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20 minute experience, or the time it takes to watch a beam of light move across the room.

Some archives are inherited, passed down by families from generation to generation. Such is the case for artist Brenton Jordan and the ring shout, a pillar of Gullah Geechee and American culture. In the following conversation, Jordan recounts his journey from observing the art form as a child to leading performances with the McIntosh County Shouters. Throughout, Jordan emphasizes the importance of history to be taught and taken up by the people and descendents upended by it.

A CONVERSATION WITH BRENTON JORDAN

Jessica Ferrer: I would love to start by knowing when you first encountered the McIntosh County Shouters and what compelled you about their performance?

Brenton Jordan: That’s always a funny question because they’re family, so they’ve always been there for me. I did have a different perspective than most youth that are in our community because of the fact that my great-grandmother was one of the original founding members. Then my grandmother, she joined the group in either ’82 or ’83.

Watching it every year as a kid, it was just something that I thought the old people made up because all you really saw doing it was the old people. You really didn’t see younger ones doing it, and it was something that we just did once a year.

I spent a lot of time with my great-grandmother and my grandmother because my mom was working; they were my babysitters, basically. So being able to spend time with my great-grandmother until I was eleven years old, there were cases in which she would teach us little games and things that she did when she was a little girl. Then, on rare occasions, she would pull the broom from out of the corner and we would shout around the potbelly stove in her living room.

Whenever there was a performance, I was usually there. Like most kids, if you’re around something enough, you just kind of take to it. In our community, young boys, they literally learn how to beat the stick fairly early because they’re sitting up watching. At the time, it was Benjamin Reed, aka Jerry, who was the stick man of the group when I was growing up. As young boys, you wanted to learn because it seemed like the way that Jerry approached beating the stick, he had his own style and flair. It was fun watching him because his head would start swaying to the rhythm and he would get lost in it, and as a kid, that was fascinating to watch.

I learned how to beat the stick at the age of five. I tried my hand at shouting at six, and I led my first shout song at nine. And in our family, if they see you have that knack for it, they’ll push you to continue doing it. Whenever they would have a performance, my grandmother would motion for me to come up on stage and shout along as a way of showing the audience that there are youth learning how to carry on this tradition.

The McIntosh County Shouters. Courtesy of Brenton Jordan.

[ID: A black-and-white group of ten people posing for a portrait in a room with wood-paneled walls. The women wear old fashioned patterned dresses and hats with matching fabric; the men wear overalls and pageboy caps.]

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Jessica: I read an article where you shared that either your great-grandmother or grandmother called you an old soul.

Brenton: All of them. Literally, the entire family calls me an old soul.

Jessica: Is that something you embrace?

Brenton: At first, when I was younger, I used to feel a type of way about it because nobody ever really explains to you what an old soul is. All you’re thinking is that you act like old people. Growing up in high school, my friends always said I reminded them of their grandparents. Then my social studies teacher, we would have conversations about certain things, all the time, she would say, “Yeah, Brenton knows about it. He done been here before. He just didn’t get it right the first time.” [laughs]

Being called an old soul is one of those things I’ve grown to accept. It’s funny because when I led my first shout song, I was nine years old, and I am a mockingbird when it comes to singing. I sing in the voice of the people that I grew up hearing, so anytime I ever take the lead of a shout song, it’s me mimicking what I grew up hearing. The first time I led “John On The Island,” which was the first shout song that I learned, I sounded exactly like Lawrence McKiver. It got to the point where people talked about how they had to turn around to look to see if Lawrence was actually singing, because it sounded so much like him.

Jessica: That’s so cool. I love hearing you describe yourself as a mockingbird, repeating and mimicking what you grew up hearing. I feel like there’s sometimes a contradiction between traditional and contemporary arts, and I was wondering if that’s a tension you feel you have to navigate with the McIntosh County Shouters, or if you feel like you need to address that?

Brenton: It’s kind of one of those things where it’s traditional, but it’s also contemporary, which is going to make sense when I explain it. When the group started, all they did was shout. That was it. But by the time I came along, there were certain gestures that were added to songs for the sake of stage presence, and in that being added, it ended up becoming a part of tradition. 

