PRELUDE

IN THE SPRING OF 1863, journalist Charles Carleton Coffin traveled from Boston to South Carolina. His intention was to file a report on the imminent recapture of Fort Sumter by the Union Army. Though that event took longer to unfold than he and his fellow Yankees had expected, he took the opportunity of his extended stay to observe religious services of recently freed slaves. After the war he wrote an account of what he saw.

At the African Baptist Church in Port Royal, near Beaufort, Coffin was pleased to hear the hymn St. Martin’s, composed by William Tans’ur. The singers took considerable liberty with the melody, adding, as Coffin described it, “crooks, turns, slurs, and appoggiaturas not to be found in any printed copy.” At the end of the formal service they transitioned into an even stranger phase, with benches pushed to the walls and everyone moving around in a display of spiritual rapture. They shuffled in jerking motions, clapping their hands and stamping their feet, with impressive precision and vigorous syncopation. As they rotated in a circle, their voices louder and louder, they seemed to repeat the same song again and again. Unlike the hymn from Tans’ur, Coffin did not recognize this song. The leader of the group fixed his eyes in a trancelike stare, prompting swelling tides of emotion. When the shouters eventually tired they simply stopped for a few minutes before starting another tune. Coffin was amazed by the fluid and independent motion of legs, arms, head, body, and hands, as if “every joint hung on wires.”

This report of a musical vision radically different from anything the author had known in New England is matched and extended by others, scattered in time and place throughout the South. The most common name the participants gave their circle ritual was “ring shout.” In the postwar years Daniel Alexander Payne, an African American preacher and one of the founders of Wilberforce University, admonished former slaves to forget all about the ring shout and adopt more dignified, Eurocentric forms of worship. But there was tremendous momentum in the opposite direction. Ring shout observers described strained vocal production indicating heightened emotions, precise synchrony between body and music, bending pitch, blue notes, hard initial attack, and the fixed and variable format for organizing rhythm. Today, the entire package is familiar through the recorded history of jazz, rock, gospel, blues, soul, and funk.

The ring shout combined emotional release with spiritual fulfillment, and it included another dimension that was just as important: the ritual was deeply communal. One of the great, central truths of music’s role in the African diaspora was its power to bring people together. Which sister supplied the slurs, which brother the hooks, which the bends, which the growls? The practice was designed to make it easy for each person to find his or her place in a collective whole. Ethnomusicologist John Chernoff, working in the 1970s with the Ewe people of Ghana, observed that “music’s explicit purpose, in the various ways it might be defined by Africans, is, essentially, socialization.” That purpose and the techniques for achieving it were fully transmitted to the New World, where people from different parts of Africa came together and discovered what they had in common. In spite of vicious annihilation of social networks—or because of that—the community-building role of music only grew stronger.

Interaction among those present mattered more than a precise rendition of Tans’ur’s hymn or any hymn. The ring shout was open-ended and accommodating. Tunes could be reduced to simple fragments—“riffs,” as they are called in jazz. Participants standing outside the inner circle formed the “base.” The predictability of the base made it easy to add claps, stamps, crooks, portamentos, “delicate variations,” syncopations, accents, and ecstatic outbursts without losing a sense of continuity and togetherness. It made it easy to sonically and visually connect with one another.

There was plenty of room for creativity. Basers could change harmonies if they felt like it, while shouters added effects of “marvelous complication and variety.” Robert Anderson, who had been enslaved in Kentucky, remembered how “all of them could sing and keep time to music, improvise extra little parts to a melody already known, or make up melodies of their own.” The singers jumped through different vocal registers and they shifted from words to vocalization, hushed murmurs, soft croons, assertive urgings, and forceful confessions.

Leaders had a knack for inventing. There was some allegiance to tunes that had been carried over from Africa and some borrowing from white hymnody, but it was more fun to get in touch with the Holy Spirit and watch a new “spiritual” unfold on the spot. The base alternated with the leader to give him or her time to think of what was coming next. “They’d all take it up and keep at it, and keep a-adding to it, and then it would be a spiritual,” as another former slave remembered. Musicians in Duke Ellington’s Orchestra and the Beatles used similar words to describe how they generated material.

It was all done without musical notation, of course, a key for producing results so dramatically different from scripted music. One observer quipped that ring-shout music was “as impossible to place on score as the singing of birds.” Nonliteracy, perceived as a lack by outsiders, was the starting point for the open-ended harvest of communal synergy. What appeared to be a disadvantage produced a distinctive field of musical creativity.

It may seem odd to join together Duke Ellington’s Orchestra and the Beatles in a single study, and odder still to begin the account in Port Royal, South Carolina, in 1863. Ellington’s upwardly mobile childhood in Washington, D.C., did not expose him to the ring shout or anything close to it. His parents would have been more sympathetic to the assimilative agenda of Daniel Alexander Payne. The Beatles were even more remote, across the Atlantic Ocean and across the boundary of race, almost a century later.

Nevertheless, the African American communal tradition was the foundation for what these musicians accomplished, both in musical style and creative process, which was highly collaborative. Jazz emerged directly from the African American vernacular and so did rock; both idioms carried a feeling for the communal vision with them. In New Orleans around 1900, Buddy Bolden played his cornet in a way that reminded people of preaching. Joe Oliver, the son of a Baptist minister, made his reputation playing his version of a hymn on his cornet. Louis Armstrong learned to sing in a Baptist church and was then tutored in jazz by Oliver. As for rock, consider this historical assessment from Armstrong himself, speaking in 1966: “All these different kinds of fantastic music you hear today—course it’s all guitars now—used to hear that way back in the old Sanctified churches where the sisters used to shout till their petticoats fell down.” And a couple of years later: “All that music that’s got a beat, it comes from the same place, the old Sanctified churches. It’s the same old soup warmed over.” Early jazz and early rock each started as “Everyman music,” easy to relate to and easy to join in with, the legacy of the ring shout still delivering the goods. Stylistic norms invited amateur participation and interaction.

A tradition of communal music-making was ripped out of Africa and survived through sheer force of will. It shaped the African American musical vernacular, which in turn shaped the American scene. The African American vernacular became an always-available source of renewal, functioning for white America something like Greek and Roman antiquity did in the high-art traditions of Europe, where it is impossible to speak of a single “renaissance” since so many generations of artists and intellectuals dipped into this inexhaustible well for inspiration. One difference is that the African American source never went away. The music was best learned by observing, which was relatively easy to do since black communities continued to train virtuosos by the dozens, generation after generation: Louis Armstrong, Little Richard, Aretha Franklin, James Brown, and countless others.

The communal tradition reached Ellington and the Beatles, and each group did something special with it. One could say that they each brought a composer’s vision to the dynamics of collaboration. The ring shout was the indispensable background. It could not have happened any other way.