslims moved west from Egypt toward the Byzantine provinces was to control that mint, which they did in 695. [4] They wanted only one currency in their territories. [5]
The Abbasids toppled the Umayyad caliphate in 750, [6] and, in 800, appointed an Arab leader of the Aghlabid as hereditary emir of north Africa. [7] The Kutama Berbers revolted in 909, and established an independent Fatimid caliphate. They moved their capital to Cairo in 969. [8]
Jean Devisse believed the Fatimids were responsible for the development of the trans-Saharan gold trade because they minted coins independently [9] of those issued by the Abbasids in Baghdad, [10] while the Umayyads, who had retreated to Spain, were issuing their own currency there. [11] The rival mints created a demand large enough for men to cross the desert.
Sijilmassa became the northern center of trade that brought gold across the Sahara from the Mandé-speaking [12] Ghana Empire [13] centered in Koumbi Saleh. Salt was taken south by camel from Taghaza in the Taoudeni Basin. [14] Caravans were run by Berber nomads living in the Sahara, the Tuaregs. [15]
Lamtuna Berbers rebelled against the chaos that came with the struggles between the Umayyads and Fatimids for control of what is now Morocco in western North Africa. [16] They also were suffering from the transfer of the salt monopoly from Awlil in their territory to Taghaza. [17]
The Almoravids merged the need for religious reform with the one for social order. They moved their capital to the boundary between the Berbers and Negroes at the Sénégal river around 1030 where Bambuk gold, Awlil salt, and Sahel grain were traded. [18] They converted the sedimentary population in the Takrur Empire, [19] then imposed Sharia law in 1035. [20]
From Takrur, the Almoravids moved east to take Awdâghust, an important caravan stop of the Ghana Empire in 1055, [21] where again they imposed Sharia Law in 1076. [22] The neighboring Sosso invaded Ghana and took over the caravan trade by 1100. [23] By then, Jan Bart Gewald said those West African goldfields were the principle currency supply for Europe and the Arab caliphate. [24]
Another Mandé-speaking group, the Mandinka, defeated the Sosso in 1235 to establish what became the Islamic Mali Empire. [25] One of the clans that supported its leader was the iron smithing Kamara. [26] Sundiata located his capital on a Niger tributary in Kamara territory upriver [27] from the newly opened Boure gold fields. [28]
The Sosso were iron workers who rejected Islam. [29] The Moslem leaders of Mali were more discriminating than the Almoravids. They did not proselytize gold workers because "prospecting and production of the metal traditionally depended on a number of beliefs and magical practices that were alien to Islam." [30] Similarly, Diango Cissé said the Kamara were known for their magic. They acted "as intermediaries between humans and protector spirits." [31]
Iron production required heat. The Kamara, no doubt, moved the Empire’s frontier with the nearby forest south as it converted trees into fuel. [32] To the north, Timbuktu became Mali’s most important city when it was annexed in 1324. [33] It had been founded by Moslem scholars fleeing the Almoravid conquest of Oualata in 1100. [34]
One consequence of the Almoravid rout of the Umayyads in Iberia was renewed efforts at reconquest. Portugal became independent in 1249. In 1415, João I landed on the Moroccan coast at Ceuta with his sons, Duarte, Pedro, and Henrique. [35] From there, Henrique directed navigators to locate the African goldfields. One of his agents spent a year near the Gulf of Arguin learning the intricacies of internal African trade. [36]
By then Mali was in decline. The Tuareg had retaken control of the caravan routes in 1433, [37] and the Songhai Empire to the north and east conquered Timbukto in 1468. [38] Taghaza fell to Songhai in 1493. [39]
The dynamics of African trade changed again in 1545 when Spain began mining at Potosí in modern-day Bolivia. [40] Silver flooded markets, especially in Italy, and gold was hoarded, especially by the Ottoman Turks who had taken over Egypt in 1517. [41]
Soon after the disruption of currency markets, Mandé-speakers began moving southwest. The first group, the Vai, went south and east toward salt supplies. The next group, the Mane, were assumed to have been a Kamara group that developed alliances as it moved. Their motives can only be deduced from the direction of their movements, south and east then northwest along the coast toward the Portuguese slave-trade centers. [42]
The first group the Mane met on the today’s coast of Liberia were the Cubales. Yves Person believed they were Gola, [43] and that the Mane introduced Poro male initiation rituals [44] to the group. The Gola already had the female Sande society.
Graphics
1. Aymatth2. "West Africa Showing the West African Craton." Wikimedia Commons. 26 December 2010.
2. Aa77zz. "Trade Routes of the Western Sahara c. 1000-1500." Wikimedia Commons. 5 August 2011.
3. T. L. Miles. "Map of Medieval Saharan Trade Routes circa 1400 CE, Centered on Niger." Wikimedia Commons. 18 January 2008.
End Notes
1. Thomas Schlüter. Geological Atlas of Africa. Berlin: Springer-Verlad, 2008. 16, 50, 192.
2. Thomas E. O’Toole. "Guinea." Encyclopædia Britannica. Last updated, 30 December 2015.
3. Timothy F. Garrard. "Myth and Metrology: The Early Trans-Saharan Gold Trade." The Journal of African History 23:443–461:1982. 447.
4. Garrard. 449.
5. J. Devisse. "Trade and Trade Routes in West Africa." 367–435 in M. El Fasi. Africa from the Seventh to the Eleventh Century. Paris: UNESCO, 1988. 391.
6. Wikipedia. "Abbasid Caliphate."
7. Wikipedia. "Aghlabids."
8. Wikipedia. "Kutama."
9. Devisse. 392.
10. Wikipedia. "Abbasid Caliphate."
11. Devisse. 399–400.
12. Mandé is a linguistic classification, much like Romance and Germanic are categories for languages spoken by diverse ethnic groups.
13. Wikipedia. "Sijilmassa."
14. Wikipedia. "Taghaza."
15. Wikipedia. "Tuareg People."
16. I. Hrbek and J. Devisse. "The Almoravids." 336–366 in El Fasi. 337.
17. Hrbek. 340–1.
18. Wikipedia. "Takrur."
19. C J. D. Fage. "Upper and Lower Guinea." In The Cambridge History of Africa. Edited by Roland Oliver. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. 3:484.
20. Wikipedia, Takrur.
21. Wikipedia. "Almoravid dynasty."
22. Fage. 484.
23. Wikipedia. "Sosso Empire."
24. Jan Bart Gewald. "Gold the True Motor of West African History: An Overview of the Importance of Gold in West Africa and Its Relations with the Wider World." In Worlds of Debt: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Gold Mining in West Africa. Edited by Cristiana Panella. Amsterdam: Rozenberg, 2010.
25. Wikipedia, Sosso.
26. D. T. Niane. "Mali and the Second Mandingo Expansion." 117–171 in Africa from the Twelfth to the Sixteenth Century. Edited by D. T. Niane. Paris: UNESCO, 1984. On allegiance to Sundiata, 131–132.
Bakary Camara. Evolution des Systemes Fonciers au Mali. Dakar: Consel pour de développement de la recherche en sciences sociales en Afrique, 2015. On clan as black smiths, 54. Kamara also was spelled Cámara.
27. Niane. 136. Niani was located on the Sankarani.
28. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. "The Trans-Saharan Gold Trade (7th–14th Century)." Museum website. October 2000.
29. N. Levtzion. Ancient Ghana and Mali. London: Methuen, 1973. Cited by Niane. 125.
30. Metropolitan Museum.
31. Diango Cissé. Structures des Malinké de Kita: Contribution à une Anthropologie Social et Politique du Mali. Bamako: Editions Populaires, 1970. 211, 249. Quoted by Christopher L. Miller. Theories of Africans: Francophone Literature and Anthropology in Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. 141.
32. Niane’s map showed Kamaro was south of Niani with an arrow pointing to the forest. (page 128)
33. Wikipedia. "History of Timbuktu."
34. Wikipedia, Timbuktu.
35. Wikipedia. "History of Portugal.
36. Hugh Thomas. The Slave Trade. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997. 58. João Fernandes stayed on the Bay of Arguin in 1455.
37. M . Ly-Tall. "The decline of the Mali Empire. 172–186 in Niane. 174.
38. Wikipedia, Timbuktu.
39. Wikipedia. "Mali Empire."
40. Wikpedia. "Potosí."
41. Ferdinand Braudel. La Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéan à l’Epoque. 1966. Translated by Siân Reynolds as The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. New York: Harper and Row, 1975 paperback edition. On Italian banks 496–497; gold hoarding, 499.
42. Yves Person. "Ethnic Movements and Acculturation in Upper Guinea since the Fifteenth Century." African Historical Studies 4:669–689:1971. "The Vai eruption must have been aimed at the kola and sea salt trade. The Mane, one century later, were probably motivated at least in part by the desire to trade with white men." (page 676)
43. Person. 681.
44. Person. 678.
The Sande and Poro societies were uniquely positioned to provide a framework for community in plantation slave quarters because they had been modified by social disruptions caused by Europe’s direct contact with sub-Saharan Africa.
For centuries the relationship between the two economies had been gold. When the African continent was forming, the Mann Shield grew by absorbing volcanos that had erupted on its perimeter. Gold formed in greenstone belts on the terranes and then was laid on the surface between 2.100 and 2.200 billion years ago. [1]
The Futa Jallon, the deep rose on the Man Shield, laid to the west. The sandstone block rose "sharply from the coastal plain in a series of abrupt faults." The plateaus were broken by deep valleys and the remnants of "ancient volcanism." [2] The rivers that flowed from the futa exposed the gold beneath. The Bambuk field was near the headwaters of the Sénégal river, the Boire along the upper Niger, and the Lobi along the Black Volta.
Timothy Garrard thought the transport of gold north from the Bambuk field had begun by 296 when Carthage opened a mint [3] in what today is Libya. By then, camels capable of crossing the Sahara had been introduced. He believed one reason the Umayyad Muslims moved west from Egypt toward the Byzantine provinces was to control that mint, which they did in 695. [4] They wanted only one currency in their territories. [5]
The Abbasids toppled the Umayyad caliphate in 750, [6] and, in 800, appointed an Arab leader of the Aghlabid as hereditary emir of north Africa. [7] The Kutama Berbers revolted in 909, and established an independent Fatimid caliphate. They moved their capital to Cairo in 969. [8]
Jean Devisse believed the Fatimids were responsible for the development of the trans-Saharan gold trade because they minted coins independently [9] of those issued by the Abbasids in Baghdad, [10] while the Umayyads, who had retreated to Spain, were issuing their own currency there. [11] The rival mints created a demand large enough for men to cross the desert.
