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.
Showing posts with label Parrish Lydia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Parrish Lydia. Show all posts
Thursday, October 4, 2018
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.
Tuesday, September 18, 2018
Ring Shouts (Antebellum)
Topic: Ring Shout
The origins of dance are lost: it left no material artifacts. All we have are images from Egyptian tomb paintings and Greek vases that were filtered through the artistic styles of the time that may have distorted more than represented physical movements.
Once writing was invented, verbal descriptions survived. If they were made by observers, they were hindered by the difficulties of describing an activity that used so many muscles. If they were made by dancers, they may have been in the language of the trade with terms whose precise meanings have been lost.
Into the vacuum rushed many with theories based on extrapolations and views of culture. Some were insightful, some silly. A number revealed more about the writer than about dance.
Many believed the ring shout was the precursor of dance-like movements in contemporary African-American religious services. It’s generally agreed shouts emerged on plantations in the southern United States before the Civil War when Africans from different villages were thrown together in close quarters.
Lydia Parrish noted:
"Shouting appears to be of two types: Along the coast of Georgia and South Carolina the most popular form is the ring-shout, in which a number of dancers move counter-clockwise in a circle. Occasionally individuals are seen in church using the same rhythmic shout step. In North Carolina and Virginia, however, the solo performance is apparently the only form in use, and the ring-shout seems to be unknown." [1]
The surviving descriptions were made by outsiders - not just by whites, but by whites who did not live with slaves. The earliest I’ve seen quoted was made by George Whitefield, the English Methodist evangelist, when he was visiting the colonies.
On Saturday, the night of 2 January 1740, he and his companions got lost when they were riding from one plantation to another in South Carolina. The Stono Rebellion by slaves from Angola had occurred less than four months before, and whites were still afraid. [2] The travelers already had met some men they suspected were runaways, and so did not approach this group to ask directions. It was a new moon. [3]
"Soon after we saw another great Fire near the Road Side, but imagining there was another Nest of such Negroes, we made a Circuit into the Woods, and one of my Friends at a Distance observed them dancing round the Fire. The Moon shining bright, we soon found our way." [4]
Benjamin Henry Latrobe was born in England and trained as an engineer and architect. He immigrated to Virginia in 1796, and moved to Philadelphia the next year where he designed neo-classical buildings. In 1818, he visited New Orleans where the city was building a waterworks he had designed. [5] His observations were contained in his record for February 26 February 1819.
"[. . .] formed into circular groupes [sic] in the midst of four of which, which I examined (but there were more of them), was a ring, the largest not ten feet in diameter. In the first were two women dancing. They held each a coarse handkerchief extended by the corners in their hands & set to each other in a miserably dull & slow figure, hardly moving their feet or bodies. Most of the circles contained the same sort of dancers. One was larger, in which a ring of a dozen women walked, by way of dancing, round, the music in the center." [6]
Charles Lyell already had revolutionized geology [7] when he was asked to lecture in the United States in 1841. [8] On his second trip, the Scotsman visited a number of plantations in 1846, including one owned by James Hamilton Couper.
"Of dancing and music the negroes are passionately fond. On the Hopeton plantation above twenty violins have been silenced by the Methodist missionaries, yet it is notorious that the slaves were not given to drink or intemperance in their merry-makings.
