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The circle in African and African American religion and culture represents unity and the natural and spiritual movement of life. As the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, the African worldview countenances a counterclockwise movement. The ring shout moves in that same direction. The ring was generally formed in worship as the sermon was ending. The cadence of the preacher lent itself to the participation of the people, who would form a circle around some space in or, at times, outside of the praise house. Observers of this centuries-old worship practice viewed it either with disdain or with appreciation for the same reason—its Africanity. Well into the 20th century, folklorists, ethnographers, and music scholars such as John and Alan Lomax and John W. Work were able to draw positive parallels between the ring shout and the movements, music, and dance of various West African ethnic groups without the antipathy of earlier writers.
Those with little or no appreciation for the counterclockwise foot shuffling that included not lifting or crossing one’s feet to avoid dancing, viewed this knee-dipping practice as a “heathenish,” nonrational Africanism. In the late 19th century, Bishop Daniel A. Payne, ironically of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, was one such detractor. But Bishop Payne was told, and others came to understand, that this practice was so crucial to the work of salvation in the worship experience that souls would not be converted unless there was a least one circle where the shout could break out in song and dance. The spirituals that were sung, and the movements made by leaping, jumping, clapping, foot patting, time keeping, stick tapping, and call-and-response, were all essential elements for the descent of the Holy Spirit in place of what had been the spirit possession of their forebears. The drum had been denied Black worshippers by their oppressors for fear of its power. Thus, in acts of liberation and freedom emanating from what may have been an inchoate but whole-bodied theology, Africans recreated the rhythm they needed, using what they had— their bodies and everyday materials like tall sticks—to get in touch with, be healed by, and give praises to their God.
For some, the ring shout has been known and associated only with the Sea Islands of Georgia and South Carolina among the Gullah people, also known as the Geechee. Their communities were relatively isolated from the mainland and fraught with the threats borne by malaria and yellow fever–carrying mosquitos, to which the Africans—skilled in growing rice for millennia—were largely immune. However, the ring shout has been observed and reported on from the 16th through the 20th centuries in Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, the Bahamas, Haiti, Trinidad, Brazil, and West Africa. The heritage of the ring shout is still preserved by organizations such as the McIntosh County Shouters of coastal Georgia, who repackaged and reintroduced the ring shout as a performance of living religious art around 1980.
-Dwight Webster, Ring Shout from The Sage Encyclopedia of African Cultural Heritage in North America
