Introduction

What is a drum kit and how do we study it? There is a commonsense answer to this question: a drum kit is a musical instrument comprising an arrangement of drums, cymbals, and associated hardware, and it can be studied both formally (not just through private tuition but also prestigious music schools and academies) and informally (by practicing along to recordings, playing in bands, and so on). And yet this commonsense answer is deceptive because it hinges on taken-for-granted assumptions about the stability of the term ‘drum kit’ and the conventional ways of studying it. The problem, of course, is that musical definitions and conventions are not fixed, immoveable, or timeless; they are always in flux and in a constant process of being shaped by shifting historical and cultural contexts.

In fact, the definition of the drum kit – and consensus regarding its appropriate study – have changed dramatically over the course of the instrument’s history. This chapter is a rough guide to unpacking that history, and in doing so it treats the drum kit not as a fixed object but as a theoretical concept. What follows is a discussion of the drum kit in theory divided into three parts: (1) the invention and changing status of the instrument; (2) the trajectory of drum kit studies within the wider field of musical instrument scholarship; and (3) a discussion of the ‘drumscape’ as a theoretical tool.

The Invention of the Drum Kit

The drum kit is a uniquely American instrument whose invention coincided with the birth of jazz at the turn of the twentieth century; or at least this is the prevailing origin story that we see reproduced in numerous popular histories of the instrument.¹ A typical version of the myth goes like this:

A similar account appears in a 2019 BBC documentary on the drum kit presented by Stewart Copeland. While being filmed on location in downtown New Orleans, Copeland holds up an enlarged photograph of the drummer Dee Dee Chandler, who played with the John Robichaux Society Orchestra at the tail end of the nineteenth century. Pointing to the bottom of Chandler’s bass drum, Copeland informs the viewer that ‘down here is one of the most important inventions in modern music’, and then declares Chandler to be ‘one of the first snare drum guys to play the bass drum at the same time … by inventing a homemade foot pedal’.³ To be fair to Copeland, the photograph of Chandler (taken circa 1896) is arguably the earliest surviving photograph of a drummer standing next to their bass drum pedal. But the viewer would be mistaken if they made the leap of assuming the photograph of Chandler was the first documented evidence of a bass drum pedal, or that it was unquestionably invented in New Orleans. Putting to one side the question of whether the hi-hat (which does not appear in drum catalogues until the mid-1920s) or separate tension tom-toms (which appear in the mid-1930s) are necessary core components of a drum kit, I will for the moment restrict my investigation specifically to the origin of the bass drum pedal.

Drummers have experimented with ways of playing more than one percussion instrument at once for centuries, if not millennia. To take a relatively recent historical example, it was common in the nineteenth century for both marching band and orchestral drummers to attach a cymbal to the rim of their bass drum so that they could play both at once.⁴ Jayson Dobney has documented that this practice was also evident in the United States, noting that ‘photographs taken during the Civil War often show a cymbal attached to a bass drum for use in a military band. After the war, this configuration could be found in many of the community and town concert bands that were gaining popularity throughout the country’.⁵

When theatre and symphonic orchestras attempted to represent the sounds of military marching band drumming indoors in cramped conditions and with fewer musicians, some inventive drummers began to place the bass drum on the floor so they could simultaneously play snare drum (often placed on a chair, since snare drum stands had not yet been invented) and bass drum (with cymbal often attached to the rim) – a performance practice which by the 1880s came to be known as ‘double drumming’.

So when did foot-operated drum pedals arrive on the scene? This is not an easy question to answer. In order to illustrate the complexity of the problem, and the messiness of historical research more broadly, I will present seven potential candidates for the bass drum pedal’s moment of origin, each with its own narrative advantages and disadvantages.

Option 1: bass drum pedals have existed from the early nineteenth century, but robust documentation proving their existence has not survived. As I document elsewhere in my book Kick It: A Social History of the Drum Kit, there are surviving illustrations from early nineteenth-century France that portray at least two different one-man bands using homemade beaters attached to their feet to play a drum with one foot, and a pair of cymbals with the other.⁶ Based on this evidence, you could argue for the possibility that foot pedals for drums and cymbals were likely discovered by multiple people independently in different countries from at least the beginning of the nineteenth century onwards and probably earlier. Here we begin to see that choosing a particular origin narrative serves a particular agenda: this first version of the bass drum pedal origin story privileges (a) the international roots of the technologies that inform the drum kit as an instrument; and (b) a ‘multiple discovery’ (no one person is attributed) rather than a ‘lone genius’ (one person only is attributed) narrative of invention. This origin narrative also de-privileges (a) innovations that have documented widespread impact (e.g. a pedal design that was successfully mass-produced); and (b) the USA as the country of origin for the proto-drum kit.

Option 2: the oldest surviving example of a foot-operated drum pedal is located (somewhat surprisingly) in the Keswick Museum in England. (A full discussion of this unusual bass drum pedal can be found in a 2014 journal article by Paul Archibald.)⁷ It was created by an inventor named Cornelius Ward for the novelty Richardson Rock and Steel Band. If we chose this as a moment of origin, it privileges (a) a single named inventor; (b) the role of drummers in novelty music (as opposed to jazz, for example); and (c) historical instruments in museum collections as a source of evidence.

Option 3: in the published memoir of Arthur Rackett, a long-time drummer for the John Philip Sousa Band, he recalled that ‘in 1882 I settled in Quincy, Illinois. This was about the time that the first foot pedal came out. Dale of Brooklyn made it. Everybody laughed at the idea, but I sent for one and started to practice in the woodshed’.⁸ This moment privileges oral history (Rackett’s memory preserved in print) but ignores the need for material evidence (no catalogue or paper trail corroborate the memory survives).

Option 4: the oldest legal patent for a bass drum pedal dates back to 1887, when George Olney of St Louis, Missouri, was granted a patent for a design very similar to that of Dee Dee Chandler, but Olney’s patent predates the photograph of Chandler by approximately nine years. This option privileges legal patents as documents of record, but de-privileges those who may have come up with a similar design but did not manage (or were somehow prevented) from patenting their idea.

Option 5: the earliest example I can find of a bass drum pedal being sold in an instrument catalogue is from 1893, when the German manufacturer Paul Stark published a catalogue to advertise his goods at the Chicago World’s Fair. This option privileges commercial production and evidence from instrument catalogues, and de-privileges the USA as the accepted country of origin for the bass drum pedal.

Option 6: as mentioned above, the earliest photograph of a drummer next to his bass drum pedal is likely that of Dee Dee Chandler in New Orleans circa 1896. It privileges the city of New Orleans, African American culture (Chandler was black), photographic evidence, and the notion that the drum kit only coalesces as an instrument through a particular kind of musical performance practice (e.g. dance music influenced by New Orleans second line drumming). It de-privileges patents as evidence (i.e. Olney 1887), countries outside the USA, and popular music not rooted in the jazz tradition.

Option 7: arguably the most famous of all the candidates outlined so far is William F. Ludwig’s 1909 patent for a highly successful and influential bass drum pedal design. This option privileges the overall impact a particular design has on the rest of drumming culture. From 1909 onwards Ludwig’s design is not only successfully mass-produced and sold but also widely imitated by other manufacturers.

The point of outlining seven different possible origin moments for the bass drum pedal is not, in my view, to then select one of them as the definitive version. Instead, the point is to draw attention the historiography of the drum kit – in other words, to draw attention to the processes of inclusion and exclusion that must be made when writing the instrument’s history. To investigate the origin of the drum kit, like any historical project, is necessarily to sift through a wide range of partial sources and piece together a story, which inevitably involves making judgments about what to leave in, and what to leave out of the story.

Put simply, there is frequently more than one way of framing the origin story of a musical instrument. The point here is that each of the possibilities above serves a particular ideological agenda, and to privilege one narrative necessarily excludes a host of equally important influences, inspirations, and voices. By giving attention to the multiple possible origin narratives and their implications, we can gain a better understanding of who and what we are including and excluding in the stories we tell, and why.⁹

The historiographical lesson learned from the bass drum pedal can also be applied to invention of the drum kit in full as a distinct instrument – there is more than one possible moment of origin. Does the first drum kit appear in 1906, when the Philadelphia-based instrument manufacture J. W. Pepper publishes a catalogue featuring a pre-bundled ‘trap drummer’s outfit’ (comprising a bass drum, snare drum, cymbal, and bass drum pedal)? Or is it 1918, when Ludwig & Ludwig first advertise their own ‘Jazz-Er-Up’ outfit equipped with their signature bass drum pedal? Is it 1928, when a new accessory that we retrospectively recognize as a hi-hat pedal (produced and distributed by the Walberg & Auge company in Worcester, Massachusetts) begins appearing in multiple drum manufacturer catalogues? Or must we wait until 1936, when Gene Krupa collaborates with the Slingerland company to create the new ‘Radio King’ series of drum kits equipped with separate-tension tom-tom drums? To complicate matters further, what happens when electronic drum kits are introduced from roughly the 1980s onwards, or virtual drum kits from the 2000s onwards? Can a drum kit be acoustic, electronic, or virtual and still count as a drum kit? If this question causes even a modest amount of debate, then we have to assume that the meaning of a ‘drum kit’ is not fully stable. The pioneers of the acoustic drum kit could not have predicted that in the twenty-first century, debates around the meanings of a ‘drum kit’, ‘drummer’, and ‘drumming’ would include voices from computer software engineers and multinational corporations packaging virtual drummers into their digital audio workstations. Nevertheless, these actors significantly influence our contemporary understanding of what counts as a drum kit, drummer, or drumming performance.

To ask such questions is to point towards a broader question in the sociology of knowledge: what aspects of its design must stay the same in order for a drum kit to remain a drum kit over time? In the twenty-first century, when as many or more electronic drum kits are sold relative to acoustic drum kits – and when the sounds of multiple drum kits can be stored and deployed within a single software plugin – is the definition of what constitutes a drum kit categorically fixed? My argument is that it is not and never was, and this is what I mean when I say the drum kit is not a fixed object but a theoretical concept.

