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The Shout

The shout could be repeated for as long as five hours in a row as the song took on the characterizations of a chant. As the tempo increased a kind of religious ecstasy was produced among participants, so much so that shouters often collapsed in complete exhaustion, only to be quickly replaced by another participant, thus keeping the ring going. Although white slave owners saw the shout as a strange spectacle, often regarding it as barbaric and lascivious, the shout more than any other form of black music in America, represented the survival of African traditions. There are obvious vestiges of the shout in modern blues.

Non-religious forms of the shout include cries, calls, and hollers, old African traditions adapted by slaves for use in communicating messages of all kinds. Shouts, cries, hollers, spirituals, work and boat songs all represented the way music played a critical role in slave societies. It is important to remember, however, that the purely African aspects of the slave music were long gone by the time of the Civil War. These musical forms had become distinctly American in nature. After all, a tremendous gulf of experience separated the joys of West African work songs linked to the harvesting of the season's crops and the painful, sonorous sounds of American slaves forced to toil long hours in the fields. Ranging from such things as the syncopated foot stomping to the accompanying clapping of spectators to the repeating of the main lines in the chorus, the blues owes its musical roots to the slave music of the nineteenth century.

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