For Charmaine Minniefield, a visual artist who divides her time between Atlanta and Gambia, praise houses are a way to honor ancestors like her great-grandmother Ora Lee Fuqua, who was born on a sharecropping plantation in Kentucky and taught her the ring shout, “a full body rhythm prayer.” The practice survived the Middle Passage from Africa to America, but often had to be performed clandestinely. The shout thrives today as a buoyant finale to worship services in Gullah Geechee and Black faith communities.

Congregants circle counterclockwise, fervent in their call-and-response shouts and praises while stamping their feet on the floor to create what Minniefield calls “a communal drum.” The shout was “conceived in Africa and born on American plantations,” said Griffin Lotson, who traces his Gullah Geechee family back seven generations and manages the famed Gullah Geechee Ring Shouters in Darien, Ga.

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