The History and Future of Studying the Drum Kit

Having now seen that the ‘drum kit’ is a contested concept whose meaning changes over time and across different contexts, it will come as no surprise that the same applies to studying the drum kit. William F. Ludwig published an essay in 1927 detailing his recollection of how drummers in the United States studied their instrument:

With the advent of ragtime at the turn of the twentieth century, however, Ludwig observed that a new way of studying the instrument appeared: ‘new beats were invented, new systems of playing the drum were invented and, in fact, ragtime methods of all sorts appeared on the market, each one different from the other. Originality seemed to be the main object’.¹¹ The ragtime and jazz eras fuelled a clash of musical cultures, specifically a tension between musicians who learned their instrument through reading and following notated sheet music versus those who learned to play through more informal methods and improvisation. In truth, learning to play the drum kit had always involved both formal and informal approaches, and even after the drum kit gained acceptance in institutions of higher education as part of university jazz programmes, drummers typically continued to study performance practice on their instrument using a mixed methods approach.

For most of the twentieth century, the practice of studying the drum kit could be divided into one of two categories: construction (how the instrument was designed and manufactured) or performance (how it was played). The study of the drum kit’s physical construction can arguably be situated within the wider field of ‘organology’ – a term coined in 1933 to designate the academic study of the material and acoustic properties of musical instruments dating back to the nineteenth century; it should be noted, however, that the scope of organology was severely limited for many decades, and the drum kit was not considered worthy of serious attention until the late twentieth century (see, for instance, James Blades’ 1970 landmark study, Percussion Instruments and Their History, which briefly contextualizes the drum kit’s origins amidst the wider history of percussion).¹² Meanwhile, the study of drum kit performance can be situated with the broader field of ‘performance practice’ scholarship, which in the case of the drum kit made inroads into the academy with the gradual institutionalization of jazz in higher education over the second half of the twentieth century (Theodore Dennis Brown’s 1976 doctoral dissertation, A History and Analysis of Jazz Drumming to 1942, is a milestone in this respect).¹³ The establishment of percussion education organizations are also relevant here, such as the Percussive Arts Society (created in 1961), which held its first International Convention (PASIC) in 1976.

While the practice of studying the drum kit has gradually crept into the academy, it is worth emphasizing that many of the most important early analyses of the drum kit’s construction and performance were produced outside the academy. The publication of catalogues, newsletters, and periodicals about the drum kit are a useful example. The drum kit was a product aimed at a commercial market, and therefore the catalogues and newsletters produced by early drum kit manufacturers such as Leedy, Ludwig, and Slingerland are rich sources of information describing the latest innovations in the instrument; even though such descriptions were explicitly created to advertise the products of drum companies, they are nevertheless invaluable accounts of the drum kit’s design and construction. In terms of performance practice, a plethora of ‘method books’ appeared following the dawn of jazz: notable examples include Carl Gardner’s Modern Drum Method (1919) and Ralph Smith’s 50 Hot Cymbal Breaks and 70 Modern Drum Beats (1929), George Lawrence Stone’s Stick Control for the Snare Drummer (1935), Jim Chapin’s Advanced Techniques for the Modern Drummer (1948), and the list goes on.

Likewise, the vintage drum community that arose from the late 1980s onwards has produced numerous vital historical studies. While some of these were created with the primary aim of identifying, collecting, and restoring rare and potentially valuable drums and cymbals, others – including pioneering work by John Aldridge, Jon Cohan, Rob Cook, Chet Falzerano, and Geoff Nicholls, to name but a few – often included social history scholarship that provided insight into the cultural significance of the drum kit.¹⁴ Long-standing special interest magazines such as Modern Drummer (first published in 1977) and Not So Modern Drummer (first published in 1988) also produced important articles on the instrument, key artists, and performance styles and techniques that predate much of the academic scholarship on the drum kit.

In recent years, a much wider range of approaches to researching the drum kit has flourished, arguably marking a shift from a paradigm of ‘studying the drum kit’ (concerned mostly with issues of construction and performance) to drum kit studies (a fully interdisciplinary field of inquiry). The emerging field of drum kit studies is distinctive for embracing insights from a variety of academic sources – including but not limited to philosophy, sociology, anthropology, psychology, education, race, gender and class studies – which are brought to bear on the drum kit, drummers, and drumming. Systems of cultural theory that have proved influential elsewhere in musical instrument scholarship – such as science and technologies studies (STS), social construction of technology (SCOT) theory, actor network theory (ANT), and material culture studies – can also be productively applied to enhance our understanding of the drum kit (more of which in the next section). Drum kit studies is not itself a discipline per se, but a loosely organized field of study, which is slowly showing signs of cohering (as evidenced by the publication of this Cambridge Companion). The point here, however, is not to define drum kit studies in opposition to earlier ways of studying the drum kit, but to build upon them. Nor is it to isolate drum kit studies inside the academy from those occurring outside the academy. The drum kit is a living instrument, and drum kit studies therefore can, and should, actively encourage interaction and engagement between all spheres of drum kit culture.

In an effort to explore the breadth of what drum kit studies can and should be, I propose unfolding the term ‘drum kit’ from its narrow, commonsense definition (described at the outset of this chapter) into a larger map of directions for further enquiry. Steve Waksman has previously argued that musical instruments can be understood in a multitude of ways: as commodities, material objects, visual icons, sources of knowledge, cultural resources, and of course, ‘sound-producing devices, without which music could hardly be said to exist at all’.¹⁵ Similarly, Kevin Dawe has shown how musical instruments create forms of meaning, ‘changing soundscapes, affecting emotions, moving bodies, demarcating identities, mobilizing ideas, demonstrating beliefs, motioning values’.¹⁶ Inspired by the above and other recent work in musical instrument research, I propose that through the lens of what one might call the drumscape (which I will outline in detail in the following section), drum kit scholars can add the sum of these multiple perspectives together and make steps towards understanding not just how the drum kit, drummers, and drumming relate to the wider world – but how they impact upon it.

The Drumscape as a Theoretical Tool

The concept of the ‘soundscape’ is a twentieth-century invention. One of its key proponents, the composer and naturalist R. Murray Schafer, once theorized that ‘modern man is beginning to inhabit a world with an acoustic environment radically different from any he has hitherto known’, arguing that the soundscape of the world required careful study ‘in order to make intelligent recommendations for its improvement’.¹⁷ Similarly, the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai introduced further concepts like ‘mediascape’ and ‘technoscape’ to make sense of the intangible forces that shape the global cultural economy. More recently, Kevin Dawe has put forth the term ‘guitarscape’ in an effort to theoretically frame the guitar as ‘a large-scale musical-cultural-social occurrence that merits serious and ongoing academic study’.¹⁸ I suggest that if we are comfortable using terms like ‘technoscape’ and ‘guitarscape’, drum kit scholars might also benefit from the concept of a drumscape.¹⁹

The drum kit in all its forms (acoustic, electronic, physical, virtual, and symbolic) participates in the drumscape. (By virtue of its name, the drumscape can also encompass other instruments in the percussion family.) Such an approach encourages the study of the drum kit not just as a physical object or a performance practice, but as a symbol (encompassing both physical and virtual forms) whose meanings are determined by cultural use. In short, the drumscape is a macroscopic lens through which to understand drums, drummers, drumming, and the meanings and impacts they produce.

To once again borrow from and modify Kevin Dawe’s thoughtful discussion of the guitarscape, I suggest that the drumscape is a lens through which to consider (a) how the drum kit has been written about, thought about, and talked about; (b) the power and agency of the drum kit in culture and society; and (c) what kind of experience it is to play the drum kit (an experience involving both the mind and the body).²⁰ Moreover, the drumscape is not simply a concept through which to analyse the drum kit as a phenomenon: it is also a process in itself. In other words, we can interrogate a multitude of events when drumscaping occurs: in the sound mixing of a recording or a live concert; in the transistorized drum machine sounds emanating from the car speakers of a moving vehicle, or the wireless headphones connected to a mobile device; in a performance by a busker in a city park; in a religious service as a gospel drummer entrains a congregation towards a spiritual experience; or in a clothing store as market researchers study whether adjustments in the BPM of a four-on-the-floor kick influence the speed with which customers shop. Drumscaping need not even be sonic in nature: it could be present in the logic of a conversation between band members over how songwriting royalties should be divided, and whether the drummer’s role merits a percentage (and if so how much); or the visual mapping of virtual music-making interfaces in a digital audio workstation that is informed in some way by an acoustic or electronic drum kit. All of these moments are both a part of the drumscape as a concept, and act as particular examples of drumscaping as a process.

Building on earlier theorizations of instruments by Simon Frith, Emily Dolan, and John Tresch, I propose that viewed through the lens of the drumscape, the seemingly simple term ‘drum kit’ can be understood from at least four different but related perspectives: the drum kit is a technology, an ideological object, a material object, and a social relationship.²¹ I will examine each in turn.

