Language and Songs

This is a 1926 recording of singer J.D. Purdy singing the folk song “Glory to God, My Son’s Come Home” in the Gullah dialect. Though the archives do not list which specific island it was recorded on, the song is tagged with “Georgia” and “Sea Islands.”1

“Glory to God, My Son’s Come Home,” sung in the Gullah dialect by J.D. Purdy, ca. 1926. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

“We say goober or pinder for peanut, gombo for okra, and benne for sesame seed. Buckra means white and can be a white potato or a white person. A skillet blond is a very dark person. We say guinea squash for eggplant and nyam for eat. I didn’t know that people in the rest of the country—or even in the rest of the state—spoke differently from us until I left the Low Country to go north. Geechee territory was my home.”2

Vertamae Smart Grosvenor

Rice and Language

While many of the enslaved Africans in the Lowcountry came from similar areas, they were by no means a homogenous group. There was, by necessity, much adaptation, amalgamation, and a resulting creation of a culture that was at once old and new. One of the first facets of the culture to emerge was a unique language. Each person from a distinct African ethnic group spoke a different language, and none of them spoke the English language of their enslavers. In order to communicate with one another, they created a hybrid language that mixed various African languages with English and this language is called Gullah.

Lorenzo Dow Turner (1890-1972) was a prominent linguist who was one of the first to devote serious and sustained study to the Gullah language, he is known as the “father” of Gullah studies. In 1949, he published the seminal work Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect, detailing his findings of the specific parts of African languages that still lived in the Gullah dialect. “To this day this classic work is a symbol of Diaspora influence among African descendants in America. Turner’s research also solidified his reputation as a founding figure in American linguistics and African American studies.”3 (Photo from Footnoting History).

Rice was the reason that slave holders in the Lowcountry purchased Africans from similar geographic areas of the West Africa; because those slave holders wanted to grow rice and they needed Africans who knew how. Coming from such similar areas was what allowed these Africans to have greater similarities in their cultural and linguistic backgrounds. These similarities allowed them to build off of one another, creating a new language that they could all understand, and that was then passed down generation to generation. Rice is the reason the Gullah and Geechee people of today retain so pieces of their past within their language.

Rice and Songs

Dr. Josephine Beoku-Betts is a professor of sociology and women’s studies. Originally from Sierra Leone, West Africa, she now lives and works in the Lowcountry. She recalls, “On the occasions when I stayed as a guest in study participants’ homes and helped prepare evening meals, women often shared stories and folktales with me, as well as songs and dances connected with their rice culture.”4 The songs and dances that were shared with her then were songs and dances that had been preserved by the Gullah and Geechee for centuries, being passed down from generation to generation, just as their connections to rice were passed on.

In the 1930s, Lorenzo Dow Turner had begun recording and transcribing these songs, to help understand the unique Gullah language and its African origins. At that time, he recorded a Gullah woman, Amelia Dawley, singing a song that had been passed down through the generations of her family. Through ingenuity, collaboration and sheer dumb luck, decades later the song was traced to a remote village in Sierra Leone called Senehum Ngola. It was recognized and known by a woman who lived in the village, and had been passed down within her own family, generation to generation.5

The song was originally sung in Mende—a language that the Gullah language has many similarities to—and was a critical part of an ancient burial ritual. Another critical part of that ritual? Rice. Rice was communally prepared and shared during the ritual. This song proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the culture of the Gullah Geechee has successfully retained and thrived with the knowledge and practices passed on by their ancestors.

This is the trailer for the documentary The Language You Cry In which details the story of connecting a song from a Gullah family back to a village in Sierra Leone. (Documentary by California Newsreel).

Next Page:

Storytelling: The key to cultural longevity and intergenerational connections
From the big screen to the woods, how storytelling is used to keep Gullah Geechee culture alive.

Footnotes

  1. J. D Purdy and Robert Winslow Gordon. Glory to God, My Son’s Come Home. Library of Congress, 1978. Audio. https://www.loc.gov/item/ihas.200196322/.
  2. Vertamae Grosvenor, Vertamae Cooks in The Americas’ Family Kitchen (San Francisco: KQED Books, 1996), 14. Available here.
  3. Noah Genatossio, “Lorenzo Dow Turner (1890-1972),” BlackPast, published February 24, 2016, https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/lorenzo-dow-turner-1890-1972/.
  4. Josephine A. Beoku-Betts, “We Got Our Way of Cooking Things: Women, Food, and Preservation of Cultural Identity Among the Gullah,” Gender & Society 9, no. 5 (1995): 141.
  5. The Language You Cry In, directed by Angel Serrano and Alvaro Toepke (1998; San Francisco, CA: California Newsreel, 1998), DVD.)

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