Different Ways to Learn Ring Shout

1. Get someone who inherited Ring Shout from their parents and community to teach us.
2. Gather the existing Ring Shout scores and recordings and hire a Music Director to examine the material, create suitable arrangements of the music, and teach us to perform the various parts.
3. Focus on the improvised nature of Ring Shout. Teach participants the musical skills necessary to improvise one part in the Ring Shout.

This would be the ideal method of learning authentic Ring Shout.

Unfortunately we have been unable to find any such persons who were inclined to teach us. Also, at this point in time we do not have the funds to fly someone to California even if they could be found.

In spite of the above difficulties we have not given up on this strategy. Perhaps in the future when we have achieved non-profit status and had time to apply for grants we focus on this method.

The big advantage of hiring a music director to create Ring Shout arrangements and then teach us to perform them, is that the process would be fairly quick and easy. We could probably be up and performing within a few months.

The job of Music Director requires a high level of responsibility, reliability, and commitment over a period of months, so that person would need to be paid. We don’t currently have the funds to hire a Music Director.

In addition to lack of funds, there are more disadvantages.

Ring Shout is very very different from the forms of music we hear in modern America. In Ring Shout there was no written score, no recording, no director, arrangement, no performers and no audience (everyone performed and ‘audienced’ together at the same time). All parts involved greater or lesser amounts of improvisation and songs were passed down as an oral tradition.

Music Directors generally lack any training or experience with music having these unusual characteristics. (Music Directors and Choir Directors are trained to choose a score or recording, change it in order to create an arrangement appropriate to abilities of their ensemble, teach the members of their ensemble their parts, and then lead their ensemble during a performance in front of an audience.)

Another problem is the hiring a Music Director might truly violate the sacredness of Ring Shout.

Imagine that a musicologist from China traveled to the United States to study a Sunday morning service at an African American Baptist church. If the service was carefully observed and videotaped, the musicologist might return to China and reenact a very close imitation of the service. The musicologist could have actors clapping and singing hymns, an actor preaching a sermon with plenty of amen’s and maybe even old ladies actresses running up and down the isles. It would probably be a very entertaining show. But, it would pervert and violate the sacred nature of the service.

The same could be said of a Music Director’s efforts to arrange, choreograph and reenact a close imitation of Ring Shout.

Strategy 3: Teaching participants the basic musical skills necessary to authentically improvise Ring Shout.

Is it possible for us to have no written score, no recording, no director, no arrangement, no performers and no audience; and still make our RS something akin to the amazing celebration of God, Freedom, and Community described by witnesses in the historical record? We believe the third strategy can achieve this end. Various members of our project, and to a lesser degree members of our audiences, must be taught the different skills of Ring Shout.

These skills include:

• Basic rules and patters of Ring Shout
• Musical skills (clapping, sticking, calling and harmonizing)
• Improvisational skills (how to play it like you feeling it)
• Dance skills (dance patterns, rules, and dance interpreting of the spiritual message of the song)
• A learning of the individual songs as in an oral tradition.

This strategy for learning and performing Ring Shout is going to be difficult. We are unfamiliar with un-scored, unrecorded, undirected, mostly improvised music, so it’s going to feel unfamiliar and strange to us. Another difficulty is that there is more for participants to learn than with ‘Music Director’ strategy. Greater musical skill is required to improvise, than to play an arranged part, and improvisation is in itself a skill.

Also, with this strategy there is a danger that, with all it’s focus on skills and learning, we might loose the joy and fun which should be part and parcel of RS. Opportunities to learn Ring Shout skills should be offered but not required. Learners should progress through levels of difficulty at their own speed. Lessons should be as short and enjoyable (not painful or frustrating) as possible. The simplest lesson of all my be: ‘Clap it like you feel it,’ and that might be enough for some people.

The payoff of pursuing this strategy is that we stay truly respectful Ring Shout’s sacredness.

Can we really teach everyone in the project all the necessary skills and in addition teach the people at the venues where we perform? The answer is yes, if we carefully analyze the skills required and come up with a series of very short practical lessons, of graded difficulty, for each part. These lessons would be part of every practice and the easier lessons would be designed to be used on the audience during performances.

Ring Shout Project performance might involve these steps:

1. Shouts by Ring Shout Project members.
2. A lecture about history and significance of Ring Shout.
3. Splitting the audience up into three groups and teaching one group basic clapping and improvisation skills, teaching another group basic Ring Shout movement (dance) and movement improvisation skills, and teaching the third group to sing the response part and encouraging them to improvise harmonies.
4. Then everyone who wants to Ring Shouts together.

We have tested this strategy by focusing on clapping and clapping improvisation skills. In a period of half an hour we had participants with no previous exposure to Ring Shout, producing respectable improvised clapping rhythms which would have been a very positive addition to a full Ring Shout.