To understand the drum kit as a technology is to approach it as the application of an accumulated field of human knowledge (i.e. instrument-building) resulting in the creation a new music-making device. The technology of the drum kit not only solves particular problems of labour and space – allowing a single musician to play multiple percussion instruments at once – but also opens up new and extends the possibilities for musical expression. However, understanding the drum kit as a technology is not to artificially separate it from its social interaction and cultural use, as may science and technology studies (STS) scholars have observed. As Timothy Taylor once put it, for instance, music technology is ‘not separate from social groups that use it, it is not separate from the individuals who use it; it is not separate from the social groups and individuals who invented it, tested it, marketed it, distributed it, sold it, repaired it, listened to it, bought it, or revived it. In short, music technology … [is] always bound up in a social system’.²² Approaching the drum kit as a technology is not synonymous with treating it as an object either. The technology of the drum kit could easily be understood, for example, not as a thing made up of wooden shells, skins, and cymbals, but as a spatial arrangement or conceptual interface. The drum kit is a form of software as well as hardware. Non-drummers might initially puzzle over the following arrangement of abstract shapes, but any drummer would immediately be able to identify its meaning and implied use (see Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 The drum kit as an abstract interface

The diagram below implies an overhead view of a typical setup for a righthanded drummer: a rectangular shape represents a bass drum, four dark grey circles from left to right represent a snare drum, two mounted toms, and a floor tom; and three light grey circles to represent from left to right a hi-hat, crash cymbal, and ride cymbal. This interface, even in abstract symbolic form, would be familiar enough to a drummer to imply not just a particular arrangement of drums and cymbals but also a rich set of performance practices – an amalgam of embodied techniques to coordinate one’s feet, hands, and body and enable a particular kind of music making. But of course, the implied sounds and uses need not be fixed in an open interface. Conceived as software, the drum kit allows for new codes to be written upon it: whether in the form of an electronic kit or displayed on a computer screen, drummers could happily (and routinely do) assign new voices and instruments to each element of the interface, or indeed add or remove elements entirely. The drum kit interface allows for the mixing, matching, and manipulation of sounds and performance techniques; the drum kit is a musically rich instrument precisely because drummers frequently borrow and repurpose its symbols and techniques in unexpected ways. A competent and creative drummer understands the instrument’s scripts but also subverts and rewrites them – navigating expressive pathways and possibilities that are musically distinct from other instruments.

Whether conceived of as an abstract interface or a concrete instrument, the drum kit as technology affords certain kinds of use and discourages others. It has the power to both enlarge and restrict the activity of music making. Understood from this standpoint (in other words, through the framework of actor network theory, or ANT), the drum kit is not a passive object, but an object with agency: it acts upon a drummer as much as a drummer acts upon it. The drum kit as technology encourages the user to experience music in a certain way (a very different way than, say, a guitar or woodwind instrument).

As an ideological object, the drum kit can be understood as a set of self-reinforcing ideas and values. The extent to which there is consensus surrounding these values informs social agreement of the drum kit’s function and purpose, and how it should and should not be used. The ideology of the drum kit contains received wisdom about its history, tradition, the accepted canon of significant drummers as artists (and the criteria by which they are judged to be significant), and its status as a sonic and visual icon. The ideology of the drum kit can also challenge prevailing music ideologies: from the perspective of drum kit culture, West African musical performance practices might be near the top of a hierarchy of musical value, while they might be located further down the value hierarchy embedded into the ideology of, for instance, a European instrument like the harpsichord or piano. There are also multiple and conflicting ideologies of the drum kit. In jazz drumming culture, for example, it might be taken for granted that an acoustic drum kit is a ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ drum kit, and an electronic or software drum kit is not; in electronic dance music culture, by contrast, this distinction might not matter at all. None of these ideas and values are absolute truths, but some sets of ideas have historically gravitated towards the orbit of the drum kit and the genre worlds surrounding it, while others have been repelled. And as ever, these ideologies shift and change over time.

As a material object, the drum kit can be understood as being made of particular elements and having particular physical and acoustic properties. Elsewhere I examine how the changing materials of the drumscape are mirrored by a wider shift in the materials used for commodity goods as a whole. A political ecology of the drum kit could be divided into three overlapping historical eras, each grouped by the principal materials used to manufacture the drum kit as a product: (1) renewable materials (i.e. the wood and metal used in traditional acoustic drums and cymbals); (2) non-renewable plastics and e-waste (i.e. the electronic circuitry and synthetic materials used in electronic drum kits); and finally (3) data (used in drum replacement and augmentation software).²³ How this categorization plays out in detail represents an avenue for future research. Furthermore, the drum kit as a material object takes part in a global commodity industry, and is implicated in various commercial and industrial processes. Here the study of the drum kit could productively align with material culture studies more broadly.

As a social relationship, the drum kit only becomes a drum kit when it is used as such (in other words, when it is played) and when a relationship is established between the instrument and the person playing it.²⁴ As Gareth Dylan Smith has observed, a drum kit can play a powerful role in shaping a drummer’s social identity.²⁵ According to this approach, drum kits are not merely aids to the activity of drumming, but also powerful forces acting in relationship to their users, shaping drumming and its meaning in the process; and as it is woven into the texture of everyday existence (to paraphrase cultural theorist Langdon Winnner), the drum kit sheds its tool-like qualities and becomes part of our very humanity.²⁶

Conclusions

To summarize, ‘what is a drum kit and how do we study it?’ is not a question where a short and simple answer will suffice. But this is a good thing. The drum kit is a living, mutable concept, and to study it properly is not a short exercise, but a lifelong inquiry that requires the establishment of a community of scholarship with constituents from both inside and outside the academy. In offering a few provocations concerning the historiography of the drum kit, the trajectory of drum kit studies, and the theorization of the drum kit, I do not claim to have fully answered any of the questions posed in this chapter, nor do I see a concept like the drumscape as a unified theoretical approach for drum kit studies as a whole. These are simply some tools to add to the toolbox, and it is my hope that the reader will find other useful tools to understand the drum kit, drummers, and drumming in the rest of this book.

Misrepresented from the Beginning?

Recordings of interest concerning the drum kit began around 1913, when record companies began to take notice of dance crazes that were sweeping across the country.³ Yet, fourteen years later in 1927, an advert from The Talking Machine World, titled ‘Drum Notes Not Only Heard – But Identified!’,⁴ advertised a new home speaker, promising that ‘thousands of radio listeners will now realise for the first time that radio orchestras have drums when they hook up this new, improved Crosley Musicone’. While it is dubious as to just how clear the drum parts would have been on this new device, what is clear is that, to some extent, audiences were not used to hearing the drum kit on record at this time, as its newfound clarity was used as a point on which to market this new technology.

Recorded music is utilised in many different ways: most obviously, as entertainment for the general listener; profit-making commodity for the producer, or record label; and often, an object of study for the performing musician seeking to learn from these captured moments in musical history. On this last point, the opening quotations to this chapter demonstrate both the importance and the danger of these recordings for the aspiring drum kit player.

Historically Informed Performance (HIP) is an approach to the performance of Western art music, most commonly from the Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque eras. At its most basic level, it means performing music with special attention given to the performance conventions and technology present when the piece of music was composed. Taruskin’s collected essays on his critique of HIP music, Text & Act, is telling of his primary complaint with early music performers: that they give authority to a preserving text.⁵ ‘Central to this concept’, Taruskin explains, ‘is an idealised notion of what a musical work is: something wholly realised by its creator, fixed in writing, and thus capable of being preserved’.⁶ This, he argues, leads to HIP practitioners placing too much value on objects, and not enough on the people performing them, and insists that the ultimate authority rests with the interpreters rather than the texts, ‘for texts do not speak for themselves’.⁷ Performers seeking to recreate the styles of early jazz (or ‘HIJP’ performers, if I may insert the word ‘jazz’), often replace scores with early recordings made in the 1910s and 1920s. This chapter argues that, while this may prove beneficial for musicians studying the clarinet, trumpet, trombone, and the like, the drum kit may not be adequately represented in such a way. Perhaps drummers, more than other instrumentalists, have reason to doubt the validity of what Taruskin describes as ‘the text’.

My own experiences in performance, as a drummer playing early jazz music, have led me to reconsider what it is to play in this style, and where to look for my ‘text’. The role that early recordings play in jazz history determine how this music is interpreted today. This chapter will explore how drummers were represented on record, how this differed from their colleagues, and how HIJP performers today can balance the importance of recorded music with these considerations.

Drummers Disadvantaged in Early Recordings: Acoustic Age

From the introduction, the ‘Crosley Musicone’ demonstrates that playback equipment during the 1910s through the 1920s was ill-equipped to reproduce the sounds of early drum kits. However, playback equipment was not the only reason for this, as the problem began in the studio itself.

There is an abundance of primary sources describing the need to remove drums from the acoustic recording studio (pre-electric recording technology, between 1890 and 1925). Even in the final year of acoustic recording (1924) Variety magazine reports the apocryphal claim that ‘a drum has never been reproduced on wax’.⁸ While this is an exaggeration, they certainly were not reproduced well. Tales of bass drums making the recording needle ‘jump’ are well known, but every component part of the drum kit came under attack in the early recording studio. One of the earliest sources comes from early audio-enthusiast publication The Phonoscope, in 1899. It recommends that, while the studio should accommodate the snare drum, sound engineers should ‘omit the bass drum. It is likely to spoil the effect, as it does not record well’.⁹ Three years later, this was repeated in similar journal (The Phonogram), but with an additional piece of advice: ‘The bass drum and cymbals should be left out entirely, as they do not record at all well’.¹⁰ In 1903 one publication described the recorded bass drum fidelity as ‘disappointing’,¹¹ and that same year the Edison Phonograph Monthly went further: ‘In making a band record bass drums are never used, as these blur or “fog” the record; cymbals are seldom used and snare drums in solo parts only’.¹² As late as 1914 the same journal reported that the snare drum was no longer a solo instrument in terms of recording: ‘a trio of banjo, piano and drum, is worthy of special attention, as it is the first time these three instruments have been successfully recorded in combination by us’.¹³ This problem seemed to persist throughout the 1910s, as the advertising manager of the English division of Columbia Records recalled that in 1911 ‘the big drum never entered a recording room’.¹⁴ In 1914 Talking Machine World states ‘bass drums and cymbals should never be used, as they have a tendency to fog the record’.¹⁵ This advice was followed right from the 1890s and carried through to the 1920s; a photograph of the Original Memphis Five taken in 1922 shows them as a ‘recording unit’, with drummer Jack Roth seated at nothing but a snare drum (see Figure 2.1).

Figure 2.1 Original Memphis Five, 1922: drummer Jack Roth on a snare drum only. Originally published in Record Research

Figure 2.1 shows drummer Roth’s bandmates pictured with their complete instruments: trumpet, trombone, clarinet, and grand piano. Many parts of Roth’s instrument – which in 1922 would feature a bass drum, multiple cymbals of different sizes and timbres, and an array of traps – are missing. Here, Roth played on a snare drum only. Replicating these recordings today necessitates choices about what to include and what to omit, complicating the accuracy or validity of the historic interpretation.

