Shouts from Rural Georgia

From a coastal field in Georgia to the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts

The present generation of McIntosh County Shouters has become an American treasure. For centuries these Gullah Geechee men and women have kept their unique music alive.

The Shouters received the Georgia Governor’s Award for the Arts and Humanities, have performed at the Kennedy Center and the Library of Congress, and were even named Master Artists by the National Endowment for the Arts for preserving Gullah-Geechee tradition. 

Many years ago, the great folklorist Alan Lomax said, “The Georgia Sea Islands are the home of the American song.”

But who are they?  

Tucked away in a field in rural Georgia, surrounded by live oak trees just off Hwy. 99, sits the Mount Calvary Baptist Church, home of the McIntosh County Shouters, the oldest living Gullah Geechee “ring shouters” surviving in North America.  They are the descendants of enslaved people brought from West Africa to work on the isolated coastal plantations, growing rice, indigo and sea island cotton. Becasue they came from many different ethnic backgrounds and spoke different languages, they had to come up with a way to communicate with each other.

They come from a humble one-story, cinder block building painted white with stained glass windows and an indigo-colored roof in the tiny community of Briar Patch in Bolden, Georgia.  The shouters are members of the Mount Calvary Baptist Church, just about 25 miles north of St.Simons Island, organized in 1890.