“A throwaway piece,” is how The Winstons’ frontman Richard Lewis Spencer describes “Amen Brother”. The instrumental B-side to his band’s 1969 hit “Color Him Father” was dashed off in a hurry, loosely based on something the mixed-race R&B band played while backing Curtis Mayfield and The Impressions. But this “uneventful” jam is now the most sampled song in history, featuring in 4,271 other songs according to whosampled.com.
What caught the attention of DJs at the birth of hip-hop was the six-second drum break performed in the middle of the song by Gregory “G.C.” Coleman to “fill time” in the horn-based tune. No one at the recording had any sense that this was a key moment in the history of percussion. Spencer remembers giving his bandmate a sense of what to do and remembers that Coleman “didn’t care for it”, but knocked it out as required. But the break was loaded deep with what drummers call “pocket”: using the sticks a microsecond ahead of or (more commonly) behind the beat for a looser, more funky, organic sound.
The addictive genius of Coleman’s casual break lay unrecognised for almost two decades until New York’s hip-hop scene picked up on it in the late 1980s. DJs began dropping the beat behind hip-hop sets. Slowed from its original 135bpm (beats per minute), the looped break offered the perfect backdrop for laid-back-but-lively rappers.
Coleman’s solo appeared on the first in the revered vinyl series called Ultimate Breaks and Beats: 25 compilation albums released from 1986 to 1991 by New York’s Street Beat Records featuring drum breaks for DJs.
The first major act to use it were pioneering female rappers Salt-N-Pepa (on “I Desire”, 1986) who bragged: “The beat is bad/ The beat is pro/ We're gonna bounce this beat all over the place.” But it was NWA’s seminal track “Straight Outta Compton” that cemented the beat into hip-hop’s sidewalk of fame in 1988.
From hip-hop, the drum solo — which had by now become known as the Amen Break —took a sidestep into the British rave scene of the early 1990s where, as DJs such as Grooverider speeded it up to blend hip-hop into house music, it formed the basis of drum & bass and jungle music. Many DJs of the era dropped it into their sets. On record, you can hear it cut with gunshot sounds on Lennie De Ice’s “We Are i.e.” (1991), on Aquarius’s 1994 “Dolphin Tune”(mixed with, yes, dolphin clicks) and on The Prodigy’s chart-storming “Firestarter” (1996).
From that point on, the Amen Break formed part of British popular culture. It appears alongside the “stinky weather” and “grumpy gnomes” of David Bowie’s 1997 song “Little Wonder”. It made its way into Britpop via Oasis’s “D’You Know What I Mean?”. At the same time, its waveform began appearing on T-shirts and celebrated in tattoos.
After analysing that waveform, Michael Schneider, author of A Beginner’s Guide to Constructing the Universe, argued that the shape of Coleman’s break matched the ancient Greek beauty standard known as the golden ratio.
And the beat went on. Amy Winehouse made it her own, slowed to a sexy-stoned drag on “You Know I’m No Good” (2006), and it slipped its way into modern electronic dance music via Chase & Status’s “Hurt You” (2007).
Meanwhile, in the US, Spencer had no idea what had happened to his lost record. The Winstons had disbanded the same year that “Color Him Father”, their only single, won a Grammy Award. Spencer was working in the Washington DC Transit system to support his return to university when he got a call from the UK’s Strut Records, asking for a copy of the master recording (to which he owned the rights). He hadn’t received a penny. “I felt,” he later said, “as if I’ve been touched somewhere that none should touch. I felt invaded upon.”
Drummer Coleman died broke and homeless in Atlanta, Georgia in 2006 without receiving any royalties from his iconic drum break. In 2015, a DJ in the UK set up a GoFundMe page in Spencer’s name as a thank you for the Amen Break. Almost 2,000 people donated about $26,000 to Spencer. He posted a video of himself on Facebook, holding a giant cheque.
“You guys are the best.” he says in the video. “Thank you very, very much. Aaaamen!”
What are your memories of the Amen Break? Let us know in the comments section below.
‘The Life of a Song Volume 2: The fascinating stories behind 50 more of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by Brewer’s.
Music credits: Metromedia Records; Island Def Jam; UMC (Universal Music Catalogue); Distinctive Records; XL Recordings; Parlophone UK; Big Brother; Universal-Island Records Ltd.; Virgin EMI
Picture credit: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
