Gullah Voices: Traditions and Transformations

FAIN: BH-261712-18

University of Connecticut (Storrs, CT 06269-9000)
Robert W. Stephens (Project Director: February 2018 to April 2021)

Two one-week workshops for 72 school teachers on Gullah history, culture, and artistic expression.

The University of Connecticut, in collaboration with Penn Center, the Georgia Historical Society and other sites in the Coastal Lowlands, will present two one-week NEH Landmarks of American History and Culture Workshops in Savannah, GA on July 8-12 and July 15-19, 2019. The sessions will examine the artistic expressions of the Gullah, direct descendants of slaves who worked the rice plantations on the coastal islands off the shores of South Carolina and Georgia. Their history, stories, beliefs, and creative expressions are critical antecedents to African-American culture and the broader American mosaic, as we know it today. The workshop format will follow the African tradition, where the arts are studied as interrelated living experiences rather than as separate entities. Immersion experiences will take place at Penn Center, St. Helena Island, SC; Sapelo Island, McIntosh County, GA; the Georgia Historical Society and Pin Point Heritage Museum, Savannah, GA.

Associated Products

Gullah Voices: Bridging Cultures through the Arts and the Oral tradition (Article)
Title: Gullah Voices: Bridging Cultures through the Arts and the Oral tradition
Author: Mary Ellen Junda
Author: Robert W. Stephens
Abstract: A young woman in the small village of Senehun Ngola, Sierra Leone is taught a song that is sung only by women. She is captured and sold into slavery in the United States. Her name is no longer known to us but we know she taught the song to her daughter, Catherine Delegal of Harris Neck, GA. who then passed it on to her daughter Amelia Dawley. Dawley sang it for the linguist Lorenzo Dow Turner who recorded her on July 31, 1933. She sang it to her daughter, Mary Moran who is the last person in that familial line in the United States to learn the song, and at ninety-two years of age, still sings it today. This song exemplifies how the oral tradition works in the Gullah community.
Year: 2014
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: The International Journal of Critical Cultural Studies

Social Protest and Resistance In African American Traditions in Tranformation (Book Section)
Title: Social Protest and Resistance In African American Traditions in Tranformation
Author: Robert W. Stephens
Author: Mary Ellen Junda
Editor: Aillen Dillane, Martin Powers, Eoin Devereaux and Amanda Haynes
Abstract: An unbroken tradition of protest song has survived for centuries off the coast of the states of Georgia and South Carolina. The carriers of this tradition are known as the Gullah. The Gullah are descendants of enslaved Africans who were brought to America for their rice-growing skills. For generations they have resided on the Sea Islands and Coastal Lowlands of South Carolina and Georgia. Given their geographic isolation, the Gullah have retained more of their African cultural heritage than any other group of African Americans (Opala 1986). On the islands, as in Africa, singing has long been a daily part of work and play, prayer and protest. The rhythmic drive of the drums, so prevalent in Africa, was transferred to body percussion to replace the banned instrument (Southern 1997). These performance practices accompanied two song styles: short musical phrases with variations in repetition; and call-and-response, in which one singer leads and is supported by a group (ibid, 14-15).
Year: 2018
Publisher: Roman & LIttleField International Ltd.
Book Title: Songs of Social Protest: International Perspectives
ISBN: HB 97817866 -4

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