Ring shout

A shout, ring shout, Hallelujah march or victory march is a Christian religious practice in which worshipers move in a circle while praying and clapping their hands, sometimes shuffling and stomping their feet as well. Despite the name, shouting aloud is not an essential part of the ritual march, which varies by congregation and locality.

Hallelujah Marches are associated with the Baptist, Methodist (especially in congregations aligned with the holiness movement), and Pentecostal branches of Christianity. The earliest accounts of the practice date to the 1840s, where the ring shout was described as being a form of revivalistic Christian worship. Certain authors claim that the ring shout may be inspired by cultural practices in Africa that became incorporated as a part of Christian worship and imbued with new theological meaning. Ring shouts may occur when a congregant experienced the New Birth or became entirely sanctified. Ring shouts may also occur when the congregation perceives the presence of the Holy Spirit during worship.

African slaves in the West Indies and the United States partook in ring shouts upon their conversion to Christianity. The ring shout was has been practiced in some Black churches into the 20th century, and it continues to the present among the Gullah people of the Sea Islands and in "singing and praying bands" associated with many Methodist congregations in Tidewater Maryland and Delaware, which have a large African American membership.

Hallelujah Marches have a strong association with Christian tent meetings and camp meetings, in which the New Birth and entire sanctification are promulgated. They have been practiced by Christians of various ethnic and racial backgrounds.

A more modern form, known still as a "shout" (or "praise break"), is practiced in many Pentecostal churches, along with black churches of various denominations, to the present day. Traditionally, ushers in Arkansas and Mississippi form a circle around the church member and allows them to shout within the circle.

Description
"Shouting" often took place during or after a Christian prayer meeting or worship service. Men and women moved in a circle in a counterclockwise direction, shuffling their feet, clapping, and often spontaneously singing or praying aloud. Robert Palmer states that it "developed with the widespread conversion of slaves to Christianity during the revival fervors of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries." He further writes that the "earliest accounts date from the 1840s; more vivid descriptions from the twentieth century leave little doubt that the dancing and stamping constituted a kind of drumming, especially when worshipers had a wooden church floor to stamp on." Ring shouts have often used as an act of praise when a person accepts the message of Christianity. As such, they are also known as "Hallelujah Marches", with the word Hallelujah meaning "Praise Jahweh". The term "Victory March" has been used to reference the Christian concept of actively serving God and living victoriously over sin.

In Jamaica and Trinidad the shout was usually performed around a special second altar near the center of a church building. In the Sea Islands of Georgia and South Carolina, shouters formed a circle outdoors, around the church building itself. In some cases, enslaved people retreated into the woods at night to perform shouts, often for hours at a time, with participants leaving the circle as they became exhausted. In the twentieth century, churchgoers (especially those of the Methodist and Pentecostal traditions) in the United States performed shouts by forming a circle around the pulpit, in the space in front of the altar, or around the nave.

Ring shouts were sometimes held in honour of the dead. This custom has been practiced by traditional bands of carnival revelers in New Orleans.

Origin
According to musicologist Robert Palmer, the first written accounts of the ring shout date from the 1840s, during the pinnacle of Christian revivalism. The stamping on the church floor and clapping in a circle was described as a kind of "drumming," and 19th-century writers described it as accompanying the conversion of slaves to Christianity.

The ring shout gained ground among Methodists of the holiness movement. Certain authors posit that the Christian ring shout may be assumed to be derived from African dance, and scholars usually point out the presence of melodic elements such as call-and-response singing and heterophony, as well as rhythmic elements such as tresillo and "hamboned" rhythm, and aesthetic elements such as counter-clockwise dancing and ecstasy, which makes the ring shouts of Christianity similar to ceremonies among people like the Bakongo, Igbos, Yoruba, Ibibio, Efik, Bahumono. A minority of scholars have suggested that the ritual may have originated among enslaved Muslims from West Africa as an imitation of tawaf, the mass procession around the Kaaba that is an essential part of the Hajj. If so, the word "shout" may come from Arabic shawṭ, meaning "a single run", such as a single circumambulation of the Kaaba, or an open space of ground for running.

Influence
Sterling Stuckey in his book, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory & the Foundations of Black America (1987, ISBN 0195042654) argues that ring shout was a unifying element of Africans in American colonies, from which field hollers, work songs, and spirituals evolved, followed by blues and jazz. In his article, "Ring Shout! Literary Studies, Historical Studies, and Black Music Inquiry", Samuel A. Floyd Jr. argues that many of the stylistic elements observed during the ring shout later laid the foundations of various black music styles developed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. According to Floyd, "...all of the defining elements of black music are present in the ring...".

These basic elements of ring shouts included calls, cries, and hollers; blue notes; call-and-response; and various rhythmic aspects. Examples of black music that would evolve from the ring include, but are not limited to, Afro-American burial music of New Orleans, the Blues, the Afro-American Symphony, as well as the music that has accompanied various dance forms also present in Afro-American culture.

The ring shout has developed into the modern "shout" (or "praise break") tradition now seen across the globe. Though augmented and interracialized by the Pentecostal tradition in the early 1900s and spreading to various denominations and churches thereafter, it is still primarily practiced among Christians of West African descent.

The ring shout continues today in Georgia with the McIntosh County Shouters.