As we have seen, in the nineteenth century context, before the concertization of Black religious music, the ring shout and spirituals were closely associated. It was not possible to have the sacred circle dance without some form of vocal music with percussive accents; nor was it likely, in a worship setting, to experience the singing of the sacred songs without repetitive corporal movement in a circle.

From the sea islands off of South Carolina and Georgia, west to Mississippi and Louisiana and back northeast to Philadelphia, there are reports from travelers, diarists and later, former slaves themselves, describing the sacred circle dances that Black people performed throughout the nineteenth and into the early twentieth century. Not all African Americans deemed the ring shout an appropriate form of veneration, however. In the 1870s, Bishop Daniel Alexander Payne of the African Methodist Episcopal church expressed an almost apoplectic frustration that the danced circle with rhythmic clapping of hands was virtually a prerequisite for worship and conversion among most Black people he encountered at the time.¹⁸ It is, he wrote “the essence of religion” to the vast majority of ignorant masses. At a large revival (“a bush meeting”) of Black Christians in Philadelphia, the bishop condemned the practice as “heathenish” and demanded that the local pastor “go and stop their dancing.” Bishop Payne was told, “Sinners won’t get converted unless there is a ring...The Spirit of God works upon people in different ways. At camp meeting there must be a ring here, a ring there, a ring over yonder, or sinners will not get converted.”¹⁹

Another witness to the ring shout was Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who in 1869 published an account of his experience in the South Carolina Sea Islands. He described returning to the camp many nights and coming upon a circle of people moving in “the rhythmical barbaric dance the negroes call a ‘shout’,” singing the music of their ceremony with the measured clapping of hands. As night wore on and the singing and dancing continued in deepening intensity, Higginson noted that eventually everyone present, of all ages, was “drawn into the vortex” of the music. “Such a response,” Stuckey writes, “from the oldest to the youngest, could not easily have been evoked by an appropriation from another culture; rather the magical pull was an expression of traditional values of a people, those that moved the oldest to engage in sacred dance and the young to join them in the circle.”²⁰

Scholars of African American history and religion have indicated that the process of “Christianization” of Black slaves was much lengthier and more complex than previously thought. Though Africans and their descendants lived and labored in the mainland colonies (and later the new nation) from the seventeenth century, large-scale conversions of African American people occurred from the 1820s forward. Prior to that time, most Blacks were not Christian. And throughout the nineteenth century, the Christianity to which the majority of Black people converted was distinctly influenced by African values and traditions. In the spirituals, as well as in the sermons of Black preachers and in the chanted prayers of congregations, the words, stories and language of nineteenth century American Christianity were welded to African artistic and ritual forms. The rhythms and tones of the preachers’ voices and of the congregations’ singing, the danced movements and the handclaps and tapped beats were all African, although the message was ostensibly Christian. Stuckey writes that even when standard Christian hymns were part of a worship ceremony, African sensibilities were transforming the music. “While a hymn was being sung, rhythms of the ring shout, which were the rhythms of the spirituals, were being applied, as the Africans took possession of the hymn.”²¹

The role of Black ministers and singers in the transformation/creation of Black religion in the United States cannot be underestimated. As they interpreted biblical stories through the lens of their own oppression, enslaved people began to form a distinctive understanding of Christianity that emphasized the liberatory aspects of the Bible’s imperatives and Jesus’ great compassion and alliance with suffering people. The combination of the “freedom-seeking” impulse in Black New World religion; an emphasis on transformative music and rhythmic, percussive movement in worship; and the experience of possession or intimacy with spirit is the hallmark of African American Christianity, setting it apart from other variants of the Christian tradition in the United States. These elements are among those shared profoundly with other religions of the Afro-Atlantic diaspora.