Moving later through the 1920s, an article from Melody Maker describes the conditions of a drummer in an acoustic studio as late as 1926:

Recollections from studio musicians of the time tell a similar story, though contradict on what parts of the drum kit were preferred. Drummer Chauncey Morehouse (1902–1980) and bandleader Paul Whiteman (1890–1967) are reported to have not used bass drums in the acoustic studio.¹⁷ Cornetist Wild Bill Davidson (1906–1989) recalls his recordings with the Chubb-Steinberg band in 1924–1925: ‘Drums couldn’t be used on the recordings, because the needle used in the process would jump the grooves when a drum beat; cymbals were used instead’.¹⁸ Abbey ‘Chinee’” Foster (1900–1962) recalls his 1925 recordings as a similar experience, only adding woodblock to the mix.¹⁹

While photographic evidence of bands in the acoustic studio are scarce, those that exist show an inconsistent picture, and almost never a full drum kit. One studio, Gennett Records, had a fortunate habit of photographing its many bands, albeit only bands comprising of white members, that passed through its doors through the first half of the 1920s. These images, all taken by photographer William Dalbey, captured each band in the same room, position, and theme (musicians pictured with their instruments), making for an informative comparison.²⁰ Of these eight photographs, taken between 1923 and 1928, five of these show drummers Stan King, George Gowans, Doc Stultz, Tom Gargano, and Earl McDowell playing on nothing more than a ‘trap rack’ with minimal traps (one cymbal, one woodblock), with no drums used at all. The recording made in this session, Davenport Blues, is of poor audio quality, but what percussion there is to hear supports what is in the picture; there is a prominent muted cymbal rhythm but little else. This setup was described by New Orleans Musician Charlie Bocage (1900–1963), who recalled that in his recording experience with drummer Louis Cottrell and the Piron band, these were the only drums allowed.²¹ One photograph shows drummer Vic Moore using what would be a full drum kit (Chinese cymbal, Turkish cymbal, cowbell, woodblock, and snare drum) if it were not for the fact that there is no bass drum. His snare drum is heavily dampened with cloth or rubber (much like today’s practice silencers that we place on acoustic kits), which would have greatly affected the performance. It is this photograph,²² along with another depicting drummer Gargano²³ that led some to the conclusion that it was a matter of space that kept the bass drum at the studio door;²⁴ however, this can’t be the case, as there are two photographs that show Hitch’s Happy Harmonists showing drummer Earl McDowell using a bass drum with his full set-up (which includes cymbal and Chinese tom-tom).²⁵ A snare drum is likely present, obscured behind the bass drum. Unfortunately this isn’t reflected in the corresponding recordings; the full set of drums depicted here cannot be heard any more than the recordings that came out of the other depicted sessions. It is, of course, possible that this was brought in merely to showcase the band’s logo on the drum head, knowing a photograph was to be taken on those sessions.

The status of the drum kit in the studio is, at best, complicated and inconsistent; one can find evidence of bass drums present on early recordings (the famous 1917 Original Dixieland Jass Band sessions shows remarkable clarity from the bass drum). Strangely, this is often more common with earlier records from the late 1910s than the 1920s, and speaks to the infancy of the recording process itself: inconsistencies are likely explained by the engineer one had on the day; while some would indeed take risks, many, perhaps most, did not.²⁶

It wasn’t just the engineers that held the fate of the drummer’s sound – at this time, everything was in the hands of the ‘A&R’ manager (‘artist and repertoire’ manager, sometimes referred to as the ‘recording master’). One such A&R manager was Eddie King, involved in making records from as early as 1905, before moving to Victor Records, then leaving for Columbia Records in 1926.²⁷ A well-known authoritarian, an A&R executive like King could have serious consequences for the drum kit in the studio. Drummer Chauncey Morehouse recalls that King only allowed his own drum equipment to be used. An ex-drummer himself in the John Phillip Sousa Band, King had meticulously experimented with his various percussion items, and had his pre-approved house cymbals which he insisted every drummer use.²⁸ Musician Nat Shilkret (1889–1982), who remembers King as a good drummer in his day, recalls that King had a cymbal he was fond of, which he brought to Victor’s recording studios, and that he would go into the recording room and hold the cymbal himself ‘ready to strike it at spots at which he thought it would help’. Shilkret remembers that he and the other younger engineers were tired of this, and began hitting the cymbal themselves unbeknown to King, to chip away at the cymbal until King was compelled to throw it away.²⁹

Drummers Disadvantaged in Early Recordings: Electric Age

It was radio broadcasting, and the revolutionary technology it employed, that grudgingly dragged the recording industry out of the acoustic era. Radio’s superior electric technology was able to record drum kits clearer than ever before, years before the recording studio caught up. Figure 2.2 shows two bands in the radio studio using full drum kits in broadcasts from 1922. These are among the earliest photographs of a microphone being used to capture a full drum kit performance.

Figure 2.2 Top: An unknown band broadcasting from the Detroit News Auditorium, 1922. Bottom: Ted Lewis and his band broadcasting from the Union Trust Co.’s radio station in Cleveland, Ohio, at seven o’clock p.m. on Tuesday, 24 October 1922.

However interesting it is to see full drum kits on radio broadcasts as early as 1922, it remains unclear what one actually heard at the other end of an early radio broadcast. A report on the drum kit’s sound over radio that year casts doubt that this greatly improved on the acoustic method: ‘traps carry well over the radio because of their sharp, clearly defined characteristics. The bass drum is too low and slow’.³⁰ In 1925, Radio Age describes the conditions of radio recording as being similar to what we have heard of the acoustic studio: ‘the drums are eliminated entirely’.³¹ One year later Radio Broadcast wrote of the state of drums on radio: ‘Perhaps in 95 per cent of the radio receivers in use to-day, it is impossible to hear a note as low as that given by a drum’.³²

Similarly, when the recording industry followed radio and went electric in 1925, this was by no means an overnight change for the drum kit. The last half of the 1920s were an ‘adjustment period’ for this technology, and while good reports of drum kit recordings start to appear, inconsistencies remain. Clarinettist Barney Bigard (1906–1980) recalls a recording session with Duke Ellington in 1928 – almost certainly recorded in an electric studio, considering the date – where drummer Sonny Greer turned up but had to sit out because the studio simply could not record the drums.³³

It is true that electrical recording rapidly improved as recordings moved into the mid-1930s, though by this time this technology brought with it a new swing style, and it was too late for the early jazz bands to immortalise their sound with clear fidelity. Early drummers did appear in later years on clear recordings demonstrating their techniques – most notably, Baby Dodds (1898–1959),³⁴ who made recordings discussing his 1920s drumming style – though these musicians could not unhear the different styles they had adopted since the days of when they used techniques they were purporting to demonstrate.

The power that recording technology, and the way it developed, had over a band is demonstrated by a 1925 Billboard article commenting on the switchover from acoustic to electrical recording, and how this would have consequences, not just on clarity and fidelity, but on what instruments would be favoured to the downfall of others:

Drums ‘in’ or ‘out of vogue’, as described above, were determined by the technology that could or could not capture them. Rather than merely adding fidelity, early electrical recording technology complimented some instruments to the disadvantage of others. Today some listeners regard the banjo as an old-fashioned sound in jazz – perhaps its demise was due to changes in recording techniques. This seems possible, given that it also predicts the rise of the saxophone in jazz music, as saxophonists ‘will find electrical recording a boon … Thus many saxophonists formerly unable to plan dates will now be able to enjoy an extra source of revenue’. The article continues: ‘Recording orchestras are busy figuring out new recording combinations under the new plan. As previously mentioned, instruments formerly neglected will be put in and others now used may have to be cut out, temporarily at least’.³⁶

Beyond the Record

Clearly the recording process, and its restrictions, represented drummers in a way that was not indicative of the way they played on stage. In terms of not being able to record certain components of the drum kit, leaving parts at the studio door. This omission can rightly be described as restrictive and certainly drummers have therefore been misrepresented on record. Perhaps players today interested in HIJP should ignore or place less importance on these records than other members of the band. However, these studio restrictions ultimately changed the way that drummers played on their instrument (as a whole, or whichever parts were allowed in). When we consider these changes in style that recording necessitated (or perhaps we should say, facilitated?) perhaps what may be thought of as ‘restrictions’, could instead be viewed as part of the drum kit’s story. Much like other forces that shaped the drum kit (as an instrument, and in terms of performance practice), perhaps recording restrictions, and the measures that drummers took accordingly, could be embraced by the HIJP performer today. Once we examine what performance practices came out of these restrictions, it becomes obvious that these carried through to live performance outside of the studio.

One such studio influence was how drummers dealt with the volume of their instrument. Drummers were encouraged to give unequal weighting to parts of the drum kit, such as sharp-sounding traps (e.g. woodblocks, cowbells, rims of the drum) to cut through and be heard, or to play with brushes where they would not have otherwise, in order to avoid saturating the recording horn. Baby Dodds speaks of this:

Dodds also recorded with Jelly Roll Morton, on the famous Hot Pepper sessions. Dodds recalls of Morton: ‘Because he wanted the drum so very soft I used brushes on Mr. Jelly Lord. I didn’t like brushes at any time but I asked him if he wanted me to use them and he said “Yes”’. How many drummers since have wanted to sound like Baby Dodds, and mimicked a sound that Dodds himself did not enjoy? Similarly, Dodds discussed playing the washboard on some of his recordings for his brother Johnny.³⁸ Ed Allen (1897–1974) recalls ‘washboard was a good substitute for drums, as bass drums wouldn’t record in those days anyway’.³⁹ The drum kit and the way it is played, has been partially shaped by its own volume, and the way recording studios and acoustic bands reacted to this volume. Volume is something that has hampered, influenced, and inspired drum kit performance. It continues to be an issue when performing, practicing, and discussing the drum kit’s place in popular music today.⁴⁰

How many of these studio habits were brought forward into live playing? Would brush playing be as prominent in jazz today if it were not so encouraged amongst drummers in the early days of recording (and during this crucial stage of the instrument’s development)? We associate washboard playing with the early jazz of this era, but not from reading about it – from listening to it. Practitioners of HIJP would benefit from considering the bigger picture, beyond the record: the studio, its restrictions, and its influence. Our contemporary understanding of jazz history reflects the practices of those bands captured on recording, as opposed to the bigger picture of jazz practice – in and out of the studio – at any given time of recording.

