Ring shout

The ring shout is a distinctive African Americanritual dance originating with enslaved Africans in the southern United States where worshippers move in a counterclockwise circle while hand-clapping, foot-patting and shuffling, stick-beating to foreground the rhythm, and call-and-response singing. It is an oral tradition passed down in African American families since the era of slavery. Elders and religious leaders pass down songs and shouts to the younger generation. The practice of sacred circle dancing combines spirituals and rhythmic music, reflecting its Christian and African spiritual and cultural importance. Most scholars agree it is a "Black holy dance" that developed in the living quarters of enslaved African practitioners and Black Christian "praise houses" through a fusion of Central and West African spiritual traditions (like counterclockwise circle dances, polyrhythms, and ancestor veneration), and revivalistic Christian practices in either the eighteenth or nineteenth century. The ring shout is part of the Black musical tradition.

According to of history and African American studies Michael A. Gomez, "the West Central African use of ring ceremonies was the main source for the development of the ring shout and the minkisi the basis of hoodoo." Though it is not definitively known when the ring shout was first observed, there are several accounts of its existence. Methodist missionaries recorded the ritual in the 1800s. Musicologist and educator Eileen Southern traced the earliest observance of the ring shout to a 1819 observance of the secret African ritual dances that took place later in the Black quarters of Philadelphia after a Christian camp meeting. The ring shout was also observed being practiced among enslaved and free Black Americans during Christian revival services in the 1840s.

Early accounts also highlight that the ring shout was originally rebuked by white Christian clergy who claimed the dance to be "a relic of some African rite". Black clergy were also known to publicly disapprove of the dance in front of white observers but practiced it themselves in Black spaces. In addition to ring shout ceremonies being gatherings where enslaved Africans could seek comfort and relief from their everyday troubles, they were also a place where abolitionists, like Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, and Gullah Jack, could plot rebellions for freedom. Today, the ring shout continues as a pivotal part of Hoodoo tradition to invoke the ancestors through veneration and spirit possession. The shout is also observed by Black Americans in Christian churches of the Methodist, Baptist and Pentecostal denominations. In these settings, the dance may occur when a congregant experiences the New Birth or became entirely sanctified.