"At the Methodist prayer-meetings, they are permitted to move round rapidly in a ring, joining hands in token of brotherly love, presenting the right hand and then the left, in which manœuver, I am told, they sometimes contrive to take enough exercise to serve as a substitute for the dance, it being a kind of spiritual boulanger, while the singing of psalms, in an out of chapel, compensates for the songs they have been required to renounce." [9]
Couper’s father, John Couper had left Glasgow for Philadelphia after the Revolution. He moved to South Carolina, then, with James Hamilton, another Scots immigrant, he moved again to Saint Simons Island in 1793. Hamilton returned to Philadelphia in 1826, and died in 1829. James Hamilton Couper managed Hamilton’s plantations for him, and, then, for himself. [10]
Saint Simons was off the coast of the Altamaha river. Macon, Georgia, was located near the fall line on a tributary of the river. In May 1850, Fredrika Bremer [11] attended a camp meeting there that had separate services for slaves and whites. Late in the evening the Swedish novelist walked around the slave area where "all the tents were still full of religious exaltation, each separate tent presenting some new phase." In one she observed
"women dancing the ‘holy dance’ for one of the newly converted. This dancing, however, having been forbidden by the preachers, ceased immediately on our entering the tent. I saw merely a rocking movement of women who held each other by the hand in a circle, singing the while." [12]
One of Couper’s neighbors on Saint Simon was Pierce Butler, who married an English actress, Fanny Kemble, in 1834. He was an absentee land owner, and spent only one winter there with Kemble. Butler sold most of his slaves in 1859 to pay debts. [13]
Another neighbor had been Tom Spalding, who sold his land in 1834 to start farming on nearby Sapelo Island. His slaves included those owned by his father on Saint Simons, and ones he purchased in Savannah and Charleston. [14]
Katie Brown was born about 1850 on his Sapelo Island plantation. [15] In the 1930s, she told WPA interviewers:
"harvest time was time for drums. Then they had big time. When harvest in, they had big gathering. They beat drum, rattle dry gourd with seeds in them, and beat big flat tin plates. They shout and move round in circle and look like march going to heaven. Harvest festival they call it." [15]
"harves time wuz time fuh drums. Den deh hab big time. Wen hahves in, dey hab big gadderin. Dey beat drum, rattle dry goad wid seed in um, an beat big flat tin plates. Dey shout an moob roun in succle an look lak mahch goin tuh heabm. Hahves festival, dey call it."
At most one knows two things from these descriptions. The shouts appeared very early and in different forms in New Orleans and in the South Carolina-Georgia lowlands. Beyond that, all the travelers described was a formation.
End Notes
I have not done research in this area and am grateful to the individuals mentioned below. I have read the original sources cited by them.
1. Lydia Parrish. Slave Songs of the Georgia Sea Islands. New York: Creative Age Press, 1942. Reprint edition, Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1992. 54.
2. The Stono Rebellion occurred 9-10 September 1739 southwest of Charleston. Wikipedia. "Stono Rebellion" and "Stono River."
3. Fred Espenak. "Phases of the Moon: 1701 to 1800." AstroPixels website.
4. George Whitefield. A continuation of the Reverend Mr. Whitefield’s journal, from his embarking after the embargo, to his arrival at Savannah in Georgia. London: W. Strahan, 1740. 78. Margaret Washington Creel brought this to my attention. "A Peculiar People." New York: New York University Press, 1988. 102.
5. Wikipedia. "Benjamin Henry Latrobe."
6. Benjamin Henry Latrobe. Impressions Respecting New Orleans, Diary and Sketches, 1818 – 1820. Edited by Samuel Wilson Jr. New York: Columbia University Press, 1951. Book 4, February 16-February 26, 1819. 49-51. Quoted by Katrina Hazzard-Donald. "Hoodoo Religion and American Dance Traditions: Rethinking the Ring Shout." The Journal of Pan African Studies 4:194-212:September 2011. 199.
7. Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (London: J. Murray, 1830) described forces that shaped the history of the planet, especially mountains. The book influenced Charles Darwin.
8. Richard W. Macomber. "Sir Charles Lyell, Baronet." Encyclopædia Britannica. Uploaded 27 May 1999; last updated 15 February 2018.
9. Charles Lyell. A Second Visit to the United States. NY: Harper and Brothers, 1849. 1:269-270. Quoted by Washington, 297-298, and by Sterling Stuckey. Slave Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013 edition. 22.
10. James M. Clifton. "Hopeton, Model Plantation of the Antebellum South." The Georgia Historical Quarterly 66:429-449:1982. 429-430.
11. Bremer hoped to replicate the experiences of Alexis de Tocqueville when she visited the United States. He had written Democracy in America for a French audience in 1835. (Wikipedia. "Fredrika Bremer.")
12. Fredrika Bremer. America of the Fifties: Letters of Fredrika Bremer. Edited by Adolph B. Benson. New York: The American-Scandinavian Foundation, 1924. 119. Letter dated 7 May 1850.
13. Stephen W. Berry. "Butler Family." New Georgia Encyclopedia. 3 September 2002. Last updated 3 September 2014.
14. Dylan E. Mulligan. "The Original Progressive Farmer: The Agricultural Legacy of Thomas Spalding of Sapelo." Honors thesis. Georgia Southern University, April 2015. 3.
15. Parrish. 131.
16. Georgia Writers Project. Dreams and Shadows: Survival Studies among the Georgia Coastal Negroes. Project director, Mary Granger. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1940. 152. Quoted by Michael A. Gomez. Exchanging Our Country Marks. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998. 266.
