For the past five years I have been documenting the folk religious heritage and culture, the folklife and folklore of a remarkable and little-known tradition in the Low-county of South Carolina County in Dorchester County - a tradition of primitive campmeeting worship marked by the sustaining of genuine community, family heritage, and ancestral roots. These "under-the-radar" camp meetings (three Anglo-American and two African American) are clustered within a 20 mile radius from a geographical center in upper Dorchester County, SC. They all stem from the same root - the planting of the Methodist faith by the horseback evangelistt, Bishop Francis Asbury, in the back woods some 40 miles inland from Charleston in the late 1780's. Covering three centuries, these campmeeting traditions and their tradition-bearers have met for a week during lay-by season each year in this farming region in an unbroken span of years dating from the founding date of each campmeeting - the earliest of which is 1786. At the founding roots of the faith of these protestant campground meetings - Cattle Creek (1786), Cypress (1794), Indian Field (1801), Shady Grove (1870), and St. Paul (1886) - is Bishop Francis Asbury and his horseback evangelist colleague, Harry "Black Harry" Hosier. Together they brought the Gospel message to white farm owners and to their black slaves and servants.

I have just completed the five stories of these primitive campmeeting traditions. They are shot in a style and manner that tells the story of these traditions in a manner cultural anthropologists have called "vox populi" - in the voice of the people. This approach is supplemented by the observations of a team of carefully selected historians and folklorists who help provide insightful comments while filmed on-location at the campmeetings. Their views unhance the audience's understanding of and provide different perspectives on the many themes and rhythms of life that connect these traditions marked by the peculiar swapping back and forth of culture and custom between the Anglo American and African American populations even as they maintain their separateness in order to preserve their locus of ancestry, integrity of origin, and return each year of the descendants of each campmeeting to their own community to renew faith and maintain old friendships and keep alive the heritage of respecting the elders who preceded them.

We see these campmeetings as having in common their shared history of springing from frontier gatherings of the horseback evangelists who planted the seeds of Methodism as the religion of the "new America" - this at a time when Colonies had become States and the land of the free was seeking to establish it's protestant faith-roots and relationship to God in churches that were free from the tyranny of the Church of England. These campmeetings were uniquely products of the American Revolutionary zeal and the co-existance of both blacks and whites who increasingly grew to rely on the immutability of the character of the Judao-Christian God.