There are interesting parallels between the experience of slaves in Protestant areas of North American and those in Catholic contexts in the Caribbean and South America, in terms of the use of Christian structures to meet their needs. In countries where Catholicism was the dominant religion, Black people often used the hagiography of the saints to create “codes” by which African deities could be identified and worshipped without undue resistance. For example, St. Lazarus – whose bodily sores and association with death and rebirth marked a similarity to the orisha of healing, Omolû or Obaluaiye (Babaluaiye) – became a legitimate and legitimizing representation in Santeria and Candomblé. Similarly, St. George, often depicted on a horse with the armor and implements of battle, is associated with Oxôssi or Ochosi, a hunter/warrior orisha who rides on horseback. Like saints, lay Catholic brotherhoods (irmandades; cofradias), were recognized and respected as valid structures for religious experience in Catholic countries. As such, Africans appropriated them creatively to their own uses. In Brazil and Cuba, the irmandades and cofradias founded by Blacks played important mutual aid functions. Furthermore, they were instrumental as institutional formations within which traditional African religious values and practices could be protected, sustained and adjusted to fit New World exigencies. In the case of Brazilian Candomblé, for example, the oldest extant terreiro in the country, Ilê Axé Iyá Nassô Oká, or Casa Branca, is believed to have been founded by members of a Black lay Catholic confraternity which included Yoruba slaves and freedpeople.²² In the United States, it appears that the Bible (and biblical stories and tropes), congregational singing, and, to a certain extent, the tradition of small churches independent of a large hierarchical bureaucracy, were among the primary institutional structures, legitimated by the larger society, that African Americans applied to their own religious purposes.

Protestant Christianity in the nineteenth century United States encouraged individual reading of the Bible to a much greater extent than did Roman Catholicism of the same period in Latin America. That encouragement was the means by which many people gained a modicum of literacy in North America, including some enslaved people, although slaves were generally forbidden by law and custom to read. Nevertheless, the few individuals in the slave community who did gain this skill often shared what they learned with their fellows. Religious leaders in particular would have been in a position to help disseminate the stories of the Old and New Testaments, and together with the communities they served, begin to create an alternative interpretation, a “freedom exegesis” based in their experiences as people in bondage. The outlines of this alternative, African American interpretation of the Bible are well-known as many elements survive today in the social justice witness of the Black church and in the lyrics of countless spirituals. The lyrics speak, sometimes directly and sometimes more obliquely, to the inevitable coming of justice, the steadfast faithfulness of God, the compassion of Jesus for those suffering and mistreated, and the right of all God’s children to share in the bounty of the earth.

The spirituals are often recognized as carrying “coded messages” understood by the Blacks who sang them but not necessarily by owners or enforcers. Songs such as Wade in the Water, Go Down Moses, and Follow the Drinking Gourd, served unsuspected purposes of alerting slaves that an opportunity to escape was close by.

Other songs, like Run, Mary, Run and Oh Freedom – which respectively included the lines You got a right to the tree of life, and Before I be a slave, I’ll be buried in my grave – reflected and fed courage to resist slavery by both internal and external means.

In addition to these kinds of codes, there is a substrata of cipher in the spirituals that highlights yet another connection to sister traditions of the Afro-Atlantic diaspora. This level of “secret language” was present in the sound of the songs, the way they were sung: the elided tones and repetitions, the humming, the broomstick and stomped feet percussive accompaniments; the chants, the prayers and responsive callings in entrancing rhythm. These distinctive elements of traditional spirituals were echoes and adaptations of African forms of communicating with the divinities and the ancestors. In this sense, the songs were not only codes for freedom and courage, they were also codes for summoning the spirits of Africa, in the ancestral ways.

It was thus by means of the spirituals and the ring shout that Africans found a way to connect their traditional forms of worship to the exercise of Christian faith. And it was in this conversion that African Americans re-created and re-interpreted Christianity to speak to African imperatives and to their experience of slavery and resistance in the New World. Anthropologist and scholar of Black folk traditions, Zora Neale Hurston, studied African American religion for many years with a close and knowledgeable eye, her observations made stronger through comparative work in Haiti and her own broad experience of varieties of Black religiosity. Hurston found many resonances of African religious values in the contemporary Black church of the mid-twentieth century. “In fact,” she said, “the Negro has not been christianized as extensively as is generally believed. The great masses are still standing before their pagan altars and calling old gods by a new name.”²³

VI. Embodiment, Accompaniment and Reciprocity: “Hard Working Gods”