Peter Was a Fisherman

Debbie Jacob

MUCH HAS been written about the importance of Spiritual/Shouter Baptist Liberation Day, officially observed on March 30. Still, it is difficult to fully comprehend the magnitude of this holiday, which commemorates the repeal on March 30, 1951, of the 1917 Shouter Prohibition Ordinance that prohibited the Spiritual/Shouter Baptist religion. Most importantly, this is the only holiday I know of that celebrates and symbolises freedom of religion for everyone.

Under colonialism, Spiritual/Shouter Baptists suffered persecution throughout the British West Indies. Worshippers could be jailed without a trial. The British objected to the Baptists’ lively worship and their way of expressing spirituality. The religion crossed boundaries, creating fear and discomfort in a rigid, insecure colonial society that had its own rules about power and order. But Baptists refused to succumb to colonial persecution, instead becoming examples of bravery and symbols of resistance and resilience.

Their unshakeable faith expressed in lively hymns and worship inspired our music, literature and culture. Their Spiritual/Shouter Baptist blend of African and Christian religious elements paid homage to Creolism.

The Spiritual/Shouter Baptists demonstrate the power of culture, particularly when it is rooted in history. We have been fortunate to witness this in literature and academic studies. Earl Lovelace tells the Spiritual/Shouter Baptists’ story of persecution and resilience in his novel The Wine of Astonishment. Claudius K Fergus gives an in-depth history of that religious struggle in Against Toleration: Britain’s Persecution of the Spiritual Baptists. Both books are fascinating and inspiring.

The Spiritual/Shouter Baptists have also inspired important research. They caught the attention of anthropologists Melville and Frances Herskovits when they stopped over in Trinidad on their way home from fieldwork on the Bush Negroes of Dutch Guiana and spotted a newspaper story about the Shouter Baptists in 1929.

A decade later, the anthropologists returned to conduct research on “African ways of life…in its greatest purity,” according to a scholarly article entitled Facing the Flames: The Herskovitses, Trinidad and the Anthropological Imagination by Ryan Cecil Jobson, published in American Ethnologist (2023).

The Herskovits’s study in remote Toco, accessed by boat at the time, was “the first study of a Protestant Negro culture in the English-speaking Caribbean.” It included field recordings of many hymns – one of the first being Peter Was a Fisherman. In 1949, the Herskovits published their ethnography entitled Trinidad Village. Anthropologists still refer to it as an important study of African cultural retentions in the Western Hemisphere.

Spiritual/Shouter Baptists have had a profound influence on popular Caribbean culture through music. In the 1930s, calypsonians recorded Baptist hymns and sang critical calypsoes of the religion. Roaring Lion recorded Happy Land of Canaan, classified as a calypso/shouter. He performed Where is Jonah Gone jointly with Atilla in 1934 and Caresser sang Do You Remember Me in 1940. There are many recordings from that era that relied heavily on Baptist hymns.

The late calypso expert Dr Gordon Rohlehr said an unconscious merger of calypso and Baptist music was beginning to take place already in the 1940s. This would be evident a decade later when Melody sang Jonah and the Bake and Sparrow delivered Don't Touch Me. Calypsonian Wonder sang Follow Me Children in the 50s, which had a Baptist-sounding chorus. All were highly dramatic extensions of Shouter Baptist preaching.

Inevitably, Spiritual/Shouter Baptists shed the stigma of being colonial pariahs to become symbols of independence and individual expression. Their penchant for blending religion and music, African rhythms and Negro spirituals served as a model for a nation struggling to find a new voice that crossed ethnic, religious and racial boundaries.

A modern, short history of a nation’s transformation in its attitude towards the Baptists could begin with Blue Boy’s hit Soca Baptist, the 1980 Road March, which captured the essence of Baptist spirituality. The Spiritual/Shouter Baptists complained about the soca being sacrilegious and asked for it to be banned, but that just widened the discussion and appreciation of religion and the contrast between the sacred and profane that Carnival brings.

Soca Baptist paved the way for David Rudder’s Bahia Gyul, as Road March in 1986. The Queen's Park Savannah cheered Rudder’s ode to the Baptists.

By 1990, a grateful nation recovering from a coup attempt turned to Mother Muriel, a Baptist woman, in Super Blue’s Get Something and Wave. "Soon Trinidad and Tobago will rise again," she promised, and the country marched on.

In a world fractured by hatred, religious intolerance and political upheaval, we celebrate Spiritual/Shouter Baptist Liberation Day and reflect on its message of unity.