The origins of dance are lost: it left no material artifacts. All we have are images from Egyptian tomb paintings and Greek vases that were filtered through the artistic styles of the time that may have distorted more than represented physical movements.
Once writing was invented, verbal descriptions survived. If they were made by observers, they were hindered by the difficulties of describing an activity that used so many muscles. If they were made by dancers, they may have been in the language of the trade with terms whose precise meanings have been lost.
Into the vacuum rushed many with theories based on extrapolations and views of culture. Some were insightful, some silly. A number revealed more about the writer than about dance.
Many believed the ring shout was the precursor of dance-like movements in contemporary African-American religious services. It’s generally agreed shouts emerged on plantations in the southern United States before the Civil War when Africans from different villages were thrown together in close quarters.
Lydia Parrish noted:
"Shouting appears to be of two types: Along the coast of Georgia and South Carolina the most popular form is the ring-shout, in which a number of dancers move counter-clockwise in a circle. Occasionally individuals are seen in church using the same rhythmic shout step. In North Carolina and Virginia, however, the solo performance is apparently the only form in use, and the ring-shout seems to be unknown." [1]
The surviving descriptions were made by outsiders - not just by whites, but by whites who did not live with slaves. The earliest I’ve seen quoted was made by George Whitefield, the English Methodist evangelist, when he was visiting the colonies.
On Saturday, the night of 2 January 1740, he and his companions got lost when they were riding from one plantation to another in South Carolina. The Stono Rebellion by slaves from Angola had occurred less than four months before, and whites were still afraid. [2] The travelers already had met some men they suspected were runaways, and so did not approach this group to ask directions. It was a new moon. [3]
"Soon after we saw another great Fire near the Road Side, but imagining there was another Nest of such Negroes, we made a Circuit into the Woods, and one of my Friends at a Distance observed them dancing round the Fire. The Moon shining bright, we soon found our way." [4]
Benjamin Henry Latrobe was born in England and trained as an engineer and architect. He immigrated to Virginia in 1796, and moved to Philadelphia the next year where he designed neo-classical buildings. In 1818, he visited New Orleans where the city was building a waterworks he had designed. [5] His observations were contained in his record for February 26 February 1819.
"[. . .] formed into circular groupes [sic] in the midst of four of which, which I examined (but there were more of them), was a ring, the largest not ten feet in diameter. In the first were two women dancing. They held each a coarse handkerchief extended by the corners in their hands & set to each other in a miserably dull & slow figure, hardly moving their feet or bodies. Most of the circles contained the same sort of dancers. One was larger, in which a ring of a dozen women walked, by way of dancing, round, the music in the center." [6]
Charles Lyell already had revolutionized geology [7] when he was asked to lecture in the United States in 1841. [8] On his second trip, the Scotsman visited a number of plantations in 1846, including one owned by James Hamilton Couper.
"Of dancing and music the negroes are passionately fond. On the Hopeton plantation above twenty violins have been silenced by the Methodist missionaries, yet it is notorious that the slaves were not given to drink or intemperance in their merry-makings.
"At the Methodist prayer-meetings, they are permitted to move round rapidly in a ring, joining hands in token of brotherly love, presenting the right hand and then the left, in which manœuver, I am told, they sometimes contrive to take enough exercise to serve as a substitute for the dance, it being a kind of spiritual boulanger, while the singing of psalms, in an out of chapel, compensates for the songs they have been required to renounce." [9]
Couper’s father, John Couper had left Glasgow for Philadelphia after the Revolution. He moved to South Carolina, then, with James Hamilton, another Scots immigrant, he moved again to Saint Simons Island in 1793. Hamilton returned to Philadelphia in 1826, and died in 1829. James Hamilton Couper managed Hamilton’s plantations for him, and, then, for himself. [10]
Saint Simons was off the coast of the Altamaha river. Macon, Georgia, was located near the fall line on a tributary of the river. In May 1850, Fredrika Bremer [11] attended a camp meeting there that had separate services for slaves and whites. Late in the evening the Swedish novelist walked around the slave area where "all the tents were still full of religious exaltation, each separate tent presenting some new phase." In one she observed
"women dancing the ‘holy dance’ for one of the newly converted. This dancing, however, having been forbidden by the preachers, ceased immediately on our entering the tent. I saw merely a rocking movement of women who held each other by the hand in a circle, singing the while." [12]
One of Couper’s neighbors on Saint Simon was Pierce Butler, who married an English actress, Fanny Kemble, in 1834. He was an absentee land owner, and spent only one winter there with Kemble. Butler sold most of his slaves in 1859 to pay debts. [13]
Another neighbor had been Tom Spalding, who sold his land in 1834 to start farming on nearby Sapelo Island. His slaves included those owned by his father on Saint Simons, and ones he purchased in Savannah and Charleston. [14]
Katie Brown was born about 1850 on his Sapelo Island plantation. [15] In the 1930s, she told WPA interviewers:
"harvest time was time for drums. Then they had big time. When harvest in, they had big gathering. They beat drum, rattle dry gourd with seeds in them, and beat big flat tin plates. They shout and move round in circle and look like march going to heaven. Harvest festival they call it." [15]
"harves time wuz time fuh drums. Den deh hab big time. Wen hahves in, dey hab big gadderin. Dey beat drum, rattle dry goad wid seed in um, an beat big flat tin plates. Dey shout an moob roun in succle an look lak mahch goin tuh heabm. Hahves festival, dey call it."