A Cycle of Influence

The picture becomes blurred as to what is considered ‘live’ and ‘studio’ performance when one considers the far-reaching influence these records have on subsequent generations of drummers. Jazz recordings have been, from their beginnings through to today, an essential teaching tool for musicians learning and developing the genre.⁴¹ For example, Bix Beiderbecke is said to have taught himself trumpet by listening to the recordings of Original Dixieland Jass Band.⁴² Cornetist Jimmy McPartland (1907–1991) describes his experience, as his friends heard, for the first time, recordings of the New Orleans Rhythm Kings: ‘We stayed there from about three in the afternoon until eight at night, just listening to those records one after another, over and over again. Right then and there we decided we would get a band and try to play like these guys’.⁴³ The influence of early recordings was the inspiration for the formation of many bands. The next stage was using these recordings to learn the style, which McPartland then describes:

Records were often a way for other drummers listening to develop their own styles. However, while clarinettists and trumpet players could learn the solos and licks on the records that would appear in the ephemeral setting of a nightclub note-for-note, the aspiring drummer was not so fortunate. Drummers either would not be able to hear the parts they wished to learn, or if they could, would they want to? And, the important question for HIJP performers today: should they? As recorded jazz music began to circulate throughout the United States and beyond, this affected the way in which a new generation of jazz musicians would learn the drum kit, and interpret their role in live performance. These musicians would then record the next generation of jazz records, and a cycle of influence would be born. During the spring of 1948, Baby Dodds travelled to Europe with Mezz Mezzrow’s band, and commented on how his drumming had been interpreted by Europeans listening to his records:

When HIJP drummers today play early jazz, just where are they taking their technique from? Recordings have undoubtedly provided the most interesting, informative, and rewarding tool when researching how this music was played, yet in the early recording studio not all instruments were created equal. The representation of drummers on record should be considered in order to project an accurate picture of what was really played in dancehalls in the late 1910s and throughout the 1920s, but also in order to consider how and why drummers are represented and portrayed the way they are today.

Conclusion

What is it to record: events, opinions, music? In order to record, we need a mediator between past and present. Just as one cannot remove the historian from the history, technology is the inevitable barrier between what was played then, and what is heard now. This chapter began by implying that the drum kit was comparatively disadvantaged by this technology, and misrepresented, but perhaps this is a weighted statement. It certainly was most affected; the effects ranged from a culling of the instrument’s component parts (and in this sense records perhaps shouldn’t be used so stringently by the aspiring HIJP drummer) to legitimate performance considerations that have defined the sound of early jazz to modern listeners. We may wish that drummers were given an equal footing from the start, but the fact is that the sound of early jazz – the sound we may wish to replicate or recreate – is defined by these early studio restrictions, and they should add to the balance of considerations the HIJP drummer must make in their performance practice.

Introduction

In a fiery 1956 sermon captured on grainy, black-and-white film, Reverend Jimmie Snow explains to his Nashville congregation why he preaches against rock and roll. ‘I know how it feels’, he intones, ‘I know the evil feeling that you feel when you sing it. I know the lost position that you get into in the beat. Well, if you talk to the average teenager of today and you ask them what it is about rock-and-roll music that they like, the first thing they’ll say is the beat, the beat, the beat!’¹ Like many social leaders who condemned rock and roll, Snow located the allure and impact of this music, commonly called ‘beat music’ or simply the ‘big beat’, in its powerful percussive accompaniment. The central and most distinctive feature of the rock-and-roll beat was its emphatic, relentless snare drum accents on ‘two and four’, the conventionally ‘weak’ beats of the measure – the so-called backbeat. Shocking though it was to many in the 1950s, the backbeat soon became and remains one of the single most prevalent features of Western popular music. This chapter explores the origins of the backbeat, charts its early history on record from the 1920s to the 1950s, and considers how it has functioned as a meaningful musical signifier and cultural agent.

For the purposes of this chapter I limit my discussion to backbeats that are exclusively rhythmic in nature, serving no harmonic or other musical function. Thus, neither the weak-beat piano, banjo, or guitar chords common in nineteenth-century songs and dance music, ragtime, early jazz, country, and blues, nor the slap-back bass in swing, Western swing, and rockabilly will be considered. Rather, I focus on the emergence of the backbeat as a convention in drum kit performance practice, typically played on the snare drum. The distinctive, piercing ‘crack’ (or ‘whack’, ‘slap’, ‘spank’, etc.) of the snare drum and its potential for extreme volumes make the drum kit backbeat different in kind from the off-beat piano, banjo, guitar, or bass rhythms cited above.

Backbeating As Signifyin(g) Practice

Reverend Snow was among many who linked the rock-and-roll backbeat to juvenile delinquency and violence. Justifying the ban on rock-and-roll shows in Jersey City in 1956, Mayor B. J. Berry asserted ‘this rock-and-roll rhythm is filled with dynamite, and we don’t want the dynamite to go off in Roosevelt Stadium’.² Critics also blamed rock and roll for promoting lascivious dancing and sexual promiscuity, claiming that its beat replicated the rhythms of sex. Condemnations of beat music commonly resorted to racist language associating the ‘primitive’ rock-and-roll beat with the ‘savage’ instincts of ‘inferior’ races. Few were more forthright than Asa Carter of the White Citizens Council of Alabama, who asserted ‘rock-and-roll music is the basic, heavy-beat music of the Negroes. It appeals to the base in man, brings out animalism and vulgarity’.³ As Steven F. Lawson summarizes, ‘the language used to link rock with the behaviour of antisocial youths was couched in … racial stereotypes. Music Journal asserted that the “jungle rhythms” of rock incited juvenile offenders into “orgies of sex and violence” … The New York Daily News derided the obscene lyrics set to “primitive jungle-beat rhythms”’.⁴ As late as 1987, conservative critics could assert that rock’s ‘notorious’, ‘evil’ backbeat ‘is very dangerous since it owes its beginnings to African demon worship’.⁵

Kofi Agawu has deconstructed the myth of ‘African rhythm’ – the notion that ‘blacks … exhibit an essential irreducible rhythmic disposition’ – exposing it as a white invention often deployed in the justification of racial hierarchy.⁶ As Ronald Radano notes, ‘the primitivist orthodoxy of “natural rhythm”’ can also serve as ‘a means of affirming positive identities in an egregiously racist, nationalist environment’.⁷ For instance, as Isaac Hayes recalled, ‘it was the standard joke with blacks, that whites could not, cannot clap on a backbeat. You know—ain’t got the rhythm’.⁸ Similarly, blues musician Taj Mahal interrupted a 1993 performance to chide his German audience for clapping on the downbeat. ‘Wait, wait, wait … This is schwarze [black] musick’, he instructs the crowd. ‘Zwie, vier! One, TWO, three, FOUR!’⁹

The affirmative potential of such strategic essentialism notwithstanding, reducing the backbeat to an inbred racial trait is profoundly limiting and, like all essentialisms, has dangerous ramifications. This is borne out by the fierce backlash against rock and roll, ‘the heavy-beat music of the Negroes’, part of a larger racist backlash in the age of Brown vs. the Board of Education, the Little Rock Nine, and Emmett Till. Far from being an inbred musical predisposition of black people, the backbeat emerged as a strategic cultural response to specific social, historical, and musical conditions. Understanding this history requires that we consider the practice of backbeating before the development of the drum kit during the first decades of the twentieth century. Indeed, as all drummers know, one does not need a drum kit to perform the multi-limb rhythmic beating that is the essence of drum kit performance practice.

Samuel Floyd has traced various elements common in African-American music – including call-and-response patterns, pitch-bending, and unflagging off-beat rhythms – to the ring shout, a ritual adapted from West African sacred traditions.¹⁰ Participants sing and chant over the rhythms of their shuffling feet, hand claps, and other body percussion. As Floyd explains, the ring shout also exemplifies the practice of ‘signifyin(g)’ central to West African and African-American expressive culture, as participants extemporaneously expand on traditional texts with additional verses, embellishments, commentary, and so forth. Theorized by Henry Louis Gates, Jr, signifyin(g) involves the interpretive elaboration on received ideas, narratives, texts, etc., often as a means of resisting or inverting dominant ideologies and power relationships, and it underlies much African-American vernacular culture, from ragging tunes to rap battles.¹¹ As a signifyin(g) practice, backbeating is a means of responding to and reinterpreting the conventional ‘strong’ downbeat of Western music – of simultaneously acknowledging and resisting it, of playing with and working against it, of inverting it, enhancing it, and making it groove.

Incarceration, Hard Labour, and the Backbeat

In ways both metaphorical and real, backbeating has functioned as a meaningful response by African Americans to the brutal oppression of slavery and the long, violent aftermath of the Civil War. For many black southerners, conditions scarcely changed after abolition. Laws targeting black people fed a network of prisons that effectively replicated the conditions of slavery. Trivial offences or bogus charges could land black citizens in labour camps such as the notorious Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana, Parchman Farm in Mississippi, or the Darrington State Prison Farm in Texas. Each are known for their brutal conditions, but also for field recordings conducted by John and Alan Lomax beginning in 1933.

These recordings establish African-American prison songs as one of earliest repertories on record that commonly features emphatic backbeat accompaniments. For example, ‘Long John’ (1933), sung by a group of prisoners led by ‘Lightning’ Washington, is based on a story from antebellum black folklore. Representative of the trickster hero central to many signifyin(g) texts, Long John is a fugitive slave who leads a nationwide chase, outwitting his would-be captors at every turn. Washington lines out the tale, lacing it with Biblical references, and the group repeats each line to the accompaniment of axes striking on the backbeat.¹² As is common in trickster tales, Long John uses cunning and wit to subvert established power structures, just as the backbeat subverts conventional notions concerning ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ beats.

