Ring Shout! Literary Studies, Historical Studies, and Black Music Inquiry

Floyd, Samuel A., Jr., Black Music Research Journal

Over the past ten years, black scholars in the field of English literature have identified a black literary tradition and developed critical strategies for studying that tradition from within black culture. And black historians have also been writing black history and American history from a black perspective. In the field of history, their works include Sterling Stuckey's Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (1987) and Mary Berry's and John Blassingame's Long Memory: The Black Experience in America (1982), and in literary criticism, Houston Baker's Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (1984) and Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (1987) and Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (1988). By taking an insider's view of black cultural and literary traditions, these books offer insights that cannot be achieved through more conventional means. The success of an Afrocentric perspective in these fields invites black music scholarship to move beyond the standard approaches of musicology and ethnomusicology, by learning from the theoretical insights of black historians and literary scholars and applying that knowledge to the study of black music.

For a glimpse of what existing theories of Afro-American history and letters offer to black music scholars, I will examine the hypothesis of Stuckey and the theory of Gates with musical implications in mind. In doing so, I will use Stuckey and Gates to read black music, Stuckey to read Gates, and Gates to read Stuckey, while recognizing that although literature, history, and music are all different things, certain aspects of black experience may be seen as common to all three.

What I will propose here is a mode of inquiry that is consistent with the nature of black music, that is grounded in black music, and that is more appropriate than other, existing modes for the perception, study, and evaluation of black musical products.

The Ring Shout: The Foundation of Afro-American Music

One of the central tenets of Stuckey's Slave Culture is that "the ring shout was the main context in which Africans recognized values common to them--the values of ancestor worship and contact, communication and teaching through storytelling and trickster expressions, and of various other symbolic devices. Those values were remarkable because, while of ancient African provenance, they were fertile seed for the bloom of new forms" (Stuckey 1987, 16).

The shout was an early Negro "holy dance" in which "the circling about in a circle is the prime essential" (Gordon 1981, 447). From contemporaneous descriptions of the shout we learn that the participants stood in a ring and began to walk around it in a shuffle, with the feet keeping in contact with or close proximity to the floor, and that there were "jerking," "hitching" motions, particularly in the shoulders. These movements were usually accompanied by a spiritual, sung by lead singers, "based" by others in the group (probably with some kind of responsorial device and by hand-clapping and knee-slapping). The "thud" of the basic rhythm was continuous, without pause or hesitation. And the singing that took place in the shout made use of interjections of various kinds, elisions, blue-notes, and call-and-response devices, with the sound of the feet against the floor serving as an accompanying device. (1)

The shout has been identified as an African survival by Courlander (1963). The earliest on record in the United States dates from 1845 (Epstein 1977, 232), but the practice in this country clearly antedates that record. As Epstein, Courlander, and numerous other scholars have shown, all ring shouts had essentially the same elements, with variations manifesting themselves here and there depending on locale and other factors.

From all accounts, the shout was an activity in which music and dance commingled, merged, and fused to become a single distinctive cultural ritual in which the slaves made music and derived their musical styles. Stuckey points particularly to the origin and function of the spirituals in the ring, contending that they should therefore be studied in relation to their ceremonial, slave-ritual context rather than strictly from the standpoint of Christian religious institutions.

Early on, the shout was central to the cultural convergence of African traditions in Afro-America. In New Orleans, for example, the ring became an essential part of the burial ceremonies of Afro-Americans, in which "from the start of the ceremonies in the graveyard, complementary characteristics of a religion, expressed through song, dance, and priestly communication with the ancestors, were organic to Africans in America[;] and their movement in a counterclockwise direction in ancestral ceremonies was a recognizable and vital point of cultural convergence" (Stuckey 1987, 23). What Stuckey does not say, but which will be clear to readers familiar with black culture, is that from these burial ceremonies, the ring straightened itself to become the Second Line of jazz funerals, in which the movements of the participants were identical to those of the participants in the ring--even to the point of individual counterclockwise movements by Second Line participants, where the ring was absent because of the necessity of the participants to move to a particular remote destination (the return to the town from the burial ground). And the dirge-to-jazz structure of the jazz funeral parallels the walk-to-shout structure of the ring shout, where "the slow and dignified measure of the 'walk' is followed by a double quick, tripping measure in the 'shout'" (Gordon 1981, 449). Today, the ring shout has practically disappeared from rural black culture, but remnants of it persist in black churches in solo forms of the dance.

I should point out here that this "straightening" of the ring into the Second Line does not affect the integrity of the shout. Krehbiel tells us, in what can be considered explanation of this contention, that "The 'shout' of the slaves ... was a march--circular only because that is the only kind of march which will not carry the dancers away from the gathering place" (Krehbiel [1914] 1967, 95). And Courlander reinforces Krehbiel's support as he tells us that the dance is what defines a shout; for, shouting was in reality dancing (Courlander 1963, 195-197), whether, I might add, it is or is not in a ring. It seems, however, that the ritual aspects of the shout are enhanced in the ring, because of symbolic implications that had their origin in Africa.

Stuckey regards the Negro spiritual as central to the ring and foundational to all subsequent Afro-American music-making. He noticed in descriptions of the shout that, in the ring, musical practices from throughout black culture converged in the spiritual. These included elements of the calls, cries, and hollers; call-and-response devices; additive rhythms and polyrythms; heterophony, pendular thirds, blue notes, bent notes, and elisions; hums, moans, grunts, vocables, and other rhythmic-oral declamations, interjections, and punctuations; off-beat melodic phrasings and parallel intervals and chords; constant repetition of rhythmic and melodic figures and phrases (from which riffs and vamps would be derived); timbral distortions of various kinds; musical individuality within collectivity; game-rivalry; hand-clapping, foot-patting, and approximations thereof; and the metronomic foundational pulse that underlies all Afro-American music. (2) Consequently, since all of the defining elements of black music are present in the ring, Stuckey's formulation can be seen as a frame in which all black-music analysis and interpretation can take place--a formulation that can confirm the importance of the performance practices crucial to black musical expression.

Because the ring shout was a dance in which the sacred and the secular were conflated (Gordon 1981, 451), I must note here the similar conflation--indeed, near-inseparability--of Afro-American music and dance in black culture, both in the ring and outside it. Indeed, the appreciation of black music and its traits, elements, and practices depends upon our understanding these features (outlined in the previous paragraph) as accompaniments to and ingredients of black dance. For our initial strategies must accept black music as a facilitator and beneficiary of black dance. The shuffling, angular, off-beat, additive, repetitive, and intensive unflagging rhythms of shout and jubilee spirituals, ragtime, and rhythm and blues; the less vigorous but equally insistent and characteristic rhythms of the slower "sorrow songs" and the blues; and the descendants and derivatives of all these genres have been shaped and defined by black dance, within and without the ring, throughout the history of the tradition. In the movements that took place in the ring and in dances such as the breakdown, buck dance, and buzzard lope of early slave culture, through those of the Virginia Essence and the slow drag of the late nineteenth century, on through those of the black bottom, Charleston, and lindy hop of the present century's early years, to the line dances of more recent days can be seen movements that …

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Publication information: Article title: Ring Shout! Literary Studies, Historical Studies, and Black Music Inquiry. Contributors: Floyd, Samuel A., Jr. - Author. Journal title: Black Music Research Journal. Volume: 22. Issue: 1 Publication date: Spring 2002. Page number: S49+. © 2008 Center For Black Music Research. COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group.

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