In songs like “Move Daniel,” where we say, “Do the eagle wing,” and everyone holds their arms out and flaps their arms like their wings, that “traditionally” was never a part of that song, but over time, it became integrated as a part of the tradition because it was so eye-catching to the children when they would perform for schools. It ended up bleeding into when they would shout on New Year’s; they would automatically do that because they’d gotten so used to doing it with the kids. It’s not that we have to fight for this space of traditional or contemporary, it just happens.

Most people, when they think about musical evolution, the ring shout is not even brought up in the equation, which is pretty sad, but the truth of the matter is that ring shout is the birthplace for a lot of American music. The reason I say that is because the ring shout music is the closest thing that we have to African music here in the West. If you take out the stick, the board, and the percussion, and just leave the singing the way that it is, you have a spiritual. If you take the religious aspects of ring shout songs, add a piano and melody to them, you now have gospel.

Most people don’t think about that because they don’t know ring shout music, because it is so centered around Gullah Geechee culture, and we’re still one of those small, little known gems of American treasures. The rhythm of the shout literally can be added to any song. When I say any song genre, I mean any song genre. You can clap the ring shout to any song and it’ll fit in perfectly. The only thing is you’ll either have to slow it down or speed it up, one of the two, but you can put it anywhere and it’ll fit absolutely perfectly.

Shout songs were created for various reasons. They could talk about what was going on at the plantation. The majority of them are religious in context. You also have some songs that are social. Some songs actually talk about the like or dislike of a fellow slave. You have songs that talk about having a good time at a party. You have songs that even talk about the slave master in his presence. With all of those aspects, which are basically what creates music anyway, if you pick a song and tweak it in certain ways, you’ll then have a song of a completely different genre that’s no longer a shout song, but the truth of the matter is it’s still a shout song because that’s where its origin came from.

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The McIntosh County Shouters perform Gullah Geechee Ring Shout at a concert at the Library of Congress, December 2010. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

[Video description: A ring shout performance by nine members of the McIntosh County Shouters on stage in an auditorium.]

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Jessica: I want to follow up on that aspect of Gullah Geechee people and your culture being this little known gem like you described, and how your family have really been the folks keeping this history alive and passing on its tradition. It sounds like it’s oral and embodied. You watch, you learn, you do, and it’s less on paper. I’m wondering what are the benefits and challenges of that for you?

Brenton: For you to actually learn the tradition, you have to be a part of it, and that makes it even more sacred because when you put too much on paper, you have people who don’t necessarily want to do the real work in learning the traditions and the protocols, the ins and outs of the tradition. Basically, if you give an inch, they’ll take a mile.

In order to truly learn the essence of the shout, you have to be a part of it, because from the outside looking in, it all looks one way. But there’s technique within each one of those duties, and if you don’t understand the technique within each one of those duties and why they do what they do the way that they do it, then you’re losing the essence and the spirit of that tradition. So the plus side of the ring shout being an oral tradition is that unless you come and actually sit at the foot of your elders, you are really losing out and miss the spirit.

It’s beautiful to see so many people attempting to bring the ring shout to a wider audience. But on the other hand, it’s one of those situations where so few know about the essence of what makes a ring shout a ring shout that it kind of discredits the essence and the spirit of a ring shout because they approach it based on their interpretation of what they hear. They’re listening to it and thinking, “These songs can be approached this way because this is how they’re singing it.” But little do they actually understand there’s true technique that it takes to sing a shout song, and those things aren’t taught.

In listening to my elders sing these songs a particular way for so long, I realized, “Okay. There’s a technique in this. There’s a reason they approach these songs this way.” Certain people won’t even sing a particular song because they don’t have the voice to sing it. So there’s that level of respect as well, because if you don’t have the voice to sing a particular shout song, don’t attempt it. In fact, my cousin, Freddie, there are certain shout songs Freddie will not lead, and Freddie is a powerhouse when it comes to singing, but there are certain songs that Freddie will not touch because he understands there’s certain ways that you have to approach shout songs, and if you don’t approach it that way, you’re basically losing the essence and the spirit of not only the song, but you’re losing the essence and the spirit of those who actually sung that song.

