If you make your way to Boone Hall Plantation and Gardens in Mount Pleasant, you can find a unique presentation titled “Exploring the Gullah Culture.” In it, the Gullah Geechee people demonstrate the history of their culture through storytelling, dance and, critically, song.
The Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor is a definitive staple of Charleston. The present-day Gullah communities, descendants of enslaved people brought to the Carolinas from Central and Western Africa, stretch from Jacksonville, N.C., to Jacksonville, Fla.
Keeping alive the memory of Gullah music and culture has always been vital, and that mission will continue at Spoleto Festival USA with trumpeter Etienne Charles’ concert “Gullah Roots.” The concert takes place June 4 at the College of Charleston Cistern Yard.
Accompanying Charles will be Grammy Award-winning drummer Quentin Baxter, who has spent a career performing and understanding Gullah music, including on the 2023 album Lowcountry and as part of the band Ranky Tanky.
The concert promises the dynamic of two acclaimed artists offering differing perspectives on Gullah music. While Baxter is from Charleston, Charles comes from Trinidad and Tobago.
Eric Crawford, interim chair of the music department at Claflin University and the author of two books on Gullah culture, said the result will be a clear cultural exchange that simultaneously intertwines West Indies and Gullah culture.
Gullah griots speak through song
Ron Daise, the Saint Helena Island native who made the Nickelodeon show Gullah Gullah Island from 1994 to 2000, said the collaboration between Charles and Baxter showcases the connectivity of the African diaspora.
“These rhythms, the blends of music, all came from West Africa,” Daise said. “And it was spread throughout the world, through the many countries where Africans were transported and enslaved.”
Daise said he grew up listening to the singer Harry Belafonte and feeling a connection between himself as a man from Sea Island, or “Islander,” and a Grammy winner whose parents came from Jamaica. The “Gullah Roots” collaboration, Daise said, has modern-day parallels with Belafonte’s efforts to popularize calypso music in America.
Crawford describes Baxter as a musical “Gullah griot,” meaning a person who serves as the oral historian or knowledge keeper for a West African village.
“He has learned since he was a small boy,” Crawford said, “hearing these old songs and knowing how this culture really is able to use music.”
“Gullah Roots” plans to focus on the throughline between jazz and Gullah music. Crawford notes the foundational elements between the two genres like a call-and-response or the Big Charleston or “Lowcountry” clap. Baxter even explained Gullah music clapping in an educational video on Gullah music for the Library of Congress.
“In my culture, or in the Gullah culture, those claps are essentially the rhythms that’s used during verses of songs, when the leader is actually leading a song,” Baxter said. “You’ll hear that in the Ranky Tanky songs as well. The full Gullah rhythm is clapping on one, the ‘and’ of two
and the downbeat of four.”
Progress in Gullah representation
For Daise, these connections signify how far the education of the Gullah culture has come, from recording episodes of Gullah Gullah Island in real Gullah Geechee communities to jazz concerts like “Gullah Roots.”
Back in 1986, Daise wrote a poem titled “Forgotten Moments.” The poem also serves as the opening track for Lowcountry. It begins with “Only few remember; A history of a people has been hushed, been stilled.”
But with concerts such as the one between Charles and Baxter, Daise thinks of the end of the poem: “They should linger—From generation to generation—Lending meaning to the past; Nurturing strength and hope; For the future.” To Daise, the concert emphasizes how the bridge between the past and the present of Gullah music can become solidified for audiences.
“These collaborations, these musical projects, help to enforce that in the minds and hearts of those who listen to the collaborations,” Daise said.
IF YOU WANT TO GO: “Etienne Charles Gullah Roots with Special Guest Quentin Baxter,” 9 p.m. June 4, College of Charleston Cistern Yard.
Henry O’Brien is an arts journalism and communications graduate of the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University.
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