Sijilmassa became the northern center of trade that brought gold across the Sahara from the Mandé-speaking [12] Ghana Empire [13] centered in Koumbi Saleh. Salt was taken south by camel from Taghaza in the Taoudeni Basin. [14] Caravans were run by Berber nomads living in the Sahara, the Tuaregs. [15]
Lamtuna Berbers rebelled against the chaos that came with the struggles between the Umayyads and Fatimids for control of what is now Morocco in western North Africa. [16] They also were suffering from the transfer of the salt monopoly from Awlil in their territory to Taghaza. [17]
The Almoravids merged the need for religious reform with the one for social order. They moved their capital to the boundary between the Berbers and Negroes at the Sénégal river around 1030 where Bambuk gold, Awlil salt, and Sahel grain were traded. [18] They converted the sedimentary population in the Takrur Empire, [19] then imposed Sharia law in 1035. [20]
From Takrur, the Almoravids moved east to take Awdâghust, an important caravan stop of the Ghana Empire in 1055, [21] where again they imposed Sharia Law in 1076. [22] The neighboring Sosso invaded Ghana and took over the caravan trade by 1100. [23] By then, Jan Bart Gewald said those West African goldfields were the principle currency supply for Europe and the Arab caliphate. [24]
Another Mandé-speaking group, the Mandinka, defeated the Sosso in 1235 to establish what became the Islamic Mali Empire. [25] One of the clans that supported its leader was the iron smithing Kamara. [26] Sundiata located his capital on a Niger tributary in Kamara territory upriver [27] from the newly opened Boure gold fields. [28]
The Sosso were iron workers who rejected Islam. [29] The Moslem leaders of Mali were more discriminating than the Almoravids. They did not proselytize gold workers because "prospecting and production of the metal traditionally depended on a number of beliefs and magical practices that were alien to Islam." [30] Similarly, Diango Cissé said the Kamara were known for their magic. They acted "as intermediaries between humans and protector spirits." [31]
Iron production required heat. The Kamara, no doubt, moved the Empire’s frontier with the nearby forest south as it converted trees into fuel. [32] To the north, Timbuktu became Mali’s most important city when it was annexed in 1324. [33] It had been founded by Moslem scholars fleeing the Almoravid conquest of Oualata in 1100. [34]
One consequence of the Almoravid rout of the Umayyads in Iberia was renewed efforts at reconquest. Portugal became independent in 1249. In 1415, João I landed on the Moroccan coast at Ceuta with his sons, Duarte, Pedro, and Henrique. [35] From there, Henrique directed navigators to locate the African goldfields. One of his agents spent a year near the Gulf of Arguin learning the intricacies of internal African trade. [36]
By then Mali was in decline. The Tuareg had retaken control of the caravan routes in 1433, [37] and the Songhai Empire to the north and east conquered Timbukto in 1468. [38] Taghaza fell to Songhai in 1493. [39]
The dynamics of African trade changed again in 1545 when Spain began mining at Potosí in modern-day Bolivia. [40] Silver flooded markets, especially in Italy, and gold was hoarded, especially by the Ottoman Turks who had taken over Egypt in 1517. [41]
Soon after the disruption of currency markets, Mandé-speakers began moving southwest. The first group, the Vai, went south and east toward salt supplies. The next group, the Mane, were assumed to have been a Kamara group that developed alliances as it moved. Their motives can only be deduced from the direction of their movements, south and east then northwest along the coast toward the Portuguese slave-trade centers. [42]
The first group the Mane met on the today’s coast of Liberia were the Cubales. Yves Person believed they were Gola, [43] and that the Mane introduced Poro male initiation rituals [44] to the group. The Gola already had the female Sande society.
Graphics
1. Aymatth2. "West Africa Showing the West African Craton." Wikimedia Commons. 26 December 2010.
2. Aa77zz. "Trade Routes of the Western Sahara c. 1000-1500." Wikimedia Commons. 5 August 2011.
3. T. L. Miles. "Map of Medieval Saharan Trade Routes circa 1400 CE, Centered on Niger." Wikimedia Commons. 18 January 2008.
End Notes
1. Thomas Schlüter. Geological Atlas of Africa. Berlin: Springer-Verlad, 2008. 16, 50, 192.
2. Thomas E. O’Toole. "Guinea." Encyclopædia Britannica. Last updated, 30 December 2015.
3. Timothy F. Garrard. "Myth and Metrology: The Early Trans-Saharan Gold Trade." The Journal of African History 23:443–461:1982. 447.
4. Garrard. 449.
5. J. Devisse. "Trade and Trade Routes in West Africa." 367–435 in M. El Fasi. Africa from the Seventh to the Eleventh Century. Paris: UNESCO, 1988. 391.
6. Wikipedia. "Abbasid Caliphate."
7. Wikipedia. "Aghlabids."
8. Wikipedia. "Kutama."
9. Devisse. 392.
10. Wikipedia. "Abbasid Caliphate."
11. Devisse. 399–400.
12. Mandé is a linguistic classification, much like Romance and Germanic are categories for languages spoken by diverse ethnic groups.
13. Wikipedia. "Sijilmassa."
14. Wikipedia. "Taghaza."
15. Wikipedia. "Tuareg People."
16. I. Hrbek and J. Devisse. "The Almoravids." 336–366 in El Fasi. 337.
17. Hrbek. 340–1.
18. Wikipedia. "Takrur."
19. C J. D. Fage. "Upper and Lower Guinea." In The Cambridge History of Africa. Edited by Roland Oliver. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. 3:484.
20. Wikipedia, Takrur.
21. Wikipedia. "Almoravid dynasty."
22. Fage. 484.
23. Wikipedia. "Sosso Empire."
24. Jan Bart Gewald. "Gold the True Motor of West African History: An Overview of the Importance of Gold in West Africa and Its Relations with the Wider World." In Worlds of Debt: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Gold Mining in West Africa. Edited by Cristiana Panella. Amsterdam: Rozenberg, 2010.
25. Wikipedia, Sosso.
26. D. T. Niane. "Mali and the Second Mandingo Expansion." 117–171 in Africa from the Twelfth to the Sixteenth Century. Edited by D. T. Niane. Paris: UNESCO, 1984. On allegiance to Sundiata, 131–132.
Bakary Camara. Evolution des Systemes Fonciers au Mali. Dakar: Consel pour de développement de la recherche en sciences sociales en Afrique, 2015. On clan as black smiths, 54. Kamara also was spelled Cámara.
27. Niane. 136. Niani was located on the Sankarani.
28. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. "The Trans-Saharan Gold Trade (7th–14th Century)." Museum website. October 2000.
29. N. Levtzion. Ancient Ghana and Mali. London: Methuen, 1973. Cited by Niane. 125.
30. Metropolitan Museum.
31. Diango Cissé. Structures des Malinké de Kita: Contribution à une Anthropologie Social et Politique du Mali. Bamako: Editions Populaires, 1970. 211, 249. Quoted by Christopher L. Miller. Theories of Africans: Francophone Literature and Anthropology in Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. 141.
32. Niane’s map showed Kamaro was south of Niani with an arrow pointing to the forest. (page 128)
33. Wikipedia. "History of Timbuktu."
34. Wikipedia, Timbuktu.
35. Wikipedia. "History of Portugal.
36. Hugh Thomas. The Slave Trade. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997. 58. João Fernandes stayed on the Bay of Arguin in 1455.
37. M . Ly-Tall. "The decline of the Mali Empire. 172–186 in Niane. 174.
38. Wikipedia, Timbuktu.
39. Wikipedia. "Mali Empire."
40. Wikpedia. "Potosí."
41. Ferdinand Braudel. La Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéan à l’Epoque. 1966. Translated by Siân Reynolds as The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. New York: Harper and Row, 1975 paperback edition. On Italian banks 496–497; gold hoarding, 499.
42. Yves Person. "Ethnic Movements and Acculturation in Upper Guinea since the Fifteenth Century." African Historical Studies 4:669–689:1971. "The Vai eruption must have been aimed at the kola and sea salt trade. The Mane, one century later, were probably motivated at least in part by the desire to trade with white men." (page 676)
43. Person. 681.
44. Person. 678.
Wednesday, March 20, 2019
Ritual Initiations and Conversion Experiences
Topic: Origins - Slaves
European traders discovered the mix of cultures described in the post for 13 March 2019 when they arrived on the coast of Africa. Their demands for slaves exacerbated existing divisions and encouraged warfare. In this country captives were recombined on plantations in groups of a hundred or less. [1]
The puzzle for historians was how this potpourri was molded into identifiable antebellum cultures when many plantation owners kept their slaves as isolated as possible from those on other plantations.
One factor was the psychological response to bondage, unpredictability, and threats of terror. Stimulated by Eugene Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll, [2] historians documented ways slaves circumvented the limits placed upon them.
Michael Gomez, as mentioned in the post for 13 March 2019, took a different tact in Exchanging Our Countries Marks. [3] He examined religious beliefs of Africans and highlighted those that were common. Margaret Washington Creel was more specific: she looked at the religion of slaves in the South Carolina lowlands where Gullah was spoken. She argued:
"in the Carolina Lowcountry there was an early cultural dominance of BaKongo peoples of Kongo-Angolan origin, followed by Upper Guinea Africans of the Senegambia and Windward Coasts. Upper Guinea peoples coming to Carolina found a creolized black culture already adjusting and acculturating." [4]
Sterling Stuckey believed the ring shout "gave form and meaning to black religion." [5] Washington thought West African initiation rituals handled by the female Sande and male Poro [6] societies served as the bridge between native religions and Christianity.
During those initiations, adolescents were sent into the wilderness to make contact with the spirit world. How that occurred was one of the carefully held secrets. Washington combed through the work of anthropologists to learn initiates were supervised by "Poro-Sande priests and priestesses, called altar mothers and fathers." She concluded:
"The boys and girls conversed with the spirits and related these conversations to the altar parent, who interpreted them. Little is known of the initiates’ experiences while on the journey through the spirit world. But their soul was considered to be in a state of anxiety and confusion, seeking to ‘recover balance and collect itself.’ The encounter with ‘nameless spirits’ in the sacred grove was manifested in dreams and prayers since these were common forms of revelation and communication." [7]
One reason these rituals survived on plantations was owners were reluctant to prosthelytize their slaves, especially after the Stono Rebellion of 1739 [8] and the Denmark Vesey conspiracy in 1822. In the first case, slaves were able to read Spanish invitations. In the second, several of the condemned freed men, including Vesey, were members of Charleston’s African Methodist Episcopal Church. [9]
Parts of Georgia and southern South Carolina where John Wesley had spent time with James Oglethorpe were the exception to this prohibition. The year after the Stono Rebellion, George Whitefield convinced one family of slave owners to open a religious school for slaves [10] overseen by William Hutson. [11] The authorities soon shut it down. [12]
As a consequence of Methodist activity in Georgia, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney asked the church to recommend an overseer in 1829. He explained a friend had told him of the "happy results which had followed the endeavors of a Methodist overseer." Instead, the local church head offered to send missionaries. [13]
One of William Caper’s evangelists complained in 1846 that African-American converts did not properly atone for their sinful natures before being baptized. Instead, he said conversion began with a "warning in a dream." [14]
The seeker as he was called, selected someone, often a woman, "by the direction of ‘the spirit’." The mentor then, rather than a Methodist minister, "is now a prophet to teach him how to conduct himself, and particularly how to pray. He is also ‘an interpreter of visions’ to whom the seeker relates all his ‘travel’." [15]
The Methodist missionary warned his brethren the word "travel" had a unique meaning for African Americans.
"These travels may differ in some things; and in others they all agree. Each seeker meets with warnings—awful sights or sounds, and always has a vision of a white man who talks with him, warns him, and sometimes makes him carry a burden, and in the end leads him to the river." [16]
In Sierra Leone, F. W. H. Migeod was told in the 1920s , when the male "initiate goes into the Poro bush, the Poro ‘ngafe’ (spirit, or in Creole English ‘devil’) is supposed to have swallowed him, and the marks on his back are said ‘devil’s’ teeth-marks." [17]
During the American Civil War, William Francis Allen made the connection between seeking and the ring shout explicit. First, he told readers of his Slave Song collection that "one of the customs, often alluded to in the songs, is that of wandering through the woods and swamps, when under religious excitement, like the ancient bacchantes. To get religion is with them to ‘fin’ dat ting’." [18]
He then quoted a woman who said her sister "Couldn’t fin’ dat leetle ting—huntin’ for ’em all de time—las’ foun’ ’em." [19] Then, he added, once when he was headed to a ring shout, he asked another man if he was going. He answered:
"No, ma’am, wouldn’t let me in—hain’t foun’ dat ting yet—hain’t been on my knees in de swamp." [20]
End Notes
1. Rice growers had a perception that a manageable plantation was of a certain size; the acreage then determined the number of laborers needed. When Nathaniel Heyward died in 1851 he had 1,900 slaves working on 17 plantations, or an average of 112 per operation. He owned other slaves and some cotton plantations as well, according to William Dusinberre [21] Josephine Pinckney’s family plantation had "ninety-something slaves" before the Civil War. [22]
2. Eugene Genovese. Roll, Jordan, Roll. New York: Pantheon Books, 1974.
3. Michael A. Gomez. Exchanging Our Country Marks. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998.
4. Margaret Washington Creel. "A Peculiar People." New York: New York University Press, 1988. 43–44.
5. Sterling Stuckey. Slave Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013 edition. 10. Ring shouts were discussed in a series posted between 18 September 2018 and 9 October 2018.
