What a 'Ring Shout' Carries Into a Concert Hall

A ring shout is a counterclockwise, call-and-response practice of singing, shuffling and stick-beaten rhythm that enslaved and later free African Americans carried from West-Central African ring ceremonies into Christian worship in the American South. When a composer titles a concert piece after it, the title is a promise about form: a circling pulse, a leader answered by a group, and a rhythm kept by something struck against the floor rather than by a conductor's beat alone.

What is a ring shout?

The "shout" in the name is not a raised voice: linguist Lorenzo Dow Turner theorized that the word may come from the Arabic shawt, a single circuit around the Kaaba, and the practice itself centers on a shuffling, close-to-the-floor movement around a ring. Scholars trace its roots to West-Central African, particularly Kongo, ring ceremonies, carried into the American South and first described in writing in 1819, in an account from Philadelphia. It took shape in praise houses and camp meetings, where enslaved people folded Christian themes into an inherited form: a practice of worship in which a song could also serve as covert communication, as when a spiritual was used to organize a prayer meeting unseen by enslavers.

How does a ring shout move?

Participants move counterclockwise around a ring in a shuffling fashion, keeping their feet close to the floor rather than crossing them, a distinction that historically let the practice avoid being classed as "dancing" where religious rules or enslavers prohibited dancing. A lead singer, called a songster, carries the line; a stickman keeps the pulse by striking a stick, often hickory, against the floor; other participants answer in call-and-response and clap in interlocking patterns, while some pantomime the words of the song with their arms as it moves. The result is a structure, not a performance piece written in advance: every role is a function, filled by whoever in the ring is suited to carry it that day.

Who still carries the practice?

The tradition survives as a living, performed form, not only as an archival description. The McIntosh County Shouters, based on the Georgia coast, were recognized in 1993 with a National Heritage Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts, the United States' highest honor for a folk and traditional artist. Group patriarch Lawrence McKiver served as songster and Benjamin Reed as stickman, with Doretha Skipper as lead "baser" guiding the choral refrain; the group began performing publicly in 1980 and has since appeared at venues including the National Black Arts Festival. Their continued practice is part of why the ring shout can still be heard, not only read about: a composer naming a piece after it is naming something a living group still performs on a stage.

What does naming a concerto after it promise a listener?

The archived catalog of Frederick Tillis's own site lists a "Ring Shout Concerto" among his commissions and performed works, alongside concert pieces such as "A Festival Journey" and his choral setting of Wallace Stevens, "A Symphony of Songs." The archive does not describe that concerto's instrumentation, movements or premiere, so none of that is claimed here. What the title itself can tell a prospective listener or player, drawing on the tradition it names, is what to expect structurally: a piece built around circularity rather than a single linear argument, a leading voice answered by the larger ensemble, and a rhythmic anchor that behaves like a stickman's floor-beat, a steady, grounded pulse under a line that keeps returning to where it started.

That is a familiar move in twentieth-century concert music: a composer absorbs a vernacular, communal form, built for a ring of participants rather than a seated audience, and writes it into a concerto's dialogue between a soloist and an orchestra. The soloist can stand in for the songster's call; the orchestra's response, phrase by phrase, can stand in for the ring's answer. A listener who knows what a ring shout actually sounds like, the stick's beat, the counterclockwise return, the call taken up and handed back, has a real framework for hearing what a "Ring Shout Concerto" is reaching for, even without a recording or a score in hand.

How to use this before a rehearsal or a listening session

Start with the two roles. Before a reading or a performance of any piece that names the ring shout, mark where a single voice leads and where the larger group answers: that division is the structural skeleton the title points to. Then listen for the floor, the equivalent of the stickman's beat, whatever instrument or section is holding a steady, grounded rhythm under the moving line. Finally, track the return: a ring shout does not resolve forward the way a linear narrative does, it circles, so listen for the moment a phrase comes back to where it began rather than for a single climactic arrival.

Where to go next

The big band voicings entry sets out how a different ensemble, a jazz big band, divides a line between sections, a useful comparison for hearing how a call is carried by one group and answered by another. The arts season planning entry shows how a single theme can run across a term's concerts and coursework, including a piece like this one. For the kind of document that first preserved this title, the concert program archives entry reads a printed program as local history.