St. Helena Island, S.C. (AP) — Minnie "Gracie" Gadson claps her hands and stomps her feet against the floorboards, lifting her voice in a song passed down from her enslaved ancestors who were forced to work the cotton and rice plantations of the South Carolina Sea Islands.

It’s a Gullah spiritual, and the 78-yearold singer is one of a growing group of artists and scholars trying to preserve these sacred songs and their Gullah Geechee culture for future generations.

"I have a passion to sing these songs," Gadson said.

On a recent summer day, her voice rang out inside Coffin Point Praise House. It’s one of three remaining wooden structures on St. Helena Island that once served as a place of worship for the enslaved, and later, for generations of free Black Americans.

Gadson grew up singing in these praise houses. Today, as a Voices of Gullah member, she travels the U.S. with others in their 70s and 80s singing in the Gullah Creole language that has West African roots.

"This Gullah Geechee thing is what connects us all across the African diaspora because Gullah Geechee is the blending of all of these cultures that came together during that terrible time in our history called the trans-Atlantic slave trade," said Anita SingletonPrather, who recently performed and directed a play about Gullah history.

The show highlighted Gullah contributions during the American Revolution, including rice farming and indigo dying expertise. At the theater entrance, vendors offered Gullah rice dishes and demonstrated how to weave sweetgrass into baskets.

More than 5,000 descendants of enslaved plantation workers are estimated to live on St. Helena Island, the largest Gullah community on the South Carolina coast where respect for tradition and deep cultural roots persists.

"A lot of our songs were coded, and this language is a language of survival, a language of resilience, a language of tenacity," Singleton-Prather said, adding that despite slavery’s brutality, the Gullah people were able to thrive, "giving our children a legacy — not a legacy of shame and victimization, but a legacy of strength and resilience."

Roots of Kumbaya

Gullah culture includes art forms, language and food by the descendants of West Africans who have lived on the coasts of the Carolinas, Florida and Georgia since slavery.

"It’s important to preserve the Gullah culture, mainly because it informs us all, African Americans, where they come from and that it’s still here," said Eric Crawford, author of "Gullah Spirituals: The Sound of Freedom and Protest in the South Carolina Sea Islands."

For most of his life, he hadn’t heard the word Gullah. That changed in 2007 with a student’s master’s thesis about Gullah culture in public schools.

"As I began to investigate it, I began to understand that ‘Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen,’ ‘Roll Jordan Roll,’ ‘Kumbaya!’ — all these iconic songs came from this area," he said.

Versions of these songs, he said, can be traced back to the 19th century when "Slave Songs of the United States," the first book of African American spirituals, was recorded on St. Helena Island.