ATLANTA -- Most travelers have little reason to pass through Bolden, a tiny community in Georgia's coastal McIntosh County. And even those who do happen that way -- past a BP gas station and Dollar General off of Interstate 95, down the two-lane highway that cuts arrow-straight through the inland scrub pines and moss-draped live oaks -- would probably never guess that an unremarkable old church by the side of the road there has been the vessel for something extraordinary.

If you pass at the right time, you'll hear a singular sound coming from the Mt. Cavalry Baptist Church's modest annex: the beat of a stick against the hardwood floor, call-and-response singing, clapping, and the patting of feet.

This is the ring shout, and it is, in fact, one of the oldest continuously practiced African-American traditions in North America. In turn joyous, mournful, rousing or comforting, it sounds like an invitation to a homecoming, one that could strike even a total stranger to the bone and stop him in his tracks.

Passed down and practiced in McIntosh County since the times of slavery, the ring shout traces its roots back to 18th-century Africa. Only in the past 33 years have the shouters of McIntosh County begun to share their centuries-old tradition with the wider world, and the group's appearance at Georgia State University's Kopleff Recital Hall on March 1 represents a rare opportunity to see the ring shout in action.

"We always say that the songs were given to us at birth, and we will sing them for all we are worth," says Carletha Sullivan, 71, a resident of Bolden who has been performing the ring shout for as long as she can remember. "My mother was a shouter. My grandmother was a shouter. The songs we sing are songs that were handed down to us from generation to generation."

In a ring shout, a lead singer, or "songster," sets the song, most often a spiritual, and "basers," or back-up singers, stand behind him performing in call-and-response fashion. A "stickman" beats the rhythm with a stick (slaves were often forbidden from using drums, so the beat of a broomstick on a wooden floor acted as a substitute), and "clappers" stand behind, clapping out the rhythm.

"It's not the singing that's the shout, it's the dancelike movement," explains Sullivan about the women's shuffling in a counterclockwise circle. Vocal shouting doesn't take place at all during a ring shout: the term "shout" likely derives from the Afro-Arabic word "saut," an ecstatic dance performed around the Kaaba in the Great Mosque at Mecca.

And when Sullivan says "dancelike," she means it. Dancing is considered too unholy to perform in a church or as part of worship, so, according to tradition, as long as the feet never cross each other and aren't picked too high off the ground then a shout technically never becomes a dance.

Ring shouts were once commonly practiced up and down the coastal areas of the American South. Nineteenth-century references to the tradition are plentiful, especially in the journals and letters of missionaries and teachers who came to the area to educate former slaves after Emancipation. But the practice was often discouraged as "heathenish" or "savage" or disparaged as old-fashioned or a painful reminder of the degradations of slavery.

Witnesses who wrote about the ring shout during the WPA in the 1930s remarked that the tradition seemed to be ending, as new ways were adopted, black families migrated North to seek work, and formerly close-knit coastal communities dispersed. By the mid-20th century, it was assumed the tradition had died out.

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