The Drumming Folk

The Gullah people of the southern United States present a unique opportunity to analyze the effects of cultural isolation and adaptation. The modern Gullah people are the direct descendants of west african slaves brought specifically to the southern coastal region to grow rice due to their remarkable resistance to tropical disease common in the region. Due to their specialized rice cropping expertise and natural immunities not inherent in white southerners, white plantation owners often left the Gullah slaves to themselves. This had the effect of allowing the oral and musical tradition of native African culture to remain almost unchanged after generations of practice in the the US.



As Gullah drummer David Pleasant explains, Gullah music, like in that of many native African cultures, is rhythm-centric. A strong, often polyrythmic beat, sometimes including background shimmer, draw similarity with the Ewe drummers of west Africa. Here, the drums share a similar communal purpose, yet as further analyzed by Pleasant, they played a direct insurrectionary role in the lives of Gullah slaves. The drum and rythms of the Ewe people are similar in their ability to draw the members of the musical culture together to a single purpose, thus explaining their eventual outlawing by white authority.



The consistency between the Gullah musical culture and cultures in West Africa make it easy to see departures and adapations from the originals, though few they are. The above performance is a gullah 'Ring Shout', a dance strongly tied to christian spirituality. The performers dance to a beat, usually played by two or more membranohpones or idiophones, moving in circular pattern.

Both functional and stylistic roots of these 'ring shouts' are evident in Ewe culture. The Ewe Atsia dance is quite similar, from the circular dancing, to the downward palm movements. In Atsia, the goal is to be possessed by the spirits at the center of the dance; In Gullah ring shout, the spirit is that of the Christian god. The function and form remains very similar, supplanted only is the native African religion.