6. The groups have had other names. I’m standardizing on Poro and Sande.
7. Washington. 288–289.
8. The Stono Rebellion was mentioned in the posts for 18 September 2018 and 6 January 2019.
9. Wikipedia. "Denmark Vesey." His religion was discussed by Gomez (pages 1–4), Stuckey pages 47, 52–55, 58), and Washington (pages 153–155).
10. William A. Sloat, II. "George Whitefield, African-Americans, and Slavery." Methodist History 33:3–13:October 1994. 3. The slave owner were Hugh Bryan.
11. Hutson was the great-great-grandfather of Mary Elliot Hutson, who was active in the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals mentioned in the post for 6 January 2019. (William Maine Hutson. "The Hutson Family of South Carolina." The South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 9:127–140:1908.)
12. Nathan E. Stalvey. "Bryan, Hugh." South Carolina Encyclopedia website. 17 May 2016; last updated 24 July 2016.
13. William M. Wrightman. Life of William Capers, D. D. Nashville: Publishing House of the M. E. Church, South, 1902. 291–2. Washington brought this to by attention. 176. Barbara L. Bellows said he was the grandfather of Josephine Pinckney, first mentioned in the post for 6 January 2019. (A Talent for Living: Josephine Pinckney and the Charleston Literary Tradition. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006. 14.)
14. Southern Christian Advocate. 30 October 1846 and 30 October 1847. Quoted by Washington. 286.
15. Southern Christian Advocate. The author is using "he" in the generic sense to refer to both men and women.
16. Southern Christian Advocate.
17. F. W. H Migeod. A View of Sierra Leone. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, and Company, 1926. 238. The scars were made during the initiation period. The post for 13 March 2019 said the ngafaga were the spirits of the dead.
18. William Francis Allen. "Introduction." The Slave Songs of the United States. Edited by Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison. New York: A. Simpson and Company, 1867. xii. Allen was assigned to Edgar Fripp’s Seaside plantation on Saint Helena Island.
19. Mosley. Quoted by Allen. xii.
20. Bristol. Quoted by Allen. xii. The unidentified woman addressed as ma’am was probably Allen’s wife. However, she died in 1865, before work had begun on the song collection. The alternative was that Allen was quoting a letter from Charles Pickard Ware. Then the woman would have been his sister Harriet Ware, and the ex-slaves would have been on Thomas Ashton Coffin’s Coffin Point plantation.
21. William Dusinberre. Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000. 33.
22. "Black and White: Plantation Scenes of South Carolina." Caption for "El Dorado Plantation, 1891." Charleston Museum website.
European traders discovered the mix of cultures described in the post for 13 March 2019 when they arrived on the coast of Africa. Their demands for slaves exacerbated existing divisions and encouraged warfare. In this country captives were recombined on plantations in groups of a hundred or less. [1]
The puzzle for historians was how this potpourri was molded into identifiable antebellum cultures when many plantation owners kept their slaves as isolated as possible from those on other plantations.
One factor was the psychological response to bondage, unpredictability, and threats of terror. Stimulated by Eugene Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll, [2] historians documented ways slaves circumvented the limits placed upon them.
Michael Gomez, as mentioned in the post for 13 March 2019, took a different tact in Exchanging Our Countries Marks. [3] He examined religious beliefs of Africans and highlighted those that were common. Margaret Washington Creel was more specific: she looked at the religion of slaves in the South Carolina lowlands where Gullah was spoken. She argued:
"in the Carolina Lowcountry there was an early cultural dominance of BaKongo peoples of Kongo-Angolan origin, followed by Upper Guinea Africans of the Senegambia and Windward Coasts. Upper Guinea peoples coming to Carolina found a creolized black culture already adjusting and acculturating." [4]
Sterling Stuckey believed the ring shout "gave form and meaning to black religion." [5] Washington thought West African initiation rituals handled by the female Sande and male Poro [6] societies served as the bridge between native religions and Christianity.
During those initiations, adolescents were sent into the wilderness to make contact with the spirit world. How that occurred was one of the carefully held secrets. Washington combed through the work of anthropologists to learn initiates were supervised by "Poro-Sande priests and priestesses, called altar mothers and fathers." She concluded:
"The boys and girls conversed with the spirits and related these conversations to the altar parent, who interpreted them. Little is known of the initiates’ experiences while on the journey through the spirit world. But their soul was considered to be in a state of anxiety and confusion, seeking to ‘recover balance and collect itself.’ The encounter with ‘nameless spirits’ in the sacred grove was manifested in dreams and prayers since these were common forms of revelation and communication." [7]
One reason these rituals survived on plantations was owners were reluctant to prosthelytize their slaves, especially after the Stono Rebellion of 1739 [8] and the Denmark Vesey conspiracy in 1822. In the first case, slaves were able to read Spanish invitations. In the second, several of the condemned freed men, including Vesey, were members of Charleston’s African Methodist Episcopal Church. [9]
Parts of Georgia and southern South Carolina where John Wesley had spent time with James Oglethorpe were the exception to this prohibition. The year after the Stono Rebellion, George Whitefield convinced one family of slave owners to open a religious school for slaves [10] overseen by William Hutson. [11] The authorities soon shut it down. [12]
As a consequence of Methodist activity in Georgia, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney asked the church to recommend an overseer in 1829. He explained a friend had told him of the "happy results which had followed the endeavors of a Methodist overseer." Instead, the local church head offered to send missionaries. [13]
One of William Caper’s evangelists complained in 1846 that African-American converts did not properly atone for their sinful natures before being baptized. Instead, he said conversion began with a "warning in a dream." [14]
The seeker as he was called, selected someone, often a woman, "by the direction of ‘the spirit’." The mentor then, rather than a Methodist minister, "is now a prophet to teach him how to conduct himself, and particularly how to pray. He is also ‘an interpreter of visions’ to whom the seeker relates all his ‘travel’." [15]
The Methodist missionary warned his brethren the word "travel" had a unique meaning for African Americans.
"These travels may differ in some things; and in others they all agree. Each seeker meets with warnings—awful sights or sounds, and always has a vision of a white man who talks with him, warns him, and sometimes makes him carry a burden, and in the end leads him to the river." [16]
In Sierra Leone, F. W. H. Migeod was told in the 1920s , when the male "initiate goes into the Poro bush, the Poro ‘ngafe’ (spirit, or in Creole English ‘devil’) is supposed to have swallowed him, and the marks on his back are said ‘devil’s’ teeth-marks." [17]
During the American Civil War, William Francis Allen made the connection between seeking and the ring shout explicit. First, he told readers of his Slave Song collection that "one of the customs, often alluded to in the songs, is that of wandering through the woods and swamps, when under religious excitement, like the ancient bacchantes. To get religion is with them to ‘fin’ dat ting’." [18]
He then quoted a woman who said her sister "Couldn’t fin’ dat leetle ting—huntin’ for ’em all de time—las’ foun’ ’em." [19] Then, he added, once when he was headed to a ring shout, he asked another man if he was going. He answered:
"No, ma’am, wouldn’t let me in—hain’t foun’ dat ting yet—hain’t been on my knees in de swamp." [20]
End Notes
1. Rice growers had a perception that a manageable plantation was of a certain size; the acreage then determined the number of laborers needed. When Nathaniel Heyward died in 1851 he had 1,900 slaves working on 17 plantations, or an average of 112 per operation. He owned other slaves and some cotton plantations as well, according to William Dusinberre [21] Josephine Pinckney’s family plantation had "ninety-something slaves" before the Civil War. [22]
2. Eugene Genovese. Roll, Jordan, Roll. New York: Pantheon Books, 1974.
3. Michael A. Gomez. Exchanging Our Country Marks. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998.
4. Margaret Washington Creel. "A Peculiar People." New York: New York University Press, 1988. 43–44.
5. Sterling Stuckey. Slave Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013 edition. 10. Ring shouts were discussed in a series posted between 18 September 2018 and 9 October 2018.
6. The groups have had other names. I’m standardizing on Poro and Sande.
7. Washington. 288–289.
8. The Stono Rebellion was mentioned in the posts for 18 September 2018 and 6 January 2019.
9. Wikipedia. "Denmark Vesey." His religion was discussed by Gomez (pages 1–4), Stuckey pages 47, 52–55, 58), and Washington (pages 153–155).
10. William A. Sloat, II. "George Whitefield, African-Americans, and Slavery." Methodist History 33:3–13:October 1994. 3. The slave owner were Hugh Bryan.
11. Hutson was the great-great-grandfather of Mary Elliot Hutson, who was active in the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals mentioned in the post for 6 January 2019. (William Maine Hutson. "The Hutson Family of South Carolina." The South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 9:127–140:1908.)
12. Nathan E. Stalvey. "Bryan, Hugh." South Carolina Encyclopedia website. 17 May 2016; last updated 24 July 2016.
13. William M. Wrightman. Life of William Capers, D. D. Nashville: Publishing House of the M. E. Church, South, 1902. 291–2. Washington brought this to by attention. 176. Barbara L. Bellows said he was the grandfather of Josephine Pinckney, first mentioned in the post for 6 January 2019. (A Talent for Living: Josephine Pinckney and the Charleston Literary Tradition. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006. 14.)
14. Southern Christian Advocate. 30 October 1846 and 30 October 1847. Quoted by Washington. 286.
15. Southern Christian Advocate. The author is using "he" in the generic sense to refer to both men and women.
16. Southern Christian Advocate.
17. F. W. H Migeod. A View of Sierra Leone. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, and Company, 1926. 238. The scars were made during the initiation period. The post for 13 March 2019 said the ngafaga were the spirits of the dead.
18. William Francis Allen. "Introduction." The Slave Songs of the United States. Edited by Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison. New York: A. Simpson and Company, 1867. xii. Allen was assigned to Edgar Fripp’s Seaside plantation on Saint Helena Island.
19. Mosley. Quoted by Allen. xii.
20. Bristol. Quoted by Allen. xii. The unidentified woman addressed as ma’am was probably Allen’s wife. However, she died in 1865, before work had begun on the song collection. The alternative was that Allen was quoting a letter from Charles Pickard Ware. Then the woman would have been his sister Harriet Ware, and the ex-slaves would have been on Thomas Ashton Coffin’s Coffin Point plantation.
21. William Dusinberre. Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000. 33.
22. "Black and White: Plantation Scenes of South Carolina." Caption for "El Dorado Plantation, 1891." Charleston Museum website.
Wednesday, March 13, 2019
African Beliefs
Topic: Origins - Africa
West Africa was not some isolated backwater, when Portuguese navigators first kidnapped men from the coast in 1444. [1] It may not have been Roman Catholic, but it was part of the Mediterranean regional community, even if it was on its outer boundary. Each incoming group had carried new ideas that overlaid a substratum of concepts shared with people already in the area.
