Old Ship of Zion: The Afro-Baptist Ritual in the African Diaspora

by Walter F. Pitts

Book Overview

This book retraces the African origins of African-American forms of worship. During a five-year period in the field, Pitts played the piano at and recorded numerous worship services in black Baptist churches throughout rural Texas. His historical comparisons and linguistic analyses of this material uncover striking parallels between "Afro-Baptist" services and the religious rituals of Western and Central Africa, as well as other African-derived rituals...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195111451
• ISBN13: 9780195111453
• Release Date: October 1996
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 216 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.4" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

Connectin' The Dots

People of African descent in North America came into a Baptist religious experience. The African Ancestors who survived the Maafa remembered and applied some of their African patterning and awareness to their 'forced faith'. These acts of cultural retention held within the Baptist Church are largely ignored by most researchers because so many of the retained Africanisms were assimilated and their origin occulted in what we know today as "American" culture. This book is well written and informative, as it speaks of and compares elements of the Afro- Baptist ritual to similiar concepts preserved in Afro-Cuban and Afro-Haitian experience in the Catholic Church, finally discussing them on an equal footing.