"'I love the Lord, He heard my cry, ' Deacon cries out as the newly
gathered congregation, now seated in their pews, echoes his words
in a plaintive tune". Thus begins the Devotional at St. John
Progressive Baptist Church, one of many Afro-Baptist services that
Walter Pitts observed in the dual role of anthropologist and church
pianist. Based on extensive fieldwork in black Baptist churches in
rural Texas, this is a major new study of the African origins of
African-American forms of worship. Over a period of five years,
Pitts, a scholar of anthropology and linguistics, played the piano
at and recorded numerous worship services. Offering an extensive
history of Afro-Baptist religion in the American South, he compares
the ritual structures he observed with those of traditional African
worship and other religious rituals of African origin in the New
World. Through these historical comparisons, coupled with
sociolinguistic analysis, Pitts uncovers striking parallels between
Afro-Baptist services and the rituals of Western and Central
Africa, as well as African-derived rituals in the United States Sea
Islands, the Caribbean, and Brazil. Pitts demonstrates that African
and African-American worship share an underlying binary structure:
the somber melancholy of the first ritual frame and the joyful,
ecstatic trance of the second frame, both essential to the
fulfillment of that structure. Of particular interest is his
discovery of the way in which the deliberate heightening and
strategic suppression of "black English" contribute to this binary
structure of worship. This highly original study, with a foreword
by Vincent Wimbush, creates a memorable portrait of this vital, yet
misunderstood aspectof African-American culture. A model for the
investigation of African retentions in the diaspora, Old Ship of
Zion will be of keen interest to students and scholars of cultural
anthropology, religious studies, and African-American studies, as
well as those concerned with the culture of the diaspora, the
investigation of syncretism, folklore, and ethnomusicology.
General
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