Many perceived a single superior god who produced a subsidiary layer of deities, then lost interest in human activities. Michael Gomez explained the Bambara of the upper Niger river [2] thought Bemba formed the lesser gods, then made women and the earth. Chaos followed the creation of plants and animals, but order was restored by one of the subordinate beings. [3]
Similarly, the Akan of modern Ghana, claimed Onayme created Assa Ya (the Earth mother) and demigods, [4] while Chineke made Ala, the Igbo Earth mother. [5] The Mende god sent rain to his wife, the Earth, then withdrew. [6]
Julian Jaynes hypothesized the perception of a remote creator arose in the chaos that followed an eruption on the island of Thera in the Mediterranean [7] some time between 1600 bc and 1525 bc. [18] Ash fell from "from the coastline of the Peloponissos to the west, over all of Crete to the south, over western Anatolia to the east, and as far as the Black Sea to the north-northwest." [9]
The volcanic activity set off internal migrations, while others fled inundated coasts. Jaynes argued the social disorder was so traumatic, it altered individuals’ mental processes. He pointed to the Iliad and Amos, written before, in which gods communicated directly to people through their voices. In contrast, in the later Odyssey, individuals turned to prayer and other means of approaching a god who had abandoned them. Charlotte Pearson’s team asserted the aftereffects coincided with the emergence of Egypt’s New Kingdom. [10]
Egyptians envisioned humans as composed of multiple elements, although the number varied from one historic period to another. The ka was a person’s "vital essence," which was depicted as an individual’s twin. When one died, one returned to the ka and needed to be sustained with food offerings. The ba was one’s personality that "Egyptians believed would live after the body died, and it is sometimes depicted as a human-headed bird flying out of the tomb to join with the ka in the afterlife." [11]
The Bambara taught a person was composed of his or her soul, the ni and its double the dya, and his or her character, the tere. [12] Gomez reported the Akan believed an individual was part blood (mogya), part spirit (ntoro), and part soul (kra). [13] Newbell Puckett noted the Ewe to the east presumed every person had "an indwelling spirit (kra)," [14] an immortal soul, [15] and a bush soul that resided in an animal. [16]
When a Bambara died, the dya entered the water, the ni returned to the ancestors, and the tere roamed loose. [17] For the Akan, the ntoro returned to the ancestors, while the mogya returned to the spirit world. [18] The Ewe kra survived to enter another infant or to wander as a sisa, a "kra without a tenement," [19] while the immortal soul became the person’s ghost. [20]
The Igbo of southeastern Nigeria simply assumed one’s soul was the chi, which returned to the land where it was born. [21]
The Kongo saw the afterworld as a mountain that mirrored the ordinary, separated from it by a river. [22] Likewise, Sjoerd Hofstra discovered the Mende believed the spirit of the dead needed to be helped over a river with gifts of food. If a ngafaga did not pass, it roamed the world of the living. [23]
These views were similar to those of the Greeks who thought the dead crossed the river Styx to enter the underworld of Hades. The boatman, Charon, was paid with a coin placed in the mouth of the dead. If there was no payment, the spirit of the dead stayed on the river shore. "Greeks offered propitiatory libations to prevent the deceased from returning to the upper world to ‘haunt’ those who had not given them a proper burial." [24]
Africans presumed the soul could be reborn. The Bambara thought the dya of one generation became the ni of the next, [25] while the Akan claimed the mogya was reborn. [26] The unborn child bartered with Chineke for its chi, predetermining "his length of life and his future activities." [27]. As soon as an infant was born, the parents consulted a professional who divined the identity of the baby’s chi. [28]
Egyptians were the ones who originated the concept of soul transmigration, according to Jaynes. Pythagoras, took the idea to Greece in the middle-500s bc. [29]
The ways individuals approached a god reflected more recent experiences. The Akan had created the Ghana empire. [30] They erected temples to the lesser gods, the abosom, who spoke through possession of professional priests and priestesses. [31]
The Bambara were part of the Mali Empire that succeeded Ghana. [32] Each village had a sacred space devoted to its particular deity, or boli. "Supplications for health, marital problems, the weather, and so on were made" to it through a jar of amulets. [33]
The Igbo had no hierarchical structures. [34] Each village had a shrine to its ancestor. Contact was made through sacrifices and prayers. [35]
The Mende came closest to maintaining the relationship with a god like that posited by Jaynes for the Iliad. Hofstra said they believed the ancestors were guardians who protected individuals. [36] The recently dead maintained contact through dreams, [37] which individuals shared with others. [38]. The visits slowly become less frequent and limited to times of trouble. [39]
Michael Gomez suggested it was these commonalities in world views that allowed slaves to form communities, first on plantations, then again under the aegis of Christianity. After all, the religion arose in the same eastern Mediterranean region.
Thus, slaves confronted with a god who created a son and ghost, already knew a god who formed lesser beings. Further, they expected some spirits to intercede for them, much like the Holy Ghost would do. [40]
Few had problems with Christ’s ritual rebirth. Instead of returning in the next generation, African Americans were willing to accept a period when they were united with Him, before the final resurrection. [41]
Slaves easily understood crossing the Jordan "represented death and the hereafter." [42] Puckett met a man from Johns Island, South Carolina, in the 1920s who said one flew above the river. [43] A man in Jacksonville, Florida, told him Jesus took one over on the Old Ship of Zion, [44] while a woman in Houston simply assumed one waded across. [45]
Gomez noted the only thing many didn’t understand was the absence of a mother Earth figure. [46]
End Notes
1. Hugh Thomas. The Slave Trade. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997. 22.
2. Michael A. Gomez. Exchanging Our Country Marks. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998. 46. He said the Bambara were most common in Louisiana [page 42].
3. Gomez. 49.
4. Gomez. 111. He said most went to Jamaica, [page 106] and then to the tobacco lands of Virginia and Maryland [page 107].
5. Gomez. 129. The Igbo were sent to Virginia and the area around Chesapeake Bay.
6. Gomez. 95. The Mende were discussed in a series posted between 30 March 2019 and 31 March 2019.
7. Julian Jaynes. The Origin of Consciousness in the Bicameral Mind. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1990 paperback edition. 209. The island of Thera is now called Santorini.
8. Charlotte L. Pearson, Peter W. Brewer, David Brown, Timothy J. Heaton, Gregory W. L. Hodgins, A. J. Timothy Jull, Todd Lange, and Matthew W. Salzer. "Annual Radiocarbon Record Indicates 16th Century BCE Date for the Thera Eruption." Science Advances 15 August 2018.
9. F. W. McCoy and S. E. Dunn. "Modelling the Climatic Effects of the LBA Eruption of Thera: New Calculations of Tephra Volumes May Suggest a Significantly Larger Eruption than Previously Reported." American Geographical Union, Chapman Conference on Volcanism and the Earth’s Atmosphere, Thera, Greece, 2002.
10. Pearson.
11. Wikipedia. "Ancient Egyptian Concept of the Soul."
12. Gomez. 49.
13. Gomez. 111.
14. Newbell Niles Puckett. Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1926. 109. Gomez suggested the Ewe were shipped to Haiti, Brazil, and Cuba; in this country they were sent to Louisiana [page 54].
15. Puckett, Folk Beliefs. 111.
16. Puckett, Folk Beliefs. 112.
17. Gomez. 49.
18. Gomez. 112.
19. Puckett, Folk Beliefs. 109.
20. Puckett, Folk Beliefs. 111.
21. Gomez. 120.
22. Gomez. 147.
23. Sjoerd Hofstra. "The Ancestral Spirits of the Mendi." Internationales Archiv fur Ethnographie 39:177-196:1941. Translation in Among the Mende in Sierra Leone, 299–318. Edited by Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra. Leiden: Afrika-Studiecentrum, 2014. 322.
24. Wikipedia. "Hades."
25. Gomez. 49.
26. Gomez. 112.
27. Gomez. 130.
28. Stuart J. Edelstein. The Sickled Cell. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986. 66.
29. Jaynes. 290.
30. Wikipedia. "Akan People."
31. Gomez. 111.
32. Wikipedia. "Mali Empire."
33. Gomez. 49-50.
34. Gomez. 128.
35. Gomez. 129.
36. Hofstra. 325.
37. Hofstra. 322, 327.
38. Hofstra. 327-328.
39. Hofstra. 328.
40. Gomez. 278-279.
41. Gomez. 278.
42. Gomez. 274.
43. Henry Walker, Johns Island, South Carolina. Quoted by Newball N. Puckett. "Religious Folk Beliefs of Whites and Negroes." Journal of Negro History 16:9-35:1931. 12.
44. B. Smith, Jacksonville, Florida. Quoted by Puckett, Religious Folk Beliefs. 12.
45. Mrs. B. Jones, Houston, Texas. Quoted by Puckett, Religious Folk Beliefs. 12.
46. Gomez. 278.
West Africa was not some isolated backwater, when Portuguese navigators first kidnapped men from the coast in 1444. [1] It may not have been Roman Catholic, but it was part of the Mediterranean regional community, even if it was on its outer boundary. Each incoming group had carried new ideas that overlaid a substratum of concepts shared with people already in the area.
Many perceived a single superior god who produced a subsidiary layer of deities, then lost interest in human activities. Michael Gomez explained the Bambara of the upper Niger river [2] thought Bemba formed the lesser gods, then made women and the earth. Chaos followed the creation of plants and animals, but order was restored by one of the subordinate beings. [3]
Similarly, the Akan of modern Ghana, claimed Onayme created Assa Ya (the Earth mother) and demigods, [4] while Chineke made Ala, the Igbo Earth mother. [5] The Mende god sent rain to his wife, the Earth, then withdrew. [6]
Julian Jaynes hypothesized the perception of a remote creator arose in the chaos that followed an eruption on the island of Thera in the Mediterranean [7] some time between 1600 bc and 1525 bc. [18] Ash fell from "from the coastline of the Peloponissos to the west, over all of Crete to the south, over western Anatolia to the east, and as far as the Black Sea to the north-northwest." [9]
The volcanic activity set off internal migrations, while others fled inundated coasts. Jaynes argued the social disorder was so traumatic, it altered individuals’ mental processes. He pointed to the Iliad and Amos, written before, in which gods communicated directly to people through their voices. In contrast, in the later Odyssey, individuals turned to prayer and other means of approaching a god who had abandoned them. Charlotte Pearson’s team asserted the aftereffects coincided with the emergence of Egypt’s New Kingdom. [10]
Egyptians envisioned humans as composed of multiple elements, although the number varied from one historic period to another. The ka was a person’s "vital essence," which was depicted as an individual’s twin. When one died, one returned to the ka and needed to be sustained with food offerings. The ba was one’s personality that "Egyptians believed would live after the body died, and it is sometimes depicted as a human-headed bird flying out of the tomb to join with the ka in the afterlife." [11]
The Bambara taught a person was composed of his or her soul, the ni and its double the dya, and his or her character, the tere. [12] Gomez reported the Akan believed an individual was part blood (mogya), part spirit (ntoro), and part soul (kra). [13] Newbell Puckett noted the Ewe to the east presumed every person had "an indwelling spirit (kra)," [14] an immortal soul, [15] and a bush soul that resided in an animal. [16]
When a Bambara died, the dya entered the water, the ni returned to the ancestors, and the tere roamed loose. [17] For the Akan, the ntoro returned to the ancestors, while the mogya returned to the spirit world. [18] The Ewe kra survived to enter another infant or to wander as a sisa, a "kra without a tenement," [19] while the immortal soul became the person’s ghost. [20]
The Igbo of southeastern Nigeria simply assumed one’s soul was the chi, which returned to the land where it was born. [21]
The Kongo saw the afterworld as a mountain that mirrored the ordinary, separated from it by a river. [22] Likewise, Sjoerd Hofstra discovered the Mende believed the spirit of the dead needed to be helped over a river with gifts of food. If a ngafaga did not pass, it roamed the world of the living. [23]
These views were similar to those of the Greeks who thought the dead crossed the river Styx to enter the underworld of Hades. The boatman, Charon, was paid with a coin placed in the mouth of the dead. If there was no payment, the spirit of the dead stayed on the river shore. "Greeks offered propitiatory libations to prevent the deceased from returning to the upper world to ‘haunt’ those who had not given them a proper burial." [24]
Africans presumed the soul could be reborn. The Bambara thought the dya of one generation became the ni of the next, [25] while the Akan claimed the mogya was reborn. [26] The unborn child bartered with Chineke for its chi, predetermining "his length of life and his future activities." [27]. As soon as an infant was born, the parents consulted a professional who divined the identity of the baby’s chi. [28]
Egyptians were the ones who originated the concept of soul transmigration, according to Jaynes. Pythagoras, took the idea to Greece in the middle-500s bc. [29]
The ways individuals approached a god reflected more recent experiences. The Akan had created the Ghana empire. [30] They erected temples to the lesser gods, the abosom, who spoke through possession of professional priests and priestesses. [31]
The Bambara were part of the Mali Empire that succeeded Ghana. [32] Each village had a sacred space devoted to its particular deity, or boli. "Supplications for health, marital problems, the weather, and so on were made" to it through a jar of amulets. [33]
The Igbo had no hierarchical structures. [34] Each village had a shrine to its ancestor. Contact was made through sacrifices and prayers. [35]
The Mende came closest to maintaining the relationship with a god like that posited by Jaynes for the Iliad. Hofstra said they believed the ancestors were guardians who protected individuals. [36] The recently dead maintained contact through dreams, [37] which individuals shared with others. [38]. The visits slowly become less frequent and limited to times of trouble. [39]
Michael Gomez suggested it was these commonalities in world views that allowed slaves to form communities, first on plantations, then again under the aegis of Christianity. After all, the religion arose in the same eastern Mediterranean region.