In their percussive accompaniments, these prisoners transform the tools of their oppression into musical instruments, making them potential tools of liberation. By signifyin(g) on the downbeat, the prisoners transform the rhythms of forced labour into compelling grooves, creating the possibility of experiencing the body, not only as a site of violent oppression, but also as a potential site of creativity and pleasure. Here backbeating constitutes a strategy for survival and resistance, providing historical precedent for John Mowitt’s assertion that the rock-and-roll backbeat ‘define[d] the substance of a modest, but tenacious pedagogy of the oppressed … a practical wisdom about how to “strike back” and “make do” under conditions of adversity and cynical humiliation’.¹³

The Lomaxes also recorded songs performed during the inmates’ few leisure hours, such as ‘That’s All Right, Honey’ (1933) by Mose ‘Clear Rock’ Platt. Platt boasted to Lomax of his various jailbreaks and his powers of evasion. In an audacious display of storytelling (and signifyin[g]), he explains that he ran so fast that the ‘splat-splattin’’ of his feet was mistaken for the sound of motorcycle engine, and that his shirttail had caught fire, which was mistaken for a taillight. ‘Dey calls me “Swif-foot Rock” ‘cause de way I kin run’, he explains, adding ‘white man say he thought I mus’ have philosophies in my feet’.¹⁴ Platt’s philosophical feet can be heard, faintly tapping downbeats during his singing of ‘That’s All Right, Honey’, each foot-tap answered by a much louder clapped backbeat. Platt sings line after line of affirmative lyrics over the up-tempo ‘stomp-CLAP’ groove, celebrating freedoms that, ‘sho ‘nuff’, will be his. Platt’s exuberant performance testifies to the uplifting power of backbeating; such a spirited performance within the confines of a system designed to break the spirit constitutes a powerful act of resistance, of beating back.

Backbeating in Pentecostal Worship

Body percussion had long been practiced in Western Africa, described by European explorers as early as 1621.¹⁵ It took on greater significance in the United States, where drumming among slaves was feared and outlawed in many places. While slave holders could ban drums, they could not ban the bodies that sustained their economy, and accompaniments to sacred song and dance moved from drums to African-American bodies. As Jon Michael Spencer explains, ‘To the African the drum was a sacred instrument possessing supernatural power that enabled it to summon the gods into communion with the people … [and] percussiveness produced the power that helped move Africans to dance and into trance possession … With the drum banned, rhythm … became the essential African remnant of black religion in North America … It empowered those who possessed it to endure slavery by temporarily elevating them … to a spiritual summit’.¹⁶

Among Christian denominations, African-American Pentecostal and Holiness (also called Sanctified) churches took up body percussion most fervently. Pentecostalism emphasizes spirit possession, achieved through rhythmic song and dance, and dozens of recordings from the 1920s demonstrate the centrality of backbeating to Pentecostal worship. In Memphis alone, Bessie Johnson and Her Memphis Sanctified Singers, Elder Lonnie McIntorsh, and the Holy Ghost Sanctified Singers made recordings with consistent handclapped backbeats that fuel impassioned vocal performances as in, for example, Johnson’s ‘Keys to the Kingdom’ (1929). Another remarkable example, ‘Memphis Flu’ (1930) by Elder Curry and His Congregation, is a proto-rock-and-roll song, replete with Little Richard-style eighth notes hammered out on the piano’s high, percussive register to solid, communal backbeating. Such congregational backbeating is the audible presence of community; all participants contribute to a unifying, thoroughly embodied groove, which constitutes the primary vehicle for spiritual communion. No wonder Pentecostal preachers like Reverend D. C. Rice would defend percussive worship music, insisting that ‘people need to feel the rhythm of God’.¹⁷

Pentecostal music was not only a form of praise, but often a means of protest, with statements of resistance embedded in religious contexts. Most explicit are the various ‘Egypt’ songs, wherein the deliverance of Israelites from Egyptian captivity is understood to prophesy the deliverance of black people from racist oppression in the United States. The earliest vocal recording I have found with consistent backbeating throughout (excepting the introduction) is ‘Way Down in Egypt Land’ (1926) by the Biddleville Quintette. The song confronts the darkest depths of slavery, ‘waaaaaay down in Egypt land’, but the exuberant, rhythmically charged performance, driven by handclapped backbeating, makes clear that this is a celebration of deliverance. Perhaps the earliest drummed backbeating on a vocal record occurs on Elder J. E. Burch’s stirring ‘Love Is My Wonderful Song’ (1927), fuelled by emphatic snare backbeat accents over driving bass drum quarter notes.

A fairly direct line connects Pentecostal backbeating to 1940s rhythm and blues. Prolific gospel recording artist Sister Rosetta Tharpe collaborated with the equally prolific Lucky Millinder on several recordings. Millinder had been leading bands on record since 1933, when he took over the Blue Mills Rhythm Band, but none of his recordings feature prominent backbeats until his work with Tharpe.¹⁸ Their 1941 collaboration, ‘Shout Sister, Shout’, features Pentecostal-style congregational backbeating placed at the forefront of the mix during choruses. Millinder would again foreground clapped backbeats on ‘Who Threw the Whiskey in the Well’, a gospel parody describing a worship service that evolves into a spirited, boozy bash. Recorded in 1944 with vocalist Wynonie Harris, the record was a massive hit, spending eight weeks atop the ‘race’ chart in 1945 and crossing over to #7 on the pop chart. Handclapped gospel backbeats propelled Harris’s next hit, ‘Good Rockin’ Tonight’ (1948), a cover of Roy Brown’s ‘Galveston Whorehouse Jingle’.¹⁹ Whereas backbeats accompany only the choruses of ‘Shout Sister, Shout’ and ‘Who Threw the Whiskey in the Well’, handclapped backbeating accompanies the entirety of ‘Good Rockin’ Tonight’, excepting the introduction, where drummer Bobby Donaldson plays emphatic snare backbeats thickened by loose, ‘dirty’ hi-hats, which, along with wah-inflected trumpet growls and insinuating saxophone squeals, set a steamy scene for the entry of gospel clapping. Here the sacred and the secular, the spiritual and sexual meet on two and four.

Sex and the Backbeat

Euphemistic references to sex such as ‘rocking’ were commonplace well before the rise of rhythm and blues, especially in a strain of the blues, sometimes called ‘hokum’ blues, built around clever double entendres and thinly veiled references to sex. Hokum blues songs often address the world of prostitution, and many were performed in brothels and bawdy dance halls, where musicians entertained and played music for dancing, particularly the kind of dancing that might encourage subsequent assignations.²⁰ No other strain of the blues from the 1920s and 1930s features as flagrant backbeating as the hokum blues, where the ‘rocking’ celebrated in the lyrics finds a parallel in the back-and-forth motion between bottom-heavy downbeats and penetrating backbeats.

For instance, Margaret Webster’s ‘I’ve Got What it Takes’, recorded in 1929 with Clarence Williams’s Washboard Band, features salacious lyrics set over an infectious, backbeat-based shuffle groove played on the washboard by drummer Floyd Casey. Among the most prolific recording artists of the 1920s and 1930s, Williams recorded with Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, among others, in addition to numerous recordings under his own name. I credit some of his success to the compelling percussive accompaniments provided by Casey. As these records demonstrate, the washboard was well suited to the recording technology of the day, offering a variety of percussive timbres, from the deep ‘thump’ of the wooden frame to the piercing, metallic scrape in the high register. Here the washboard constitutes a kind of miniature drum kit that produced better results in the studio than could be achieved easily with drums. Like the axes and other tools that accompanied prison songs, the washboard represents an instrument of labour that was radically repurposed and deployed in the celebration of freedoms.

Allusions to prostitution are common in the songs of Memphis Minnie, the influential blues singer, songwriter, and guitarist, who, like many musicians of her era, played at brothels and often ‘entertained’ in more ways than one.²¹ At a remarkable 1936 session, Minnie recorded seven sides, each featuring an unidentified percussionist playing stark, consistent backbeats on either a washboard or woodblock. Most of these songs address sexual politics, some making direct references to prostitution, such as ‘Black Cat Blues’ with the refrain ‘everyone wants to buy my kitty’, Minnie’s saucy swagger punctuated by pulsating backbeats. These are perhaps the earliest recordings to feature backbeating in the context of guitar-based blues, establishing Memphis Minnie as a rhythm-and-blues pioneer.

As Hazel Carby, Shayna Lee, and others have shown, in such songs women performers reclaimed female sexuality from the objectifying male gaze and projected empowering representations of female agency and desire.²² In this context, the backbeat is an apt metaphor for sex, rollicking between steady downbeats and penetrating backbeat accents, imparting an embodied experience that renders these assertions and celebrations of sexuality all the more compelling. Not surprisingly, some of the most influential drummers in the development of rock and roll, including prolific session drummers Earl Palmer and Hal Blaine, and Elvis Presley’s drummer D. J. Fontana – all early masters of the backbeat – started out playing in strip clubs providing rhythmic accompaniments to steamy floor shows.

Shout Choruses, Afterbeats, and the Kansas City School

Earl Palmer has often been noted for his role in standardizing the rock-and-roll beat. He played drum kit on Fats Domino’s ‘The Fat Man’ (1949), an early hit that features consistent backbeats, and his recordings with Little Richard were among the earliest to feature the backbeat in conjunction with straight eighth-note hi-hat or ride cymbal patterns (as opposed to the swung or shuffled accompaniments typical of rhythm and blues and early rock and roll). Palmer identified the Dixieland ‘shout chorus’ as the inspiration for his earliest use of a consistent backbeat.²³ In the shout chorus, the ensemble takes up boisterous figures while the rhythm section plays heavy ‘weak’ beat accents. For instance, drummer Andrew Hilaire plays emphatic snare backbeats during the last chorus of ‘Black Bottom Stomp’, recorded in 1926 with Jelly Roll Morton’s Red Hot Peppers. As an isolated, deliberately ‘unruly’ section, the shout chorus stands out as exceptional, as a moment of abandon during which the normal rules do not apply, or rather, in carnivalesque fashion, are inverted.

