Gullah Geechee elders work to preserve sacred songs passed down by
enslaved ancestors
[August 07, 2025]
By LUIS ANDRES HENAO
ST. HELENA ISLAND, S.C. (AP) — Minnie “Gracie” Gadson claps her hands
and stomps her feet against the floorboards, lifting her voice in a song
passed down from her enslaved ancestors who were forced to work the
cotton and rice plantations of the South Carolina Sea Islands.
It's a Gullah spiritual, and the 78-year-old singer is one of a growing
group of artists and scholars trying to preserve these sacred songs and
their Gullah Geechee culture for future generations.
“I have a passion to sing these songs,” Gadson said.
On a recent summer day, her voice rang out inside Coffin Point Praise
House. It’s one of three remaining wooden structures on St. Helena
Island that once served as a place of worship for the enslaved, and
later, for generations of free Black Americans.
Gadson grew up singing in these praise houses. Today, as a Voices of
Gullah member, she travels the U.S. with others in their 70s and 80s
singing in the Gullah Creole language that has West African roots.
“This Gullah Geechee thing is what connects us all across the African
diaspora because Gullah Geechee is the blending of all of these cultures
that came together during that terrible time in our history called the
trans-Atlantic slave trade,” said Anita Singleton-Prather, who recently
performed and directed a play about Gullah history.
The show highlighted Gullah contributions during the American
Revolution, including rice farming and indigo dying expertise. At the
theater entrance, vendors offered Gullah rice dishes and demonstrated
how to weave sweetgrass into baskets.
More than 5,000 descendants of enslaved plantation workers are estimated
to live on St. Helena Island, the largest Gullah community on the South
Carolina coast where respect for tradition and deep cultural roots
persists.
“A lot of our songs were coded, and this language is a language of
survival, a language of resilience, a language of tenacity,”
Singleton-Prather said, adding that despite slavery’s brutality, the
Gullah people were able to thrive, “giving our children a legacy — not a
legacy of shame and victimization, but a legacy of strength and
resilience.”
Discovering Gullah culture and the roots of Kumbaya
Gullah culture includes art forms, language and food by the descendants
of West Africans who have lived on the coasts of the Carolinas, Florida
and Georgia since slavery.
“It’s important to preserve the Gullah culture, mainly because it
informs us all, African Americans, where they come from and that it’s
still here,” said Eric Crawford, author of “Gullah Spirituals: The Sound
of Freedom and Protest in the South Carolina Sea Islands.”
For most of his life, he hadn’t heard the word Gullah. That changed in
2007 with a student's master’s thesis about Gullah culture in public
schools.
“As I began to investigate it, I began to understand that ‘Nobody Knows
the Trouble I’ve Seen,’ ‘Roll Jordan Roll,’ ‘Kumbaya!’ — all these
iconic songs came from this area,” he said.
Versions of these songs, he said, can be traced back to the 19th century
when “Slave Songs of the United States,” the first book of African
American spirituals, was recorded on St. Helena Island.
“And so my question was: ‘These songs that trace back to the 1800s —
were they still being done over 150 years later?’”
He was so curious that he traveled to St. Helena, where he met the
singers and began recording their music.
“These songs became pivotal,” Crawford said, sitting on the original
wooden pews of the island’s Mary Jenkins Praise House. “They were forced
to go to their owners’ church and stay in the balcony. But then in the
evening, typically on Sunday evenings, Tuesday and Thursday, they had
this space by themselves, away from the watchful eye of the owners, and
they could engage in their own songs.”
At the praise houses, he said, they connected with their ancestors
following West and Central African practices. Prayers and song would end
with a counterclockwise dance and a “ring shout” — a rare outlet of joy
for the enslaved.
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James Peter Smalls, a deacon, who takes care of the Mary Jenkins
Praise House, poses for a photo outside the wooden structure in St.
Helena Island, Sunday, July 20, 2025. (AP Photo/Luis Andres Henao)
 These days the singers no longer
rise to do the ring shout due to their age. But at a recent concert
they clapped their hands in one rhythm, stomped the floor in another
and swayed, singing at the island’s Brick Baptist Church.
“These singers are as close as we would ever come to how the
enslaved sang these songs,” Crawford said. “That authenticity — you
just cannot duplicate that.”
The Voices of Gullah goes global
He began to take the singers on tour in 2014. Since then, they’ve
performed across the U.S. as well as in Belize and Mexico.
The touring band's members include Gadson; 89-year-old Rosa Murray;
87-year-old Joe Murray; and their son, Charles “Jojo” Brown.
“I’m gonna continue doing it until I can’t do it no more, and hope
that younger people will come in, others younger than me, to keep it
going,” said Brown who, at 71, is affectionally called the “baby.”
His mother agrees. Sitting in her living room, surrounded by framed
photos of dozens of grandchildren, she said she’ll continue singing
for them.
“I hope and pray one or two of them will fall in my footsteps,” she
said. “I’m leaving a legacy for them to do what I’m doing for the
Lord.”
Other community members share that mission to teach future
generations.
The Gullah Heritage Trails Tours take visitors through historic
neighborhoods surrounded by beaches, wealthy vacation homes and golf
resorts on Hilton Head Island. The tours were started by a family of
12 brothers and sisters in 1996.
“We thought it was important for people to know that Gullah people
live on this island,” said Emory Campbell, 82, who helped translate
the New Testament into Gullah and for decades led the respected Penn
Center, one of the country’s first schools for freed slaves.
“If we don’t know who we are, we’re lost,” said Marlena Smalls, a
singer and actor who for decades has been performing adaptations of
Gullah spirituals for new audiences and founded the popular Gullah
Festival. Her work even appeared on an SAT question about Gullah
culture.
“I want to know who I am. And I want my children to know who they
are and their children to know who they are. That’s why it’s
important,” said Smalls, who is also known for playing Bubba’s
mother in the film “Forrest Gump.”
Her adaptations of Gullah music, she said, are a way of preserving
it by appealing to a mass audience. But she treasures the old
spirituals, calling the group of singers, “true keepers of the
culture.”
Given their age, Crawford sometimes asks himself “who will carry the
torch.” He has been working to get grants so students can also start
projects to preserve the songs, language and culture.
On a recent day, a group of students from Atlanta’s Morehouse
College arrived at the Mary Jenkins Praise House to admire a site
built in the early 1900s.
“It is a portal into the past and a window into the future,” said
Tendaji Bailey, 35, founder of “Gullah Geechee Futures,” a project
that focuses on the preservation of Gullah communities and cultural
sites. For the past three years, he has been bringing Morehouse
students to visit praise houses.
“They hear some of the prayers, some of the songs, and they always
come out of that experience transformed. So, I know that there’s
power in this place, still.”
___
Associated Press journalist Jessie Wardarski contributed to this
report.
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