In 1931, Dr. Lorenzo Dow Turner recorded a 5-line song by a Gullah Geechee woman named Amelia Dawley of Harris Neck, GA. It was one of many recordings he made — little did he know it would become the most important find of his life and unite families in the U.S. and Africa. 
A linguist, Dr. Turner went to the Sea Islands of coastal South Carolina and Georgia to study the speech of the residents of African descendant. He had a theory that the “broken English” the Gullah Geechees spoke was more than it seemed. That’s him in the photo.
Turner learned a decade after he recorded Amelia Dawley singing that the song lyrics were actually in Mende, one of the major languages in Sierra Leone, West Africa. The song proved that the Gullah language was a cultural connection between Africans and Black Americans.
The story of the song is told in the1998 documentary “The Language You Cry In.” The film follows Amelia Dawley’s then 69-year old daughter, Mary Moran, as she is reunited with the Baindu Jabati tribe in a remote in Mende village in the country of Sierra Leone in West Africa.
Anthropologist Joseph Opala and Ethnomusicologist Cynthia Schmidt were the ones who — after hearing Dr. Turner’s recording — went to Sierra Leone to search for anyone who might recognize the lyrics sung in America by a Gullah Geechee family at least 200 years.
Dr. Opala wrote years later: “I played it in one Mende village after another in Sierra Leone. Many people told me they recognized their language in the song, but not the song itself. Then, in the village of Senehun Ngola a woman named Bendu Jabati began singing along.”
She told Dr. Opala that “it’s the oldest song we know.” It turns out that the song was one only sung by women of the tribe at funerals. You can watch the documentary on YouTube.
The five line song sung by Amelia Dawley’s family is the longest African language text ever found in the U.S. And Dr. Lorenzo Dow Turner went on to creat a new field of study by his work and an appreciation for a unique element of African-American culture.
