If you heard the McIntosh County Shouters a couple weeks ago at Savannah Music Festival, you may have picked up on rhythms that got your toes tapping one way while your hands clapped another.
Polyrhythm, different percussive patterns played simultaneously, is the heart of Gullah-Geechee music. And Dr. David Pleasant wants to teach you more about the rhythms, culture, and history pulsing through this historic music.
Starting April 21, you can learn percussion, vocal techniques, polyrhythm and more with Pleasant in his Drumfolk course at the Beach Institute in Savannah. The class runs every other Thursday through July 14.
“This isn’t a drumming class or drum circle,” emphasized Pleasant. “We’re going to learn percussion, drumming, we sing, we vocalize. We’ll work with a variety of instruments including strings. The class also examines the nature, ecology, and culture of Gullah Geechee music and looks at the drum’s power to liberate and inspire freedom.”
Pleasant, who is Brooklyn-based but grew up in Savannah and the sea islands of McIntosh County, comes from a line of doers and thinkers. His grandfather taught at Savannah State in the early 1900s. His father, a child music prodigy, traveled the country performing as Little Billy Pleasant before opting for art school in New York City. He eventually returned to Savannah and rose to prominence as a sign painter; some of his work is featured at the Smithsonian.
The familial love of art and culture runs strong in Pleasant who went to Oberlin College before heading to Columbia University to study educational psychology.
“After that, I focused on playing music and sharing my perspective and observations as Gullah Geechee native,” said Pleasant. “I’ve traveled the Caribbean, Jamaica, Italy, and Portugal as musician and speaker teaching resistance culture through music and drumming.” Pleasant is also a Senior Fulbright Scholar with musical collaborations featuring Audra McDonald, Wynton Marsalis, Erykah Badu, and more.
Credit: Ali James/Shopper News
Credit: Ali James/Shopper News
The class is structured to teach students the musicality situated in Gullah Geechee culture through percussive elements, vocalization, and body movement. The class also explores narratives different from the master-slave-plantation trope. In his teaching, Pleasant prefers highlighting stories of people who escaped slavery and lived on the margins.
“The drum is powerful. It can inspire upheaval and focus as it did in the Stono Rebellion in 1739. Drums unite, incite, rally — but I’ll get into that in class,” said Pleasant, with a chuckle.
“I’ve been researching stories of people who defied enslavement and evaded bounty hunters and lived in marshes out along the coast. I like these stories of escape, liberation, and freedom because these perspectives challenge the pervasive cultural notion that all enslaved people worked on plantations. There just are more stories than that, and these escape histories register more triumphantly within the human psyche.”
Jonathan Winbush, CEO of The Beach Institute, thinks the Drumfolk class an interactive and thoughtful way for the community to study Gullah Geechee culture.
“When patrons come to the Beach Institute, there’s a kind of pre-designed narrative that they have in their minds,” said Winbush. “We try to point out the fact that there are many different stories, many different levels at play beyond the slave-master-subjugation-plantation narrative. Pleasant widens the lens to show diversity of stories which adds to a greater depth of understanding of this era.”
Since the late 1980s, Pleasant has been researching accounts of people on the margins, investigating how they lived un-enslaved. Alone on his motorcycle, he has traveled coastal South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida exploring places were people likely created robust yet hidden lives. It’s all research for a book he’s nearly finished with.
“I’ll find a story of someone or a group of people who escaped, and then I’ll go where they may have lived. I take a tent with me and explore the marshes. These places are out there, boggy and swampy, and the bugs are thick — deterrents for pursuers, protection for people wanting freedom. Escape, rebellion, freedom are core themes in the Drumfolk course, and you can feel these when you’re out on the marsh walking where these people could have been.”
Credit: Josephine Johnson / For Do Savannah
Credit: Josephine Johnson / For Do Savannah
The Drumfolk course culminates in a community presentation later this summer. Students aren’t required to take part but are welcome to if they choose. Rehearsals take place after the main lecture, and Pleasant encourages anyone interested to stick around and learn more.
“I’m presenting a counter-narrative to the plantation and slave culture so dominant in Savannah — this is one part and circumstance of African American experience,” emphasized Pleasant.
“Escape, rebellion, and freedom as an ethos is the meaning and relevance of human experience, no matter what heritable background people are from. And that’s the focus of this course, that people will fight back. People will resist when they are held back. People push back. And we explore liberation and freedom through music and power of the drum.”
This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: Drumfolk class at the Beach Institute challenges you to explore human experience through drums
The Latest
Featured
