Entry · catalog no. 0023
praise house
/ ˈpreɪz ˌhaʊs /PRAYZ HOWSS
n. · South Carolina and Georgia Sea Islands · 1800s
✓ Verified
1.
A small building on Sea Island plantations where enslaved people held their own worship — prayer, testimony, song and the ring shout — apart from anything a white minister conducted. Built by the people who used it, out of whatever material was at hand.
“Praise night was Tuesday and Thursday, and the shout didn't start till after.”
2.
After Emancipation, the same building working as the community's court and council: disputes were brought to the praise house elders and settled there rather than carried to white authority.
“They didn't take that to the sheriff. They took it to the praise house.”
Origin & Attribution
Gullah/Geechee communities of the South Carolina and Georgia Sea Islands, from the plantation era through Emancipation and well into the twentieth century. The name is a matter of pronunciation, not theology: in Gullah, prayer is said as praise, so a prayer house is a praise house. Enslavers permitted the buildings but kept the gatherings small, on the standing assumption that any large assembly of enslaved people meant insurrection.
1867
Slave Songs of the United States describes praise-house worship and the shout at Port Royal
1984
Charles Joyner's Down by the Riverside documents praise-house religion in All Saints Parish
1988
Margaret Washington Creel's "A Peculiar People" makes the praise house central to Gullah religious history
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The South
South Carolina and Georgia Sea Islands · 1800s
Spoken by
Gullah/Geechee people of the Sea Islands — plantation congregations, then freedmen's communities
$PRAISEThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady159 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
55/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1867
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
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Citations & Sources
■
Slave Songs of the United States — William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware and Lucy McKim Garrison, A. Simpson & Co., 1867
text · songbook
■
Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community — Charles W. Joyner, University of Illinois Press, 1984
text · scholarship
■
+ Cite a source"A Peculiar People": Slave Religion and Community-Culture Among the Gullahs — Margaret Washington Creel, New York University Press, 1988
text · scholarship
See also