Jessica: I think I understand what you’re saying. I feel like to get to your point of when folks try and bring ring shout to a wider audience, but there isn’t that level of closeness that you and your family have to it as direct practitioners, it kind of unlocked for me this idea of what does it mean to study an art form? I think it’s not about going to a school and getting a degree in the case of ring shout, right? It’s about being born into this thing and it’s actually this really long lifetime study and presence with it, and that’s how you actually come to know ring shout.

Brenton: Exactly.

Jessica: That’s really important to hear. You can understand and appreciate it as an observer, but you cannot go so far as to claim you can replicate or certainly just explain it in full to someone else.

Brenton: Exactly. That’s literally one of the reasons why a part of the script says, “Often imitated, but never duplicated.”

Jessica: Wait, I have to ask, when you’re saying script, what does that mean? 

Brenton: When I say script, it’s a way of giving the shouters a breather, but it’s also a way of giving and bringing the experience of the stories that our ancestors told to us over the years — our family’s history — to an audience. We know how these songs were created, but the audience doesn’t. They don’t know the stories and the intricacies, in some cases, even the silly ways that songs were created. We know this information, but the audience doesn’t. So in us sharing our knowledge and our history of these stories, that’s our script.

The McIntosh County Shouters. Brenton Jordan is the fourth person from the right. Photo courtesy of Brenton Jordan.

[ID: A group of people pose outdoors. The men wear pink shirts under overalls with straw hats; the women wear colorful floor-length dresses.]

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Jessica: Thank you for clarifying what you were referring to around the script and also re-emphasizing this notion of intergenerational exchange. Knowing that this tradition has been passed down from generation to generation and you have had super important teachers and your family pass it on to you and practice with you, do you find yourself now shifting into this role of teaching or mentoring others, or is that something you’re aspiring to do more of?

Brenton: It just happens because of the fact that when you’re a part of the McIntosh County Shouters, regardless of if you want to or not, you’re thrown into the spotlight in so many ways. I’ve always been one of the youth in my community that everyone thought would be a teacher of some sort or an entertainer. People thought I would be doing African dance at a greater capacity than I am, but everyone knew I would be teaching in some capacity. With the ring shout, it kind of put me in that position because my favorite audience are kids. In our community, we have some of the youth who want to come and learn how to beat the stick, so I’m literally sitting there showing them and teaching them the same exact way that Jerry taught me. You don’t have too many trying to learn shout songs, which is kind of sad, but you have those trying to learn the chorus. 

But I’m realizing that I’m being pushed to bring the ring shout outside of our community, because of interviews like this, being asked to do workshops at Morehouse, being asked to be a consultant as a part the Ring Shout Resilience Research Project, being asked about pursuing an education in ethnomusicology. It’s putting me in a position where I realized that my duty is to bring the ring shout to younger audiences, but not only those within my community. It’s time to also bring it outside of our community because that is the only way the ring shout is going to get the recognition that it deserves. It’s the only way that it’s going to be brought into the conversation of music history.

It wasn’t until 2000 that being Gullah Geechee was considered a badge of honor and nothing to be ashamed of. It wasn’t until 2015 that you have what I call the renaissance of Gullah Geechee culture and music, where you have people who are outside of the Gullah Geechee corridor now coming back and saying, “Well, my grandfather or grandmother came from this area. I’m Geechee. What does this mean? What does this mean to me? What does this mean for my family? I want to learn about this culture. I want to learn the language. I want to learn the history of my people.”

Jessica: What do you think changed in 2015? Why is that sticking out to you?

Brenton: It’s interesting because history happens in cycles, and just like when we had the Black Panther Movement, the Black Power Movement in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, that’s basically where we are again within Black culture. Thanks to Beyonce’s Lemonade, we had a resurgence of people wanting to come back to African spirituality. In people coming back to African spirituality, it segued into Gullah Geechee culture because everybody’s coming into African spirituality. One of the aspects of African spirituality is Hoodoo. So in people learning about Hoodoo, they’re finding out about Gullah Geechee culture because Gullah Geechee culture at one point was heavily influential in Hoodoo culture.