Thus, slaves confronted with a god who created a son and ghost, already knew a god who formed lesser beings. Further, they expected some spirits to intercede for them, much like the Holy Ghost would do. [40]
Few had problems with Christ’s ritual rebirth. Instead of returning in the next generation, African Americans were willing to accept a period when they were united with Him, before the final resurrection. [41]
Slaves easily understood crossing the Jordan "represented death and the hereafter." [42] Puckett met a man from Johns Island, South Carolina, in the 1920s who said one flew above the river. [43] A man in Jacksonville, Florida, told him Jesus took one over on the Old Ship of Zion, [44] while a woman in Houston simply assumed one waded across. [45]
Gomez noted the only thing many didn’t understand was the absence of a mother Earth figure. [46]
End Notes
1. Hugh Thomas. The Slave Trade. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997. 22.
2. Michael A. Gomez. Exchanging Our Country Marks. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998. 46. He said the Bambara were most common in Louisiana [page 42].
3. Gomez. 49.
4. Gomez. 111. He said most went to Jamaica, [page 106] and then to the tobacco lands of Virginia and Maryland [page 107].
5. Gomez. 129. The Igbo were sent to Virginia and the area around Chesapeake Bay.
6. Gomez. 95. The Mende were discussed in a series posted between 30 March 2019 and 31 March 2019.
7. Julian Jaynes. The Origin of Consciousness in the Bicameral Mind. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1990 paperback edition. 209. The island of Thera is now called Santorini.
8. Charlotte L. Pearson, Peter W. Brewer, David Brown, Timothy J. Heaton, Gregory W. L. Hodgins, A. J. Timothy Jull, Todd Lange, and Matthew W. Salzer. "Annual Radiocarbon Record Indicates 16th Century BCE Date for the Thera Eruption." Science Advances 15 August 2018.
9. F. W. McCoy and S. E. Dunn. "Modelling the Climatic Effects of the LBA Eruption of Thera: New Calculations of Tephra Volumes May Suggest a Significantly Larger Eruption than Previously Reported." American Geographical Union, Chapman Conference on Volcanism and the Earth’s Atmosphere, Thera, Greece, 2002.
10. Pearson.
11. Wikipedia. "Ancient Egyptian Concept of the Soul."
12. Gomez. 49.
13. Gomez. 111.
14. Newbell Niles Puckett. Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1926. 109. Gomez suggested the Ewe were shipped to Haiti, Brazil, and Cuba; in this country they were sent to Louisiana [page 54].
15. Puckett, Folk Beliefs. 111.
16. Puckett, Folk Beliefs. 112.
17. Gomez. 49.
18. Gomez. 112.
19. Puckett, Folk Beliefs. 109.
20. Puckett, Folk Beliefs. 111.
21. Gomez. 120.
22. Gomez. 147.
23. Sjoerd Hofstra. "The Ancestral Spirits of the Mendi." Internationales Archiv fur Ethnographie 39:177-196:1941. Translation in Among the Mende in Sierra Leone, 299–318. Edited by Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra. Leiden: Afrika-Studiecentrum, 2014. 322.
24. Wikipedia. "Hades."
25. Gomez. 49.
26. Gomez. 112.
27. Gomez. 130.
28. Stuart J. Edelstein. The Sickled Cell. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986. 66.
29. Jaynes. 290.
30. Wikipedia. "Akan People."
31. Gomez. 111.
32. Wikipedia. "Mali Empire."
33. Gomez. 49-50.
34. Gomez. 128.
35. Gomez. 129.
36. Hofstra. 325.
37. Hofstra. 322, 327.
38. Hofstra. 327-328.
39. Hofstra. 328.
40. Gomez. 278-279.
41. Gomez. 278.
42. Gomez. 274.
43. Henry Walker, Johns Island, South Carolina. Quoted by Newball N. Puckett. "Religious Folk Beliefs of Whites and Negroes." Journal of Negro History 16:9-35:1931. 12.
44. B. Smith, Jacksonville, Florida. Quoted by Puckett, Religious Folk Beliefs. 12.
45. Mrs. B. Jones, Houston, Texas. Quoted by Puckett, Religious Folk Beliefs. 12.
46. Gomez. 278.
Tuesday, October 9, 2018
God’s Grace - Needing Time
Topic: Origins - Ring Shout
God’s Grace was one of several acts who appeared at an anniversary concert for The Sensational Chariots in Philadelphia’s Saint Andrews Fellowship Baptist Church on a Saturday in 2016. The five women used "Needed Time" to close their segment.
The backup singers and musicians stood in the mourning bench area, while the lead, Vanessa Mims, moved into the aisle where the most interested were seated. When she walked, she bent her knees to move her feet. One hand held a microphone, while the other was bent at the elbow. During the denouement, she often leaned forward from the hips as she sang.
The women in her backup group stood behind floor mikes and moved to the music. While their movements were similar, they were not synchronized. They bent their knees and tended to keep their elbows bent.
Mims had a corded mike, and so only moved up four pews where people on the aisles were clapping. Those who stood tended to be on the side aisles or at the back.
At the end, the women moved down the aisle with the same march-style walk as Mims, and congregated at the rear.
"Needed Time" apparently was her closing number; two other videos of it were posted from concerts celebrating God’s Grace’s anniversaries. Her movement patterns were the same, as were the responses of the audience. In one, two women at the back brought tambourines that they began shaking toward the end.
Performers
Vocal Soloist: Vanessa Mims
Vocal Group: Rosie Harris, Misty Henley, Myra J. Maxwell, Patricia Dockery, Starr Ball [1]
Instrumental Accompaniment: electric guitar, electric bass
Rhythm Accompaniment: drum set
Credits
None given
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Phrases: come by here, needed time, praying
Vocabulary
Pronoun: somebody, then I
Term for Deity: Lord, then Jesus
Special Terms: none
Basic Form: prelude-denouement
Prelude: followed the conventional song with verses about "it’s a needed time" and "somebody’s praying." The first repeated the line three times (AAAB). The second used variants of "why don’t you come here" for the second through fourth lines. These two verses were repeated three times.
Transition: one verse, come by here in the morning/noontide/midnight hour, with "come by here" for fourth line.
Denouement: repetitions of "come by here" and "see about Jesus."
Ending: repeated transition verse, before another repetition of the denouement verse.
Literary Devices: incremental repetition
Unique Features: none
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: 1-5
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: AB
Singing Style: soloist sang one syllable to one note. It became harder to understand her words toward the end. The group sang in chords.
Solo-Group Dynamics: The group begin repeating her lines, then repeated "come by here" as the soloist began repeating lines.
Vocal-Orchestral Dynamics: the musicians continued playing while the women walked down the aisle at the end.
Notes on Performance
Occasion: concerts celebrating the anniversaries of local Philadelphia gospel groups. Two were for her group, and one was for another.
Location: mourning bench areas of local churches
Microphones: generally the soloist had a corded hand-mike and the backup singers had floor mikes. In one concert the second lead singer also had a hand-mike, and in another they all did.
Clothing: they dressed alike in straight, calf-length skirts and over blouses; in one case they were bright pink, in the others they were shades of white or gray. The musicians wore black or black slacks and white tops.
Notes on Movement
The guitar and bass player stood behind the women in two concerts. In the third, they were seated to one side. The drummer was always seated.
As suggested in the post for 30 September 2018, shoes with heels could restrain women’s movements. In the video for 2016, Mims took off shoes before she began singing. In the video from 2017, one of the backup singers removed her shoes before the recessional.
Notes on Performers
God’s Grace was organized in 2000 by Vanessa Mims and Rosie Harris. Mims was affiliated with Saint John Memorial Baptist Church where she was an associate minister. [2]
The second lead singer, Myra Maxwell, was a Methodist pastor at Saint Luke’s Restoration Worship Center. She had been sexually molested as a child, and much of her ministry was concerned with helping victims. She said she first became serious about religion when she learned "Jesus Loves Me" at a friend’s vacation Bible school. [3]
The others were members of Enon Baptist Church. [4] It had been organized in 1917; it’s pastor in 2017 was born in South Carolina, but moved to Philadelphia as a child. Samaria Bailey said "his preaching style is reminiscent of an elder Southern Baptist preacher and complements the enthusiastic music supplied by the church’s vocalists and instrumentalists." He said it was a spirit-centered church, because "if the Holy Ghost don’t come, then everything we do is in vain."[5]
Availability
YouTube: Vanessa Mims. "Needing Time." Uploaded 22 June 2014 by Vanessa Mims. Anniversary concert for God’s Grace.
YouTube: God’s Grace. "Come By Here." Uploaded 2 October 2016 by Best Quartets. Fifty-seventh anniversary concert for The Sensational Chariots.
YouTube: God’s Grace. "Lord Come By Here." Uploaded 17 June 2017 by PeaceCobbler. Seventeenth anniversary concert for God’s Grace.
End Notes
1. YouTube notes, 2016.
2. "Gospel, Soul & Rhythm-n-Blues Review with Carlton Lewis III and More." Ticketfly website.
3. John W. Coleman. "Pastor’s Healing from Abuse Inspires Ministry and a Meeting with the Pope." United Methodist Church, Eastern Pennsylvania Conference website. November 2015.
4. Ticketfly.
5. Samaria Bailey. "Church of the Week: Historical Enon Baptist Church." The Philadelphia Tribune website. 4 November 2017.
God’s Grace was one of several acts who appeared at an anniversary concert for The Sensational Chariots in Philadelphia’s Saint Andrews Fellowship Baptist Church on a Saturday in 2016. The five women used "Needed Time" to close their segment.
The backup singers and musicians stood in the mourning bench area, while the lead, Vanessa Mims, moved into the aisle where the most interested were seated. When she walked, she bent her knees to move her feet. One hand held a microphone, while the other was bent at the elbow. During the denouement, she often leaned forward from the hips as she sang.
The women in her backup group stood behind floor mikes and moved to the music. While their movements were similar, they were not synchronized. They bent their knees and tended to keep their elbows bent.
Mims had a corded mike, and so only moved up four pews where people on the aisles were clapping. Those who stood tended to be on the side aisles or at the back.
At the end, the women moved down the aisle with the same march-style walk as Mims, and congregated at the rear.
"Needed Time" apparently was her closing number; two other videos of it were posted from concerts celebrating God’s Grace’s anniversaries. Her movement patterns were the same, as were the responses of the audience. In one, two women at the back brought tambourines that they began shaking toward the end.
Performers
Vocal Soloist: Vanessa Mims
Vocal Group: Rosie Harris, Misty Henley, Myra J. Maxwell, Patricia Dockery, Starr Ball [1]
Instrumental Accompaniment: electric guitar, electric bass
Rhythm Accompaniment: drum set
Credits
None given
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Phrases: come by here, needed time, praying
Vocabulary
Pronoun: somebody, then I
Term for Deity: Lord, then Jesus
Special Terms: none
Basic Form: prelude-denouement
Prelude: followed the conventional song with verses about "it’s a needed time" and "somebody’s praying." The first repeated the line three times (AAAB). The second used variants of "why don’t you come here" for the second through fourth lines. These two verses were repeated three times.
Transition: one verse, come by here in the morning/noontide/midnight hour, with "come by here" for fourth line.
Denouement: repetitions of "come by here" and "see about Jesus."
Ending: repeated transition verse, before another repetition of the denouement verse.
Literary Devices: incremental repetition
Unique Features: none
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: 1-5
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: AB
Singing Style: soloist sang one syllable to one note. It became harder to understand her words toward the end. The group sang in chords.
Solo-Group Dynamics: The group begin repeating her lines, then repeated "come by here" as the soloist began repeating lines.
Vocal-Orchestral Dynamics: the musicians continued playing while the women walked down the aisle at the end.