As early as the 1920s, then, drum-kit backbeating was associated with the kinds of excess and disorder critics would impute to the rock-and-roll beat decades later. The term ‘shout’ chorus alludes to the kind of spirited performances associated with black sacred music, but I have come to think of such choruses in instrumental jazz and later rhythm and blues as ‘cut-loose’ choruses, a metaphor with particular resonance for black people contending with the legacy of bondage. Typically, these backbeat-driven choruses support and impel particularly intense solos that transgress the dynamic, scalar, and timbral restraints in place during ‘regular’ choruses.

Emphatic backbeats would remain exceptional in jazz drumming, reserved for occasional, particularly boisterous choruses. By the early 1930s, the conventional swing pattern (‘ding ding-da ding ding-da’) had established itself as the central component of jazz drumming. A secondary convention, the ‘afterbeat’, was standardized during the 1930s and emerged in conjunction with a major technological innovation, foot-operated cymbals. Designs from the early 1920s, including the ‘low boy’ (also known as ‘sock cymbals’) and the ‘snow shoe’, led to the hi-hat, which drummers began incorporating into their kits in the late 1920s.²⁴ Bringing two cymbals together via the foot pedal could create a variety of sounds, the most serviceable proving to be the light ‘chick’ produced when the cymbals are brought together and held closed to prevent reverberation. Drummers typically placed the ‘chick’ on the weak beats, either in alternation with bass drum half notes (‘boom-chick-boom-chick’) or over bass-drum quarter notes. The convention of playing left-foot afterbeats was well enough established by 1928 that Slingerland would introduce the ‘Duplex After Beat Drum’ to meet drummers’ evolving needs (Figure 3.1). The advertisement suggests that the ideal afterbeat is ‘just loud enough to be heard without prominence’. As Duke Ellington often explained, the jazz afterbeat was part of a ‘cool’ sensibility that eschewed aggression and provocation in favour of stylized restraint, inciting nothing more than head tilts and finger snaps. ‘Of course, one never snaps one’s fingers on the beat’, he states, ‘it’s considered aggressive. You don’t push it. You just let fall. If you’d like to be conservatively hip, … tilt your left earlobe on the beat and snap the fingers on the afterbeat’.²⁵ Though clearly related, the unobtrusive ‘conservatively hip’ jazz afterbeat was a far cry from the explosive big beat that inspired such fear and fury in the mid-1950s.

Figure 3.1 Slingerland 1928 catalog, page 31

The backbeat was central to one exceptional school of jazz drumming. Famed for extended jam sessions, Kansas City jazz musicians of the 1920s and 1930s, cultivated a groove-based aesthetic that distinguished it from the arrangement-based styles preeminent elsewhere. As Ross Russell recounts:

Period recordings suggest that backbeat-based drumming sustained these legendary all-night jams. ‘South’, recorded by Bennie Moten’s Kansas City Orchestra in 1924, is the earliest recording I have yet found featuring strong, consistent backbeats as the primary percussive accompaniment for the entirety of the recording. Willie Hall, like most drummers in the age of acoustic recording, was denied his drum kit in the studio, opting instead for a woodblock, a standard component of the early drum kit and the most common replacement for the snare drum in the studio. Hall lays down consistent woodblock backbeats on all twelve recordings he made with Moten in 1924 and 1925 (Figure 3.2).

Figure 3.2 Bennie Moten Radio Orchestra, 1922

(Willie Hall, drums; from the ‘Goin’ to Kansas City’ Collection, courtesy of Herman Walder and the Kansas City Museum)

Hall left Moten’s band after the 1925 sessions, but the backbeat remained a distinguishing feature of the ensemble. Their 1926 recording of ‘Thick Lip Stomp’ is a clinic in backbeating. Drummer Willie McWashington plays stark backbeats through the first six choruses but varies the treatment throughout, moving from choked cymbal crashes, to the woodblock, and then to the snare. He starts each of the next four choruses with tasteful four-measure solos, setting up dramatic stop-time ensemble backbeating. The whole band rests on the downbeats and plays emphatic percussive accents on beats two and four (excepting the soloist, of course, and occasionally Moten’s piano) in the style of a Dixieland shout chorus, but for four full choruses.

McWashington placed backbeating at the center of his rhythmic accompaniments on nearly all fifteen recordings he made with Moten in 1926 and 1927, before gradually moving towards hi-hat and ride-cymbal-based swing accompaniments on subsequent records. ‘New Tulsa Blues’ (1927) is among several remarkable recordings that feature robust backbeats over well-recorded bass drum downbeats. During the introduction, McWashington plays a shuffle groove that rollicks between heavy bass drum downbeats and shuffled tom-tom eighth notes on two and four:

||: Boom  BAA-da Boom  BAA-da :||

McWashington maintains propulsive bass-drum downbeats throughout the recording, each kick answered by a forceful ‘whack’, played variously on a snare drum, tom-tom, choked crash cymbal, or woodblock, often in combination. The relentless rocking between heavy downbeats and piercing backbeats, sometimes with subtle, syncopated embellishments, is entrancing, and helps explain why Kansas City musicians were inspired to extend jams to such unprecedented lengths.

The Backbeat in 1940s Rhythm and Blues

The Kansas City school notwithstanding, heavy, consistent backbeats remained rare in jazz through the swing era. With the rise of bebop in the 1940s, jazz drummers further undermined any sense of a regular backbeat, peppering the conventional swing ride pattern with unpredictable snare ornaments and accents and dropping bass drum ‘bombs’ with designed irregularity. A more commercially oriented offshoot of swing that also emerged in the 1940s, jump blues, has often been considered a ‘missing link’ between swing and rock and roll. Longtime Rolling Stone contributor, J. D. Considine, credits 1940s jump blues artists such as Louis Jordan with popularizing the backbeat, introducing the crucial element that would define rock and roll.²⁷ Similarly, legendary composer, producer, and executive Quincy Jones claimed that ‘Lionel Hampton and Louis Jordan were probably the first rock-and-roll bands that were really conscious of what we call the big beat … [Jordan] did shuffle boogie with backbeats and everything else that were all the elements of rock and roll’.²⁸ But the backbeat does not figure prominently on any of Jordan’s recordings until 1949, by which time other artists had been making records with far more emphatic backbeats.

Most of Jordan’s 1940s hits feature an even four-beat boogie-woogie groove alongside a walking quarter-note bass line. The drum kit accompaniments (usually played by Joe ‘Chris Colombo’ Morris or Shadow Wilson) are consistently light and typically feature a snare drum played with brushes, comping a groove based on quarter-note and shuffle patterns over faint four-on-the-floor bass-drum quarter notes, often with light hi-hat afterbeats (as on ‘Caldonia’, ‘Choo Choo Ch’Boogie’, ‘Ain’t Nobody Here But Us Chickens’, and others). Jordan’s drummers sometimes play swing hi-hat accompaniments, with downbeat accents on open hi-hats (‘SHEE Chick-cha SHEE Chick-cha SHEE’) obliterating any sense of a backbeat (as on ‘Saturday Night Fish Fry’ and ‘Is You Is Or Is You Ain’t’). While hi-hat and brushed snare afterbeats are common on Jordan’s recordings from the 1940s, they project a sense of cool restraint similar to the ‘conservatively hip’ afterbeating Ellington endorsed, rather than the aggressive, unrestrained big beat.

The Jordan recording from the 1940s that comes closest to the rock-and-roll backbeat is ‘Beans and Cornbread’ (1949), wherein Jordan invokes the sermonic tone of gospel music. Columbo uses drumsticks rather than the lighter brushes used on most Jordan records, playing a swing ride-cymbal pattern with light snare backbeats, scarcely audible over the hi-hat afterbeats. By contrast, Joe Morris’s version of the song recorded a month later features emphatic backbeats throughout (excepting stop-time sections) as drummer ‘Philly’ Joe Jones doubles loud snare backbeats with explosive cymbal crashes. Ensemble handclaps amplify the boisterous backbeating on Morris’s version of ‘Beans and Cornbread’ and reinforce the gospel allusion. The raucous backbeating imbues the brawl described in the lyrics with far greater turbulence than Jordan’s more humorous version. As such a comparison shows, the backbeating on Jordan’s records through the 1940s more closely resembles the swing afterbeat than the rock-and-roll backbeat.

Jones is on firmer ground with Lionel Hampton, who does foreground backbeats on several 1940s recordings. On ‘Central Avenue Breakdown’ (1941), a heavy boogie-woogie romp fuelled by a dual-piano attack, drummer Al Spieldock drives the groove with emphatic snare backbeats. ‘Hamp’s Boogie Woogie’ (1944) and ‘Hey-Ba-Ba-Re-Bop’ (1946) feature backbeats during extended instrumental sections. On both, drummer Fred Radcliffe supports the soloists (and vocalist on the latter) with light, even, four-beat shuffle grooves for most of the song but kicks the band into a different gear with forceful backbeating during boisterous, cut-loose choruses.

While recordings from the 1940s tend to reserve consistent backbeat accents for exclusively instrumental recordings or instrumental sections of vocal numbers, there are exceptional cases of drummers accompanying entire vocal recordings with emphatic backbeats, the most remarkable being those on Buddy Johnson’s ‘Walk ‘Em’ (1945), played by Teddy Stewart, and Rabon Tarrant’s brushed, but penetrating, backbeat swats on ‘Ooh Mop’ (1945) by Jack McVea’s All Stars. These exceptions notwithstanding, the vast majority of recordings made during the 1940s by jump blues artists, including Amos Milburn, Roy Brown, Joe Liggins, Ivory Joe Hunter, and Roy Milton featured light afterbeat drum kit accompaniments, occasionally with loud backbeats during isolated instrumental choruses. This started to change around 1949, after which most of the artists just named began to incorporate consistent backbeat accompaniments.

