SAVANNAH, Ga. (AP) — Their dinner had just arrived as the two college professors watched their guests, a group of singers from the Georgia coast, unexpectedly turn saying grace into an outburst of song, rhythm and shouted praises that soon had other diners in the restaurant joining in with the impromptu performance.
“Before you know it, they’re out of their chairs and the beat is getting played on a table and you had all the children in the restaurant shouting praises with them,” said Mary Ellen Junda, a music professor at the University of Connecticut.
The dinner at a restaurant in Richmond, Va., last year with the Geechee Gullah Ring Shouters of Darien, Ga., turned into another lesson for Junda and fellow music professor Robert Stephens, who have spent years studying the art and traditions of the Gullah, descendants of slaves who live in coastal communities from North Carolina to northern Florida. Scholars say their culture, long isolated from the mainland, has clung to its African roots and traditions more than any in America.
Now Junda and Stephens are preparing to share their firsthand research next year with 80 classroom teachers from elementary and high schools across the U.S., who will spend a week visiting Gullah communities in coastal Georgia and South Carolina. It’s an effort to spread word of a distinct American culture that’s rapidly giving way to assimilation as younger generations leave small island communities for life on the mainland.
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