SAVANNAH, Ga. (AP) -- 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. "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.
Scholars say their culture, long isolated from the mainland, has
clung to its African roots and traditions mor