Amen break

The Amen break is a drum break that has been widely sampled in numerous music genres. It comes from the 1969 track "Amen, Brother" by the soul group the Winstons, released as the B-side of the 1969 single "Color Him Father". The drum break lasts about seven seconds and was performed by Gregory Coleman.

Part of the waveform for the Amen break including the crash at the end.

With the rise of hip hop in the 1980s, the break was widely sampled and became a staple of drum and bass and jungle music. It has been used on thousands of tracks of many genres, making it one of the most sampled recordings of all time. Neither Coleman nor copyright owner Richard Lewis Spencer received royalties for its use; Spencer said it was unlikely Coleman, who died homeless and destitute in 2006, realized the impact he had made on music.

Background

The Winstons were a multiracial soul band from Washington, D.C., who played throughout the Southern United States. They were led by Richard Lewis Spencer.

In early 1969, the Winstons recorded the single "Color Him Father" in Atlanta and struggled to find a B-side for it.[1] They decided to play an instrumental based on the old gospel song "Amen" and a guitar riff Curtis Mayfield had played for Spencer.[1][2] The result was the song "Amen, Brother",[2] which took 20 minutes to compose.[1]

Drum break

At about 1 minute and 26 seconds into "Amen, Brother", the other musicians stop playing and drummer Gregory Coleman performs a four-bar drum break. For two bars, he plays the previous beat; in the third, he delays a snare hit; in the fourth, he leaves the first beat empty, following with a syncopated pattern and early crash cymbal.[2]

Drum notation for the Amen break

The drum solo was added to pad the length of the track, which had been too short with just the riff. Spencer said he directed the break, but Phil Tolotta, the only other surviving member of the band, credited it solely to Coleman.[1]

Though "Color Him Father" became a top-10 R&B hit and won a Grammy Award, "Amen Brother", received little notice at the time of release.[1] The Winstons struggled to secure gigs in the South with their multiracial composition and disbanded in 1970.[1]

Sampling

In the 1980s, with the rise of hip hop, DJs began using turntables to loop drum breaks from records, which MCs would rap over.[2] In 1986, "Amen Brother" was included on Ultimate Breaks and Beats, a compilation of old funk and soul tracks with clean drum breaks intended for DJs.[2]

Salt-N-Pepa's 1986 single "I Desire" saw one of the earliest uses of the Amen break. A number of releases in 1988 took it into the mainstream, including "Straight Outta Compton" by N.W.A and "Keep It Going Now" by Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock.[3] In "King of the Beats" by Mantronix (1988), the Amen break is "chopped up, layered and processed so that the drums became central to the track rather than simply a rhythmic bedding".[2]

The Amen break was widely sampled in British dance music in the early 1990s, especially in drum and bass and jungle.[4][2] It has since been used on thousands of tracks, making "Amen, Brother" one of the most widely sampled tracks in history.[2][5] It has been widely used across genres, including rock music by acts such as Oasis and television themes such as that of Futurama.[2] According to WhoSampled, a user-generated website cataloging samples, the Amen break is the most sampled track in history, appearing in over 2000 tracks.[6]

Royalties

The copyright owner of "Amen, Brother", including the Amen break, is Winstons leader Richard Lewis Spencer.[2] Neither he nor drummer Coleman received royalties for the break, and Spencer was not aware of its use until 1996, when an executive contacted him asking for the master tape. Spencer condemned the sampling as plagiarism, and said: "[Coleman's] heart and soul went into that drum break. Now these guys copy and paste it and make millions."[2] However, in 2015, he said: "It's not the worst thing that can happen to you. I'm a black man in America and the fact that someone wants to use something I created – that's flattering."[1]

Coleman died homeless and destitute in 2006.[1] Spencer said it was unlikely he was aware of the impact he had made on music.[1] In 2015, a GoFundMe campaign set up by British DJs Martyn Webster and Steve Theobald raised £24,000 (US$37,000) for Spencer.[1]

See also

References
  1. Otzen, Ellen (March 29, 2015). "Six seconds that shaped 1,500 songs". BBC News. Retrieved March 29, 2015. 'It's not the worst thing that can happen to you. I'm a black man in America and the fact that someone wants to use something I created — that's flattering,' he says.
  2. "Seven seconds of fire". The Economist. December 17, 2011. ISSN 0013-0613. Retrieved March 20, 2019.
  3. Dave Turner (November 20, 2018). "The 20 best tracks that sample the Amen Break". Mixmag. Retrieved December 8, 2019.
  4. Butler, Mark J. (2006), Unlocking the groove: Rhythm, meter, and musical design in electronic dance music, Indiana University Press, p. 78, ISBN 978-0-253-34662-9, Even more common, especially in jungle/drum 'n' bass, is a break ... which fans and musicians commonly refer to as the 'Amen' break.
  5. Otzen, Ellen (March 29, 2015). "Six seconds that shaped 1,500 songs". Retrieved March 20, 2019.
  6. Goldenberg, David (September 22, 2016). "It Only Takes Six Seconds To Hear The World's Most Sampled Song". FiveThirtyEight. Retrieved January 13, 2020.

Further reading
  • A detailed analysis of how to play this break on drum set, and how to manipulate it for the drum and bass paradigm, can be found in the book Live Drum & Bass written by Ryan Alexander Bloom[1] and also in the German language book Welcome to the Jungle by Gerwin Eisenhauer.[2]
  1. Bloom, Ryan Alexander. Live Drum & Bass. New York: Hudson Music, 2018.
  2. Eisenhauer, Gerwin. Welcome to the Jungle. Germany: Dux, 2005.
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