With a combination of resources from their homelands and their captivities, enslaved people in the Americas, found ways to negotiate, resist, and in some moments, even transform the afflictions they faced. African American spirituals arose out of response to enslavement in the United States, not only in terms of evocative, often coded, lyrics, but also in the very circumstance of the creation and development of the music. The songs, almost always accompanied by ritual movement and dance, melded Biblical language to African religious values and New World experiences of struggle. They provided the foundation for the emergence of a distinctive, African American Christianity marked by many elements common to other traditions of the diaspora such as Santeria, Vodou and Candomblé.

One of the most important of these shared religious elements is the circle dance. In the United States, it is known as the “ring shout.” This is a ritual combination of music and movement that was widely recognized and practiced in the nineteenth century (although probably in use in some form earlier as well), and though much less common now, is still present in the more limited form of “holy dance” and individual “shouting” in many of the most traditional Black church congregations. It was a ceremonial activity created by people with roots in many different parts of west and central Africa who found themselves together in a difficult new land and were faced with the need to remember traditions that could enable them to survive here. Stuckey and Long both refer to the ring shout as the way that Africans in North America literally re-membered, rejoined themselves to their origins and created a new experience of self and community in the New World.

African Americans felt most free to sing spirituals accompanied by the ring shout dances when they were away from the gaze of masters and overseers, who often forbad the gatherings. When the slave quarters was far enough away from the residence of the owners, Black people might gather there in one of the cabins, moving to the side the meager furnishings so that a danced circle could form in the center of the room.⁶ The narratives of former slaves mention that a large tin basin was sometimes overturned and raised to the rafters to “catch the sound” and lessen the likelihood that the gathering would be discovered. Or, the basin or barrel might be filled with water and set in the middle of the room or by the door in the belief that it could serve a similar purpose of dampening down the sound. When slaves had access to their own churches, with moveable benches or pews, the ring shout ceremonies often occurred there, after the formal “sermon” service was completed. But just as often, people gathered in woods bordering the plantations where they lived or in simply constructed “praise houses” or “hush harbors” or sometimes out in the open air, around a fire. There they would raise up the song and move in an easy, slightly weighted step in a counterclockwise ring, starting with a slow tempo and gradually building to a cadence that featured the syncopation of handclaps, feet stomping and percussive sticks to keep and vary the rhythm. And in the repetition of the sung lines and the movement of the circling bodies, the spirit was called and answered.

Throughout the diaspora, enslaved people used their homes, wooded and isolated places, and structures they built with the express purpose of sheltering their gatherings, to meet, to dance, to sing and to thus call spirit into their midst. The barracoons, large warehouse-style sleeping quarters common on plantations in Cuba and other parts of the Caribbean were sometimes, at the end of the long workday or on a Sunday or saint’s day, the site of large gatherings of slaves to dance and drum together; simultaneously remembering traditions that had been brought from Africa and, in the circumstances of bondage, creating new ones. But in Cuba as well as in Brazil and Haiti, the largest gatherings were often held away from the plantations in peripheral areas of difficult access, similar to the practice of praise house and hush harbor worship in the United States.

b. Santeria, Candomblé and Vodou: Major Traditions of the Diaspora