Jessica: Got it. I love knowing that it feels like there’s a renaissance happening. 

Brenton: Yeah. Honestly, it’s a beautiful thing, but it’s also very scary.

Jessica: Say more.

Brenton: The reason I say it’s beautiful and scary is because I’m a part of the African spirituality community. You have a lot of online spiritual gurus and things of that nature going on, especially now. If you change your name and you’re wearing eleke, not knowing what eleke are, not understanding what these things represent and all of that stuff, but you look the part, people automatically think that you have the knowledge and you have the information. It’s the same with the resurgence of Gullah Geechee culture. You have these individuals who are coming in saying, “Well, my family’s from South Carolina and I’m entitled to this.” No. Understand the history of the community that your family came from. Understand that cultural legacy. When you understand the cultural legacy of what was going on in South Carolina and why the ring shout died in a lot of those communities, you’re then able to understand the essence and resilience of what the ring shout is, and why the ring shout is so precious to me.

A lot of people are tired of feeling that our history started with slavery, and they’re hungry for that revolution, but they don’t realize that traditions like spirituals and ring shout were active and living, breathing forms of resistance, revolution, and resilience. One of the reasons why the ring shout did not survive in areas like South Carolina is because the majority of the members in those communities wanted to be like our European counterparts, especially at that specific time, because being considered Gullah Geechee was worse than being called the N-word. A lot of those communities stopped doing the ring shout because the sound of the board and the stick was considered “too African.” A lot of the dancelike movements and the hip-rocking and all of those elements of the shout were considered “too African” or too “savage.” A lot of Gullah Geechee communities, they don’t have the actual dance aspect that makes up the shout. 

My family being the stubborn bullheaded people that we are, we purposely built our church annex with a wooden floor so that the ring shout could continue. When pastors came in, they would be like, no, y’all can’t do this in the church. The older people said, “We were doing this before you got here, and we’re going to continue doing this while you’re here. Now, either you can get with the program or you can get going. We have members in our community that can preach. It’s up to you as to what you do.” 

On New Year’s Eve, the local bar down the street in our community would literally shut down at 11 and everybody would come to our church and stay for that hour because they knew that at 12 o’clock, the ring shout was going to start popping off. Then they’d leave our church at about 2 o’clock and go back down to the bar and finish out their New Year’s. That’s just what the ring shout meant to our community. It was the one time of year that the entire community, the family was going to come together, and be a part of this great sacred tradition that was passed on to us by our ancestors, which were the seven sisters: my great-great-grandmother and her six sisters. It was the one thing that those seven women left their children, and it was the one time that you would literally see all of those descendants coming together to partake in this great tradition.

We can present the shout in a way that allows them to see, yes, this is a living, breathing form of resistance, this was something that our ancestors did to get by the hard times, but it was also their way of rebellion as well.

The intergenerational teaching aspect of this tradition is a beautiful thing because if the elders actually teach their children about what these traditions mean, we would find that we’re all looking for something that’s a sign of resistance against outside influences. We can present the shout in a way that allows them to see, yes, this is a living, breathing form of resistance, this was something that our ancestors did to get by the hard times, but it was also their way of rebellion as well.

I used to sing one of our shout songs all the time because my supervisor would get on my nerve and I would just bust out in the song. I knew what that song meant for me, but they thought I was just singing. It wasn’t until I ended up telling one of my coworkers, she was like, “Brenton, what’s the song you be singing?” I told her about the song, and I told her where the song came from. She was like, “Ooh, you shady, but I love it.” Literally, anytime he would come around and he would irritate us, I would start singing and she would literally come in with the chorus.

Jessica: Amazing. Oh my God.

Brenton: When people actually know, when we’re actually able to bridge those generational gaps, it becomes this beautiful thing where it’s a form of comedy and relief, but it’s also this sense of, “Dang, these songs can still ring true today.”