Notes on Performance
Occasion: concerts celebrating the anniversaries of local Philadelphia gospel groups. Two were for her group, and one was for another.
Location: mourning bench areas of local churches
Microphones: generally the soloist had a corded hand-mike and the backup singers had floor mikes. In one concert the second lead singer also had a hand-mike, and in another they all did.
Clothing: they dressed alike in straight, calf-length skirts and over blouses; in one case they were bright pink, in the others they were shades of white or gray. The musicians wore black or black slacks and white tops.
Notes on Movement
The guitar and bass player stood behind the women in two concerts. In the third, they were seated to one side. The drummer was always seated.
As suggested in the post for 30 September 2018, shoes with heels could restrain women’s movements. In the video for 2016, Mims took off shoes before she began singing. In the video from 2017, one of the backup singers removed her shoes before the recessional.
Notes on Performers
God’s Grace was organized in 2000 by Vanessa Mims and Rosie Harris. Mims was affiliated with Saint John Memorial Baptist Church where she was an associate minister. [2]
The second lead singer, Myra Maxwell, was a Methodist pastor at Saint Luke’s Restoration Worship Center. She had been sexually molested as a child, and much of her ministry was concerned with helping victims. She said she first became serious about religion when she learned "Jesus Loves Me" at a friend’s vacation Bible school. [3]
The others were members of Enon Baptist Church. [4] It had been organized in 1917; it’s pastor in 2017 was born in South Carolina, but moved to Philadelphia as a child. Samaria Bailey said "his preaching style is reminiscent of an elder Southern Baptist preacher and complements the enthusiastic music supplied by the church’s vocalists and instrumentalists." He said it was a spirit-centered church, because "if the Holy Ghost don’t come, then everything we do is in vain."[5]
Availability
YouTube: Vanessa Mims. "Needing Time." Uploaded 22 June 2014 by Vanessa Mims. Anniversary concert for God’s Grace.
YouTube: God’s Grace. "Come By Here." Uploaded 2 October 2016 by Best Quartets. Fifty-seventh anniversary concert for The Sensational Chariots.
YouTube: God’s Grace. "Lord Come By Here." Uploaded 17 June 2017 by PeaceCobbler. Seventeenth anniversary concert for God’s Grace.
End Notes
1. YouTube notes, 2016.
2. "Gospel, Soul & Rhythm-n-Blues Review with Carlton Lewis III and More." Ticketfly website.
3. John W. Coleman. "Pastor’s Healing from Abuse Inspires Ministry and a Meeting with the Pope." United Methodist Church, Eastern Pennsylvania Conference website. November 2015.
4. Ticketfly.
5. Samaria Bailey. "Church of the Week: Historical Enon Baptist Church." The Philadelphia Tribune website. 4 November 2017.
Sunday, October 7, 2018
Ring Shouts (Concerts)
Topic: Origins - Ring Shout
Ring shouts survived because they could be modified as individuals’ social situations and religious beliefs changed. As the rituals moved from bare cabins to churches, the architecture of the locations introduced variations.
When shouts were held outdoors or in empty rooms, it was possible for everyone present to move in a circle. When they first moved indoors, participants objected to benches that cluttered the space. [1] Eventually, churches attached pews to the floors, and shouts survived the loss of the ring.
Protestant churches that held revivals reserved an area between the front row of pews and the altar rail for the unconverted to come commit themselves to Christ. [2] The exhorters, mentioned by Fredrica Bremer in New Orleans in 1852, [3] moved into the space to direct their energies on those on the mourning bench. The Bolton Brothers said their mother was among those who gathered around would-be converts. [4]
This wide open area, which had no name in diagrams of Protestant churches, was a transitional space that was not part of the formal church represented by the altar. When gospel groups performed in church concerts they didn’t stand on the platforms used by pastors where they could be seen. Instead, they sang in the metaphorical mourning benches.
The exception was modern megachurches that had turned their altars into stages with large aprons reaching into the empty spaces. Groups like Keith Johnson [5] and the Bolton Brothers worked on the apron in front of a curtain that, if it did not actually shield the altar, acted as a symbolic barrier between formal and information religious areas.
When musicians like George Nesbitt and the Trinity Inspirational Mass Choir did sing behind the altar in Goose Creek, South Carolina, it was because they were perceived to be part of the service, not a separate concert. [6]
Artists could only reach the mourning benches the way converts did, by walking up the aisles. They didn’t have access to the side rooms used by the pastor and choir. Those processionals became so much a part of the concert that Willa Ward published a picture of her sister Clara and the Ward Singers "entering through the audience at Philadelphia Convention Hall, 1951." [7]
They no doubt mounted the stage and had access to the wings in the secular space, but the procession emphasized that they were not preachers there to convert unbelievers. The role remained the same as the musicians observed by Laura Towne on Saint Helena in 1862 who stood to the side while the others moved in the circle. [8] The backup singers and instrumentalists were there to serve the needs of the participants.
The quartet soloist did not emerge until the Soul Stirrers added a second lead singer around 1939, so the soloist had a full quartet backing him. [9] Ray Allen believed the lead singer took on the role of the priest who re-enacted the drama of contact with the Holy Spirit on behalf of the audience, who might or might not join him or her. [10]
Allen’s experience was with gospel groups in Brooklyn, New York. One of the men in a group he interviewed, instead emphasized the expectations of the audience. When they were in Sumter, South Carolina, for the wedding of one of the group’s kinfolk, Jeff Richardson told Allen:
"You see people down here, they know how to have church! [. . .] They know how to get down and clap their hands, and shout, and have a good time without any music [instruments]. Up in New York they just mess around, until it’s time to hear some music and clap their hands." [11]
For many concert goers, the lead replaced the exhorter. It was his or her role to abet their religious experience. That was why Johnson invited people to come down into the mourning bench space and made it permissible to dance.
Ring shouts originally lasted for hours, but they weren’t all climax. People danced and rested. One woman told Lydia Parrish on Saint Simons Island: "‘When it gets hot, them that’s on the outside of the church comes runnin’ in.’ I asked what she meant by ‘getting hot.’ ‘O, you feel good. You know things is warmin’ up and you gets revived’." [12]
The pacing occurred on several levels. Within songs in the prelude-denouement format, there was the movement from exhortation to exhilaration. In a performance, artists sang other types of songs. Willa Ward said, in a concert in a Los Angeles church in 1949, they
"opened with ‘Jesus Is All the World to Me,’ which I had arranged. Clara, Marion, and I blasted the line ‘When I’m sad, He makes me glad, He’s my friend.’ Then we dropped the volume. Marion and I did a spot obbligato in high register and close harmony with Cara ad-libbing."
Willa indicated they were very attuned to their audience responses.
"We could see the listeners twitch in their seats—we knew their reserve from crumbing. By the time we eased into our heavy hitters, the congregation was crying, shouting, and holy dancing in the aisles. Even the ushers lost control and joined the joyous happening." [13]
The Clara Ward Singers were stars who were responsible for an entire concert. Many gospel programs included several acts. Thus, the pacing of songs existed within individual acts that in turn were part of a series, in which each climax was followed by a lull at a level higher than the previous one. Each group then raised the emotional plateau for the next act. At any point, the atmosphere could become what Saint Simons’ Clara called hot, then cool, then reheat.
End Notes
1. Richard James Arnold’s observations on benches were quoted by Frederick Law Olmsted in the post for 25 September 2018.
2. Charles Finney and the introduction of mourning benches was discussed in the post for 12 August 2017.
3. For Bremer’s comments, see the post for 27 September 2018.
4. For the Bolton Brother’s comments, see the post for 12 August 2017.
5. Keith Johnson was discussed in the post for 23 September 2018.
6. Trinity Inspirational Mass Choir was discussed in the post for 30 September 2018.
7. Willa Ward-Royster. How I Got Over: Clara Ward and the World-Famous Ward Singers. Told to Toni Rose. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997. 90-91.
8. For more on Laura Towne, see the post for 20 September 2018.
9. Shelia G. Kidd. "Soul Stirrers." Handbook of Texas Online. 6 May 2013; last updated 5 October 2015.
10. Ray Allen. Singing in the Spirit. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991. Chapter 6.
11. Jeff Richardson. Quoted by Allen. 186. Ellipsis for text in the middle of the comment; bracketed comment in the original. Richardson played drums for Willie Johnson’s Brooklyn Skyways. He was born in Brooklyn, but "spent childhood summers with his grandmother in South Carolina and continues to visit friends and family on a regular basis." (Allen. 187.)
12. Lydia Parrish. Slave Songs of the Georgia Sea Islands. New York: Creative Age Press, 1942. Reprint edition, Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1992. 89. Parrish did not provide Clara’s surname. "Revived" here drew on at least two meanings: given new energy and converted.
13. Ward. 75. Marion Williams often sang lead with the Ward Singers. Note the use of the word "eased."
Ring shouts survived because they could be modified as individuals’ social situations and religious beliefs changed. As the rituals moved from bare cabins to churches, the architecture of the locations introduced variations.
When shouts were held outdoors or in empty rooms, it was possible for everyone present to move in a circle. When they first moved indoors, participants objected to benches that cluttered the space. [1] Eventually, churches attached pews to the floors, and shouts survived the loss of the ring.
Protestant churches that held revivals reserved an area between the front row of pews and the altar rail for the unconverted to come commit themselves to Christ. [2] The exhorters, mentioned by Fredrica Bremer in New Orleans in 1852, [3] moved into the space to direct their energies on those on the mourning bench. The Bolton Brothers said their mother was among those who gathered around would-be converts. [4]
This wide open area, which had no name in diagrams of Protestant churches, was a transitional space that was not part of the formal church represented by the altar. When gospel groups performed in church concerts they didn’t stand on the platforms used by pastors where they could be seen. Instead, they sang in the metaphorical mourning benches.
The exception was modern megachurches that had turned their altars into stages with large aprons reaching into the empty spaces. Groups like Keith Johnson [5] and the Bolton Brothers worked on the apron in front of a curtain that, if it did not actually shield the altar, acted as a symbolic barrier between formal and information religious areas.
When musicians like George Nesbitt and the Trinity Inspirational Mass Choir did sing behind the altar in Goose Creek, South Carolina, it was because they were perceived to be part of the service, not a separate concert. [6]
Artists could only reach the mourning benches the way converts did, by walking up the aisles. They didn’t have access to the side rooms used by the pastor and choir. Those processionals became so much a part of the concert that Willa Ward published a picture of her sister Clara and the Ward Singers "entering through the audience at Philadelphia Convention Hall, 1951." [7]
They no doubt mounted the stage and had access to the wings in the secular space, but the procession emphasized that they were not preachers there to convert unbelievers. The role remained the same as the musicians observed by Laura Towne on Saint Helena in 1862 who stood to the side while the others moved in the circle. [8] The backup singers and instrumentalists were there to serve the needs of the participants.
The quartet soloist did not emerge until the Soul Stirrers added a second lead singer around 1939, so the soloist had a full quartet backing him. [9] Ray Allen believed the lead singer took on the role of the priest who re-enacted the drama of contact with the Holy Spirit on behalf of the audience, who might or might not join him or her. [10]
Allen’s experience was with gospel groups in Brooklyn, New York. One of the men in a group he interviewed, instead emphasized the expectations of the audience. When they were in Sumter, South Carolina, for the wedding of one of the group’s kinfolk, Jeff Richardson told Allen:
"You see people down here, they know how to have church! [. . .] They know how to get down and clap their hands, and shout, and have a good time without any music [instruments]. Up in New York they just mess around, until it’s time to hear some music and clap their hands." [11]
For many concert goers, the lead replaced the exhorter. It was his or her role to abet their religious experience. That was why Johnson invited people to come down into the mourning bench space and made it permissible to dance.
