Their dinner had just arrived as the two college professors watched their guests, a group of singers from the Georgia coast, unexpectedly turn saying grace into an outburst of song, rhythm and shouted praises that soon had other diners in the restaurant joining in with the impromptu performance, the Associated Press reports.
“Before you know it, they’re out of their chairs and the beat is getting played on a table and you had all the children in the restaurant shouting praises with them,” said Mary Ellen Junda, a music professor at the University of Connecticut.
The dinner at a restaurant in Richmond, Va., last year with the Geechee Gullah Ring Shouters of Darien, Ga., turned into another lesson for Junda and fellow music professor Robert Stephens, who have spent years studying the art and traditions of the Gullah, descendants of slaves who live in coastal communities from North Carolina to northern Florida……Read More