I say a lot of people don’t want to learn about it because anytime you hear slavery, there’s this narrow-minded way of looking at what slavery was and what it did to a people. They don’t look at the things that we created in the midst of being in those hardships. They don’t talk about the creativity. They don’t talk about the resilience. They don’t talk about the fight for freedom. We don’t hear about the Gullah wars when we speak of revolutions in the United States. Most people don’t talk about Nat Turner’s Rebellion when we talk about slavery in the United States. We don’t talk about the origins of Black music when we talk about music history in the United States. We understand that this music came out of slavery, but we don’t know how it developed. 

Another reason we don’t have Black people wanting to learn this is because it’s rarely Black people who are teaching it. A lot of people don’t want to learn this stuff because it’s not taught by people who look like us. It’s usually taught by some stuffy old white man or woman who thinks that because they did the legwork of learning this history that they want to share. It comes from a good place. Don’t get me wrong, it does come from a good place, but there’s still a level of a disconnect with the audience because it’s not presented in a traditional standpoint.

It’s always presented as a people who were downtrodden and, oh, woe is them, and that was it. We don’t talk about the fact that during slavery, there were people who may not have ran from the plantation, but they were some of the very ones that if somebody ran through the plantation, they were hiding them. We don’t talk about the fact that people always wonder, “Why do you still celebrate Christmas as a Black person doing African spirituality?” We don’t talk about the fact that Christmas time was the only time of the year that the slaves actually had to themselves. We don’t talk about the fact Christmas was the time that the majority of the running happened. We don’t talk about the fact that the origins behind some of these shout songs are to talk about the slave master while he’s standing right there. We don’t talk about the fact that some of these songs we’re even talking about the fact that you might not like a fellow slave. There was a song that was created about a slave that they didn’t like, but these are things that we don’t talk about, and because these are things that are not presented to the youth, they’re like, “Why do I want to learn about something that was a part of a moment in history in which there was no creativity happening?”

If we talk about it from a perspective that, look, your people created this for these reasons, and they were able to do it this way, and because they were able to do it this way, you were able to get here. You were able to create art forms that are different, like rap, hip-hop, R&B, jazz, blues, house, techno, all of the different things. We were actually even able to go back to Africa and influence African music, afrobeats, amapiano. All of those have Black American influences that were influenced by the ring shout, but nobody knows this information.

Jessica: Well, they will after this interview comes out. They’ll start to learn here.

Brenton: Well, I am glad that I could be of service, ma’am.

Portrait photo of Brenton Jordan by Margo Newmark Rosebaum.

[ID: A Black man sits against a wooden wall, gazing into the camera. He is wearing a straw hat at an angle, a collared shirt under denim overalls, and colorful beaded necklaces.]

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Brenton Jordan
He // Him // His
Eulonia, GA

Originally from the Briar Patch community of Eulonia, Georgia, Brenton Jordan grew up in a close Gullah Geechee community. There, Jordan would learn — along with relatives and members of the Mt. Calvary Baptist Church — about the traditional ring shout. As a child, he learned the specific nuances of the authentic ring shout. As he grew older, he started performing with the McIntosh County Shouters as a baser/clapper — providing percussion and helping to maintain the rhythm. Today, he is the stick man for the group, still providing percussion by beating a large wooden stick against a wooden board as well as leading some songs. He also is a storyteller, teaching people about his heritage. He has traveled around the United States, sharing this Gullah Geechee culture with audiences young and old. He has performed in venues as large as the National Museum of African American History and Culture to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and venues as intimate as nursing homes and schools. Some of his favorite audiences are school children; as it is in performing for these children, he is able to reach out to the younger generations, thereby keeping the ring shout tradition alive. He is a descendant of London and Amy Jenkins, two former Georgia slaves, and the Gullah Geechee culture is something very near to his heart. Being able to share this distinctive culture with the world is one of Jordan’s most important objectives, as today’s world sees the culture disappearing due to the gentrification of the East Coast.

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