Ring shouts originally lasted for hours, but they weren’t all climax. People danced and rested. One woman told Lydia Parrish on Saint Simons Island: "‘When it gets hot, them that’s on the outside of the church comes runnin’ in.’ I asked what she meant by ‘getting hot.’ ‘O, you feel good. You know things is warmin’ up and you gets revived’." [12]
The pacing occurred on several levels. Within songs in the prelude-denouement format, there was the movement from exhortation to exhilaration. In a performance, artists sang other types of songs. Willa Ward said, in a concert in a Los Angeles church in 1949, they
"opened with ‘Jesus Is All the World to Me,’ which I had arranged. Clara, Marion, and I blasted the line ‘When I’m sad, He makes me glad, He’s my friend.’ Then we dropped the volume. Marion and I did a spot obbligato in high register and close harmony with Cara ad-libbing."
Willa indicated they were very attuned to their audience responses.
"We could see the listeners twitch in their seats—we knew their reserve from crumbing. By the time we eased into our heavy hitters, the congregation was crying, shouting, and holy dancing in the aisles. Even the ushers lost control and joined the joyous happening." [13]
The Clara Ward Singers were stars who were responsible for an entire concert. Many gospel programs included several acts. Thus, the pacing of songs existed within individual acts that in turn were part of a series, in which each climax was followed by a lull at a level higher than the previous one. Each group then raised the emotional plateau for the next act. At any point, the atmosphere could become what Saint Simons’ Clara called hot, then cool, then reheat.
End Notes
1. Richard James Arnold’s observations on benches were quoted by Frederick Law Olmsted in the post for 25 September 2018.
2. Charles Finney and the introduction of mourning benches was discussed in the post for 12 August 2017.
3. For Bremer’s comments, see the post for 27 September 2018.
4. For the Bolton Brother’s comments, see the post for 12 August 2017.
5. Keith Johnson was discussed in the post for 23 September 2018.
6. Trinity Inspirational Mass Choir was discussed in the post for 30 September 2018.
7. Willa Ward-Royster. How I Got Over: Clara Ward and the World-Famous Ward Singers. Told to Toni Rose. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997. 90-91.
8. For more on Laura Towne, see the post for 20 September 2018.
9. Shelia G. Kidd. "Soul Stirrers." Handbook of Texas Online. 6 May 2013; last updated 5 October 2015.
10. Ray Allen. Singing in the Spirit. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991. Chapter 6.
11. Jeff Richardson. Quoted by Allen. 186. Ellipsis for text in the middle of the comment; bracketed comment in the original. Richardson played drums for Willie Johnson’s Brooklyn Skyways. He was born in Brooklyn, but "spent childhood summers with his grandmother in South Carolina and continues to visit friends and family on a regular basis." (Allen. 187.)
12. Lydia Parrish. Slave Songs of the Georgia Sea Islands. New York: Creative Age Press, 1942. Reprint edition, Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1992. 89. Parrish did not provide Clara’s surname. "Revived" here drew on at least two meanings: given new energy and converted.
13. Ward. 75. Marion Williams often sang lead with the Ward Singers. Note the use of the word "eased."
Thursday, October 4, 2018
Ring Shouts (Changes)
Topic: Origins - Ring Shout
Shouts observed by Lydia Parrish on Saint Simons Island in the 1920s and 1930s seemed tame and scripted compared to those seen by Thomas Wentworth Higginson on Saint Helena Island in 1862. He had described a ritual that began with men clapping their hands and stamping their feet, before some "circled like dervishes," while she only saw the first phase when they wound "monotonously." [1]
African Americans knew from slavery times their well-being depended on maintaining boundaries between public and private behavior. Thus, when Parrish watched Margaret wiggle "her hips shamelessly" at the Queen of the South Society hall, she was in a building controlled by a Black fraternal organization. When she had her photographed in the cabin she had built, Margaret was in a space controlled by a white benefactor. [2]
The wariness of outsiders extended beyond whites to the unknown African-Americans who accompanied them as retainers. Parrish observed, they were aware both groups considered shouts as "sad and disagreeable," to quote Harriet Ware on Saint Helena in 1865. [3] Even so, Parrish wrote:
"the hold of shouting is tenacious, and it is practiced during the Christmas holidays to this day. All the country Negroes enjoy it immensely, though many are unwilling to admit that they know how to do it, as they consider the dance old-fashioned. [4]
Protestant missionary attempts to suppress shouts introduced the separation of the sacred from everyday life to African Americans who perceived the two to be intertwined. While the sacred rituals were monitored by outsiders, the secular dances were dismissed as trivial because they were "done for fun." [5]
Before the Civil War, African Americans disguised shouts as exercises. Thus, James Hamilton Couper told Charles Lyell his slaves "sometimes contrive to take enough exercise to serve as a substitute for the dance." [6] Similarly, Edward Pierce concluded a "fastidious religionist might object to this exercise; but being in accordance with usage, and innocent enough in itself, it is not open to exception." [7]
After the war, when missionaries disparaged shouts, important rituals were transferred to the secular realm where they survived in forms carrying both innocent and symbolic meanings. The descendants of slaves Parrish met on Saint Simon were more protective of their secular dance traditions than their religious ones.
She had heard about a dance called the Buzzard Lope, but no one would admit knowing it. They claimed it was "done on some far-off island, such as St. Catherine’s or Sapelo." After ten years, a newcomer to the singing group demonstrated it, and then "a number who had previously denied such a gift" also showed her the steps. [8]
Parrish’s photograph showed a woman tilted forward at the hips with wide spread legs. Her arms, bent at the elbows, opened and closed like a bird’s wings. [9] The significance wasn’t in the movement but in the song in which people begged to be thrown into the "ole field" or graveyard when they died. Proper treatment of the dead in Africa was more important than salvation was to Protestants. [10]
Once it was known Parrish had seen the dance and heard the song, others were willing to show her. [11] On Sapelo Island, she found Isaac Johnson had incorporated modern steps. His teacher, a descendant of Bilali on Tom Spalding’s plantation, gave "a stylized pattern of the bird’s awkward steps, without any attempt at realism." She described it as a "high form of rhythmic approximation." [12]
Ring shouts were no more static than the Buzzard Lope. The ones Parrish saw may have included only one phase of the ones done on Saint Helena Island sixty years before, but African Americans had replaced what was lost with appropriations from whites, including round dances that were done by plantation owners. For instance, James Postell, whose family owned land on Saint Simons, spent time in Brunswick, Georgia, in the 1870s learning the steps of the "latest round dance" before a ball. [13]
"Down in de Mire" used incremental repetition like "Hold your light, Brudder Robert," which Higginson said was repeated with the names of everyone present. [14] Sterling Stuckey claimed the song was more complex, because he believed the names were those of the ancestors and that the lyrics blurred the line between the living and the dead. [15]
In the shout Parrish saw, the person whose name was called out had to kneel in the center with his or head touching the floor and "rotates with the group as it move around the circle." As they sang "Sister Emma, Oh you mus’ come down to de mire" and "Jesus been down to de mire," the "different shouters, as they pass, push the head ‘down to the mire.’ The several arms reaching out to give a push make an unusually picturesque pattern." [16]
Instead of a shout contacting the spirits, it was a re-enactment of another, older, African initiation ritual that had been camouflaged as a Protestant conversion experience. As mentioned in the post for 20 September 2018, Harriet Ware claimed shouts coincided with "meetings" in May 1862 that "take place for the examination of new members." Several generations later, the ritual appeared as a shout on Saint Simons with elements of a round dance.
The assimilation of white dance forms into shouts also occurred with the farewell song that closed a prayer meeting, shout, or service. Edward Pierce had noted, in January 1862, the slaves on Saint Helena "close with what is called ‘a glory shout, one joining hands with another, together in couples singing a verse and beating time with the foot." [17] Harriet Ware mentioned a church service in May 1862 that ended when they simply "shook hands all round." [18]
By the time Harriet Beecher Stowe described the religious meeting in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1867, the farewell had incorporated elements of the Virginia reel. [19] The one Lydia Parrish observed include parts of the grand-right-and-left associated with square dancing. Liverpool had been born in 1828 [20] on the Pierce Butler plantation. [21] At one singing session, he
"became excited as he heard again the old prayer-meeting song, left his seat, joined in the swaying group of sixty-five singers, and gave a demonstration of the ‘right hand of fellowship’ which he performed with the dignity seen in the minuet. First he gave his right hand to the singer on his right; then, bowing sedately, he crossed his left hand to the same member. Both hands were then shaken as the singers bowed with the rhythm before passing to the next neighbor and repeating the same ceremony." [22]
Parrish published one photograph of Willis Proctor "shaking the hand of Bessie in accordance with the usual custom at prayer meeting in a less sophisticated era." [23] They stood facing the camera clasping right hands, [24] much like the people mentioned by Pierce and Ware.
She included one other photograph that illustrated the ways secular forms perpetuate sacred ones. A middle-school-aged boy was doing "Juba Dis, Juba Dat." [25] At first glance, Snooks’ pose was similar to that of William Henry Lane who began performing as Master Juba in minstrel shows in the 1840s. [26]
In a woodcut from 1848, he had one heel raised slightly with his other knee in the air with the toe pointed down. His arms were at his sides with his hands flexed, and his torso tilted from the hips. [27] Snooks didn’t raise his knee, but raised his heel. He had one arm at his side, and his other forearm pointing up from the elbow. His torso leaned from the hips so he was looking down.
If one looks more closely at Snooks, one would see this was the basic shout step that used bent knees and raised heels. The angle of the torso was the same as that of singers like George Nesbitt and Keith Johnson. [28] His elbows were bent like those of the people mentioned in the post for 2 October 2018. Only his raised forearm was different.
If he had been doing this during slavery times, as men no doubt were after Lane became popular, Snooks would have been practicing a sacred ritual in front of a plantation owner who saw only the copy of a popular theatre dance.
End Notes
1. For more on Parrish’s observations, see the post for 2 October 2018. For more on Higginson, see the post for 20 September 2018.
2. Margaret was discussed in the post for 2 October 2018.
3. For more on Harriet Ware, see the post for 20 September 2018.
4. 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.
5. Parrish. 93.
6. A fuller quotation from Lyell and the citation appeared in the post for 18 September 2018. Emphasis added.
7. A fuller quotation from Pierce and the citation appeared in the post for 25 September 2018. Emphasis added.
8. Parrish. 108.
9. Photograph by Ralph Steiner. In Parrish. Opposite 129.
10. Sterling Stuckey discussed the many ways African attitudes toward death and burial traditions were transferred to the American South. He included a discussion of the buzzard as a symbol for the men who enslaved others in Africa. (Slave Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013 edition. 2-4.)
11. She wrote: "It is a curious fact that the Negro rarely volunteers information–on the sound principle, perhaps, that if you tell nothing you have nothing to regret; and this is my reason for giving so many identifying titles and lines. If you know what to ask for, the work is half done." (page 14)
As an example, she recalled reading about ring-games in the library in Boston, but had not seen any on Saint Simon in the previous twenty years because she didn’t live near a school. When she asked her cook, Julia Armonstrong, what a shanty sung on the island had to do with a ring-game, the sister of Willis Proctor answered: "Dear me! It’s a ring-play song, but it’s so long since I sung one I’d forgotten we ever did."
Parrish concluded, "again it was brought home to me that we learn from these people who have no past, only what we first discover for ourselves." (page 93)
12. Parrish. 111.
13. Caroline Couper Lovell. The Light of Other Days. Macon: Mercer University Press, 1995. 45. As mentioned in the post for 2 October 2018, James Pettigrew Postell owned the plantation where Parrish built her home and cabin. This may have been his son, James Mackbeth Postell, born in 1856. (Amy. "Coastal Georgia Families 1." Ancestry website. 28 May 2017.) Brunswick, on the mainland, was the county seat for Glynn County.
14. A fuller quotation from Higginson and the citation appeared in the post for 20 September 2018.
15. Stuckey. 29.
16. Parrish. 71.
17. A fuller quotation from Pierce and the citation appeared in the post for 25 September 2018.
18. Harriet Ware. Letter, 1 May 1862. In Letters from Port Royal Written at the Time of the Civil War. Edited by Elizabeth Ware Pearson. Boston: W. B. Clarke Company, 1906.