At most one knows two things from these descriptions. The shouts appeared very early and in different forms in New Orleans and in the South Carolina-Georgia lowlands. Beyond that, all the travelers described was a formation.
End Notes
I have not done research in this area and am grateful to the individuals mentioned below. I have read the original sources cited by them.
1. Lydia Parrish. Slave Songs of the Georgia Sea Islands. New York: Creative Age Press, 1942. Reprint edition, Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1992. 54.
2. The Stono Rebellion occurred 9-10 September 1739 southwest of Charleston. Wikipedia. "Stono Rebellion" and "Stono River."
3. Fred Espenak. "Phases of the Moon: 1701 to 1800." AstroPixels website.
4. George Whitefield. A continuation of the Reverend Mr. Whitefield’s journal, from his embarking after the embargo, to his arrival at Savannah in Georgia. London: W. Strahan, 1740. 78. Margaret Washington Creel brought this to my attention. "A Peculiar People." New York: New York University Press, 1988. 102.
5. Wikipedia. "Benjamin Henry Latrobe."
6. Benjamin Henry Latrobe. Impressions Respecting New Orleans, Diary and Sketches, 1818 – 1820. Edited by Samuel Wilson Jr. New York: Columbia University Press, 1951. Book 4, February 16-February 26, 1819. 49-51. Quoted by Katrina Hazzard-Donald. "Hoodoo Religion and American Dance Traditions: Rethinking the Ring Shout." The Journal of Pan African Studies 4:194-212:September 2011. 199.
7. Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (London: J. Murray, 1830) described forces that shaped the history of the planet, especially mountains. The book influenced Charles Darwin.
8. Richard W. Macomber. "Sir Charles Lyell, Baronet." Encyclopædia Britannica. Uploaded 27 May 1999; last updated 15 February 2018.
9. Charles Lyell. A Second Visit to the United States. NY: Harper and Brothers, 1849. 1:269-270. Quoted by Washington, 297-298, and by Sterling Stuckey. Slave Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013 edition. 22.
10. James M. Clifton. "Hopeton, Model Plantation of the Antebellum South." The Georgia Historical Quarterly 66:429-449:1982. 429-430.
11. Bremer hoped to replicate the experiences of Alexis de Tocqueville when she visited the United States. He had written Democracy in America for a French audience in 1835. (Wikipedia. "Fredrika Bremer.")
12. Fredrika Bremer. America of the Fifties: Letters of Fredrika Bremer. Edited by Adolph B. Benson. New York: The American-Scandinavian Foundation, 1924. 119. Letter dated 7 May 1850.
13. Stephen W. Berry. "Butler Family." New Georgia Encyclopedia. 3 September 2002. Last updated 3 September 2014.
14. Dylan E. Mulligan. "The Original Progressive Farmer: The Agricultural Legacy of Thomas Spalding of Sapelo." Honors thesis. Georgia Southern University, April 2015. 3.
15. Parrish. 131.
16. Georgia Writers Project. Dreams and Shadows: Survival Studies among the Georgia Coastal Negroes. Project director, Mary Granger. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1940. 152. Quoted by Michael A. Gomez. Exchanging Our Country Marks. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998. 266.
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