19. For more on Stowe, see the post for 27 September 2018.
20. Parrish. Opposite 32.
21. Parrish. 8. During the Civil War, Liverpool had been a cook for the Confederate company commanded by William Miles Hazzard, [29] whose family owned plantations north of the north of the town Frederica on the island. [30] As mentioned in the post for 18 September 2018, Butler sold his slaves in 1859 to pay debts. It’s likely, he was purchased by Hazzard, who then conscripted him. Liverpool took Hazzard’s surname, rather than Butler’s, when one was needed after the war.
22. Parrish. 130.
23. Parrish. 32.
24. Photograph by Foresta Hodgson Wood. In Parrish. Opposite 96. Bessie was Bessie Cuyler, who was born in 1895 according to Benjamin Allen. (Glynn County. Charleston: Arcadia Publishing, 2003.) Proctor was mentioned in the post for 2 October 2018.
25. Photograph by Clara Sipprell. In Parrish. Opposite 64. She did not provide Snooks’ last name.
26. Wikipedia. "Master Juba."
27. "Master Juba. The Illustrated London News. 5 August 1848. Reproduced by Hans Nathan. Dan Emmett and the Rise of Early Negro Minstrelsy. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962. 74. Uploaded to Wikimedia Commons on 26 October 2005 by Amcaja and included in Wikipedia entry on Juba.
28. George Nesbitt was discussed in the post for 30 September 2018. Keith Johnson was described in the post for 23 September 2018.
29. Allen.
30. "The Plantation Era and Christ Church, Frederica, Saint Simons Island, Georgia." Oatlands Plantation website. 11.
Shouts observed by Lydia Parrish on Saint Simons Island in the 1920s and 1930s seemed tame and scripted compared to those seen by Thomas Wentworth Higginson on Saint Helena Island in 1862. He had described a ritual that began with men clapping their hands and stamping their feet, before some "circled like dervishes," while she only saw the first phase when they wound "monotonously." [1]
African Americans knew from slavery times their well-being depended on maintaining boundaries between public and private behavior. Thus, when Parrish watched Margaret wiggle "her hips shamelessly" at the Queen of the South Society hall, she was in a building controlled by a Black fraternal organization. When she had her photographed in the cabin she had built, Margaret was in a space controlled by a white benefactor. [2]
The wariness of outsiders extended beyond whites to the unknown African-Americans who accompanied them as retainers. Parrish observed, they were aware both groups considered shouts as "sad and disagreeable," to quote Harriet Ware on Saint Helena in 1865. [3] Even so, Parrish wrote:
"the hold of shouting is tenacious, and it is practiced during the Christmas holidays to this day. All the country Negroes enjoy it immensely, though many are unwilling to admit that they know how to do it, as they consider the dance old-fashioned. [4]
Protestant missionary attempts to suppress shouts introduced the separation of the sacred from everyday life to African Americans who perceived the two to be intertwined. While the sacred rituals were monitored by outsiders, the secular dances were dismissed as trivial because they were "done for fun." [5]
Before the Civil War, African Americans disguised shouts as exercises. Thus, James Hamilton Couper told Charles Lyell his slaves "sometimes contrive to take enough exercise to serve as a substitute for the dance." [6] Similarly, Edward Pierce concluded a "fastidious religionist might object to this exercise; but being in accordance with usage, and innocent enough in itself, it is not open to exception." [7]
After the war, when missionaries disparaged shouts, important rituals were transferred to the secular realm where they survived in forms carrying both innocent and symbolic meanings. The descendants of slaves Parrish met on Saint Simon were more protective of their secular dance traditions than their religious ones.
She had heard about a dance called the Buzzard Lope, but no one would admit knowing it. They claimed it was "done on some far-off island, such as St. Catherine’s or Sapelo." After ten years, a newcomer to the singing group demonstrated it, and then "a number who had previously denied such a gift" also showed her the steps. [8]
Parrish’s photograph showed a woman tilted forward at the hips with wide spread legs. Her arms, bent at the elbows, opened and closed like a bird’s wings. [9] The significance wasn’t in the movement but in the song in which people begged to be thrown into the "ole field" or graveyard when they died. Proper treatment of the dead in Africa was more important than salvation was to Protestants. [10]
Once it was known Parrish had seen the dance and heard the song, others were willing to show her. [11] On Sapelo Island, she found Isaac Johnson had incorporated modern steps. His teacher, a descendant of Bilali on Tom Spalding’s plantation, gave "a stylized pattern of the bird’s awkward steps, without any attempt at realism." She described it as a "high form of rhythmic approximation." [12]
Ring shouts were no more static than the Buzzard Lope. The ones Parrish saw may have included only one phase of the ones done on Saint Helena Island sixty years before, but African Americans had replaced what was lost with appropriations from whites, including round dances that were done by plantation owners. For instance, James Postell, whose family owned land on Saint Simons, spent time in Brunswick, Georgia, in the 1870s learning the steps of the "latest round dance" before a ball. [13]
"Down in de Mire" used incremental repetition like "Hold your light, Brudder Robert," which Higginson said was repeated with the names of everyone present. [14] Sterling Stuckey claimed the song was more complex, because he believed the names were those of the ancestors and that the lyrics blurred the line between the living and the dead. [15]
In the shout Parrish saw, the person whose name was called out had to kneel in the center with his or head touching the floor and "rotates with the group as it move around the circle." As they sang "Sister Emma, Oh you mus’ come down to de mire" and "Jesus been down to de mire," the "different shouters, as they pass, push the head ‘down to the mire.’ The several arms reaching out to give a push make an unusually picturesque pattern." [16]
Instead of a shout contacting the spirits, it was a re-enactment of another, older, African initiation ritual that had been camouflaged as a Protestant conversion experience. As mentioned in the post for 20 September 2018, Harriet Ware claimed shouts coincided with "meetings" in May 1862 that "take place for the examination of new members." Several generations later, the ritual appeared as a shout on Saint Simons with elements of a round dance.
The assimilation of white dance forms into shouts also occurred with the farewell song that closed a prayer meeting, shout, or service. Edward Pierce had noted, in January 1862, the slaves on Saint Helena "close with what is called ‘a glory shout, one joining hands with another, together in couples singing a verse and beating time with the foot." [17] Harriet Ware mentioned a church service in May 1862 that ended when they simply "shook hands all round." [18]
By the time Harriet Beecher Stowe described the religious meeting in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1867, the farewell had incorporated elements of the Virginia reel. [19] The one Lydia Parrish observed include parts of the grand-right-and-left associated with square dancing. Liverpool had been born in 1828 [20] on the Pierce Butler plantation. [21] At one singing session, he
"became excited as he heard again the old prayer-meeting song, left his seat, joined in the swaying group of sixty-five singers, and gave a demonstration of the ‘right hand of fellowship’ which he performed with the dignity seen in the minuet. First he gave his right hand to the singer on his right; then, bowing sedately, he crossed his left hand to the same member. Both hands were then shaken as the singers bowed with the rhythm before passing to the next neighbor and repeating the same ceremony." [22]
Parrish published one photograph of Willis Proctor "shaking the hand of Bessie in accordance with the usual custom at prayer meeting in a less sophisticated era." [23] They stood facing the camera clasping right hands, [24] much like the people mentioned by Pierce and Ware.
She included one other photograph that illustrated the ways secular forms perpetuate sacred ones. A middle-school-aged boy was doing "Juba Dis, Juba Dat." [25] At first glance, Snooks’ pose was similar to that of William Henry Lane who began performing as Master Juba in minstrel shows in the 1840s. [26]
In a woodcut from 1848, he had one heel raised slightly with his other knee in the air with the toe pointed down. His arms were at his sides with his hands flexed, and his torso tilted from the hips. [27] Snooks didn’t raise his knee, but raised his heel. He had one arm at his side, and his other forearm pointing up from the elbow. His torso leaned from the hips so he was looking down.
If one looks more closely at Snooks, one would see this was the basic shout step that used bent knees and raised heels. The angle of the torso was the same as that of singers like George Nesbitt and Keith Johnson. [28] His elbows were bent like those of the people mentioned in the post for 2 October 2018. Only his raised forearm was different.
If he had been doing this during slavery times, as men no doubt were after Lane became popular, Snooks would have been practicing a sacred ritual in front of a plantation owner who saw only the copy of a popular theatre dance.
End Notes
1. For more on Parrish’s observations, see the post for 2 October 2018. For more on Higginson, see the post for 20 September 2018.
2. Margaret was discussed in the post for 2 October 2018.
3. For more on Harriet Ware, see the post for 20 September 2018.
4. 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.
5. Parrish. 93.
6. A fuller quotation from Lyell and the citation appeared in the post for 18 September 2018. Emphasis added.
7. A fuller quotation from Pierce and the citation appeared in the post for 25 September 2018. Emphasis added.
8. Parrish. 108.
9. Photograph by Ralph Steiner. In Parrish. Opposite 129.
10. Sterling Stuckey discussed the many ways African attitudes toward death and burial traditions were transferred to the American South. He included a discussion of the buzzard as a symbol for the men who enslaved others in Africa. (Slave Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013 edition. 2-4.)
11. She wrote: "It is a curious fact that the Negro rarely volunteers information–on the sound principle, perhaps, that if you tell nothing you have nothing to regret; and this is my reason for giving so many identifying titles and lines. If you know what to ask for, the work is half done." (page 14)
As an example, she recalled reading about ring-games in the library in Boston, but had not seen any on Saint Simon in the previous twenty years because she didn’t live near a school. When she asked her cook, Julia Armonstrong, what a shanty sung on the island had to do with a ring-game, the sister of Willis Proctor answered: "Dear me! It’s a ring-play song, but it’s so long since I sung one I’d forgotten we ever did."
Parrish concluded, "again it was brought home to me that we learn from these people who have no past, only what we first discover for ourselves." (page 93)
12. Parrish. 111.
13. Caroline Couper Lovell. The Light of Other Days. Macon: Mercer University Press, 1995. 45. As mentioned in the post for 2 October 2018, James Pettigrew Postell owned the plantation where Parrish built her home and cabin. This may have been his son, James Mackbeth Postell, born in 1856. (Amy. "Coastal Georgia Families 1." Ancestry website. 28 May 2017.) Brunswick, on the mainland, was the county seat for Glynn County.
14. A fuller quotation from Higginson and the citation appeared in the post for 20 September 2018.
15. Stuckey. 29.
16. Parrish. 71.
17. A fuller quotation from Pierce and the citation appeared in the post for 25 September 2018.
18. Harriet Ware. Letter, 1 May 1862. In Letters from Port Royal Written at the Time of the Civil War. Edited by Elizabeth Ware Pearson. Boston: W. B. Clarke Company, 1906.
19. For more on Stowe, see the post for 27 September 2018.
20. Parrish. Opposite 32.
21. Parrish. 8. During the Civil War, Liverpool had been a cook for the Confederate company commanded by William Miles Hazzard, [29] whose family owned plantations north of the north of the town Frederica on the island. [30] As mentioned in the post for 18 September 2018, Butler sold his slaves in 1859 to pay debts. It’s likely, he was purchased by Hazzard, who then conscripted him. Liverpool took Hazzard’s surname, rather than Butler’s, when one was needed after the war.
22. Parrish. 130.
23. Parrish. 32.
24. Photograph by Foresta Hodgson Wood. In Parrish. Opposite 96. Bessie was Bessie Cuyler, who was born in 1895 according to Benjamin Allen. (Glynn County. Charleston: Arcadia Publishing, 2003.) Proctor was mentioned in the post for 2 October 2018.
25. Photograph by Clara Sipprell. In Parrish. Opposite 64. She did not provide Snooks’ last name.
26. Wikipedia. "Master Juba."
27. "Master Juba. The Illustrated London News. 5 August 1848. Reproduced by Hans Nathan. Dan Emmett and the Rise of Early Negro Minstrelsy. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962. 74. Uploaded to Wikimedia Commons on 26 October 2005 by Amcaja and included in Wikipedia entry on Juba.
28. George Nesbitt was discussed in the post for 30 September 2018. Keith Johnson was described in the post for 23 September 2018.
29. Allen.
30. "The Plantation Era and Christ Church, Frederica, Saint Simons Island, Georgia." Oatlands Plantation website. 11.
Tuesday, October 2, 2018
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.
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.
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