This is true as well for other strains of 1940s rhythm and blues. Records by leading blues shouters such as Big Joe Turner, Jimmy Rushing, Jimmy Witherspoon, Wynonie Harris, and Tiny Bradshaw eschew consistent backbeats until after 1949. For instance, Big Joe Turner released dozens of recordings during the 1940s, but his earliest record with consistent backbeats is 1950’s ‘Jumpin’ at the Jubilee’, and even so, the strong handclapped gospel backbeats overpower the unknown drummer’s snare drum. By 1953, however, Turner’s records commonly featured heavy snare backbeats, which are particularly emphatic and up front of the mix on his biggest hits, ‘Honey Hush’ (1953, Alonzo Stewart, drums), ‘Shake, Rattle, Roll’ (1954, Connie Kay, drums), and ‘Flip, Flop, Fly’ (1955, Connie Kay, drums).

We have already encountered the hand-clapped gospel backbeats on Wynonie Harris’s ‘Who Threw the Whiskey in the Well’ and ‘Good Rockin’ Tonight’; however, neither feature drum-kit backbeats for the entirety of the song, nor do any pre-1949 recordings by Harris, which typically feature even four-beat shuffle grooves similar to those on Jordan’s recordings. Starting with ‘All She Wants to Do Is Rock’, a paean to a sexually voracious girlfriend recorded with Joe Morris’s band (Kelly Martin, drums) in 1949, strong backbeats figure prominently on many of his records. For instance, ‘Lovin’ Machine’ (1951) features drummer William Benjamin playing heavy backbeats accompanied by a swing pattern played on slightly opened hi-hats. As in the introduction to ‘Good Rockin’ Tonight’, reverberating, loose hi-hats produce a noisy, ‘dirty’ tone (as opposed to the crisp, ‘clean’ tone of tightly closed hi-hats) that – along with the emphatic backbeats, growling horns, and honking saxes – provide a raunchy backdrop to Harris’s sexually charged lyrics.

Garry Tamlyn traces a similar trajectory with blues instrumentalist-singers of the 1940s. Backbeats are rarely featured for an entire track on recordings by artists such as Muddy Waters, Eddie Boyd, ‘Big’ Bill Broonzy, Floyd Dixon, and others throughout most of the 1940s, but become increasingly common from roughly 1949 onwards.²⁹ Notable exceptions include Jazz Gillum’s ‘Roll Dem Bones’ (1946) and Muddy Waters’s ‘Hard Day Blues’ (1946), both featuring drummer Lawrence ‘Judge’ Riley, a fixture of the Chicago blues scene. On the former, Riley accompanies the entire tune, excepting stop-time sections, with some of the heaviest, most consistent backbeats recorded during the 1940s. The latter features solid, if relatively subdued, backbeats throughout, but, following several verses decrying a life of frustration, Riley explodes with emphatic backbeats that erupt from beneath the musical surface, blowing the lid off of the recording’s dynamic restraints and impelling a fiery James Clark piano solo.

The Big Beat Takes Over

Pioneer that Riley was with his heavy, albeit often sporadic, backbeats on recordings by Arthur Crudup, ‘Big’ Bill Broonzy, Muddy Waters, and others, it is not likely he had a profound impact beyond the Chicago blues scene before 1950. None of his backbeat-based recordings cracked the charts, nor was there a proliferation of backbeats on record after he started employing them in 1946. But there would be after 1949, most likely due to the cumulative impact of several enormously successful, backbeat-based recordings from that year (in addition to ‘The Fat Man’, mentioned above, and ‘Good Rockin’ Tonight’ from the previous year).

Wynonie Harris points to one of them in ‘All She Wants to Do Is Rock’, when he boastfully proclaims:

• My baby don’t go for fancy clothes, high class dinner, and picture shows,

• All she wants to do is stay at home and hucklebuck with daddy all night long.

Harris’s use of the term ‘hucklebuck’ as a euphemism for sex is a reference to the biggest rhythm-and-blues hit of 1949, ‘The Huckle-Buck’ by Paul Williams and His Hucklebuckers, an instrumental track based on Charlie Parker’s ‘Now’s the Time’ (1945), now outfitted with a backbeat-based groove anchored by Reetham Mallett. During statements of the main theme (starting at :35 and 1:54), Mallett swats the backbeat more forcefully and drops heavy bass drum bombs that anticipate selected downbeats, boosting the allure of Parker’s slinky melody with insinuating low-end bumps, an early instance on record of the backbeat played in conjunction with a prominent, syncopated bass drum part. The effect proved irresistible, and ‘The Huckle-Buck’ spent a record-breaking fourteen weeks atop the R&B chart.³⁰

The same day Williams’s band recorded ‘The Huckle-Buck’ (15 December 1948) in New York City, Big Jay McNeely’s All Stars recorded ‘Deacon’s Hop’ in Los Angeles, which also topped the R&B chart in 1949, fuelled by a heavily percussive, backbeat-based accompaniment. The recording opens with McNeely soloing to the accompaniment of nothing but loud swing hi-hats and handclaps that double the swing rhythm with accents on two and four. The stark saxophone-percussion texture alternates with full band sections, during which drummer William Streetser lays down heavy backbeats, fattened by loud, loose hi-hat hits. The title ‘Deacon’s Hop’ implies the same comingling of the sacred and secular we encountered with Harris’s ‘Good Rocking Tonight.’ Sonically, the handclaps evoke the world of worship, while the emphatic backbeats and ‘dirty’ reverberating hi-hats match McNeely’s bawdy honking, moaning saxophone. Documenting a McNeely performance, photographer Bob Willoughby apparently snapped one of his shots precisely on the backbeat as audience members pound the stage and snap their fingers in unison (Figure 3.3). The image captures the power of communal backbeating and illuminates why it was so threatening to conservative leaders in the 1950s; enraptured male fans beat the stage violently with clenched fists while a white female fan snaps her fingers, just visible between McNeely’s legs as he writhes suggestively and wails on the saxophone to the intense delight of the crowd.

Figure 3.3 Big Jay McNeely, Olympic Auditorium, Los Angeles, 1951

(used with permission of © Bob Willoughby, mptvimages.com)

One of the most impactful backbeats of the early 1950s appears on ‘Sixty-Minute Man’, the Dominoes’ massive 1951 hit. Like other early backbeat-driven hits, ‘Sixty Minute Man’ fuses the sacred with the sexual, as a vocal harmony group of the gospel tradition offers a graphic celebration of swaggering male sexuality. The backbeat, played by a drummer whose name went unrecorded, is bolstered by gospel handclaps, both placed high in the mix of a sparse arrangement. The ‘in-your-face’ backbeat at the song’s moderate tempo projects the erotic rocking that Allan Bloom would decry as ‘the beat of sexual intercourse’.³¹ It helped drive ‘Sixty-Minute Man’ to the top of the R&B chart, where it stayed for fourteen weeks (matching the record set by ‘The Huckle-Buck’), crossing over to #17 on the pop chart, astounding for a song with such graphic lyrics. By 1952, the backbeat was a well-established convention common in all strains of rhythm and blues. It would require a white performer to bring the backbeat into the living rooms of white, middle-class Americans nationwide.

On 5 June 1956, Elvis Presley caused a sensation with his controversial hip-shaking performance of ‘Hound Dog’ on the Milton Berle Show. Towards the end of the performance, Presley dramatically cues his unsuspecting bandmates to stop, before leading them in a slow, grinding reprise of the tune, conducted largely by Presley’s thrusting pelvis. As drummer D. J. Fontana remembers:

Fontana’s roots in ‘strip music’ apparently involved hard, spanking backbeats, which he ably deploys at Presley’s slowed down tempo, impelling the singer’s pelvic gyrations. As Matt Brennan explains, it was Fontana who introduced Presley to the backbeat and inspired his famous stage moves.³³ Fontana’s backbeat and Presley’s pelvis caused an uproar, exhilarating and outraging viewers in equal measure, and inspiring the kinds of condemnations of beat music I cited at the beginning of this chapter.

Conclusions

Of course, there was far more at stake than the prudish sensibilities of the white middle class in 1950s America. The ‘vulgar’ performance of Presley and his band reinforced the notion that rock and roll was primarily about ‘disorder, aggression, and sex: a fantasy of human nature, running wild to a savage beat’.³⁴ Most alarmingly, Presley’s performance – profoundly and unashamedly influenced by African-American music and dance – represented a shocking case of cultural desegregation and an imminent threat to a white supremacist ideology entrenched since the nation’s founding. And it did so backed by the interpellating force of the backbeat, a musical idiom deeply rooted in African-American signifyin(g) practices and strategies of resistance. By the end of the 1950s the backbeat had become firmly established as a primary convention, not only of rock and roll, but of popular music more broadly, and has since become so ubiquitous that its early history has been obscured.

I believe this history helps explain why the backbeat has proven to be so compelling and why it posed such a threat in the mid-1950s. Now a central convention of most popular music genres, drummers, engineers, and producers have dedicated enormous effort to crafting effective treatments of the backbeat, from the conga doubling that gives ‘Let’s Stay Together’ and other Al Green hits their distinctively deep, warm backbeat to the tambourines, tire chains, and wall scrapes used to enhance the backbeats behind the Motown sound, from the celebrated ‘delayed’ backbeat cultivated at Stax Records to the massive, electronically contrived backbeats in some strains of popular music since the 1980s. Reverend Snow was right to consider the backbeat a powerful cultural force, and we are only beginning to recognize its profound impact on American cultural history.

A Cosmopolitan Drumming Practice

In Colombia, música tropical sabanera (and most types of popular music) was recorded and produced in the city of Medellín, located in the northern Andes. As scholars have shown, in the early decades of the twentieth century, Medellín rose as Colombia’s most prominent industrial economy.⁷ Medellín saw the golden days of Colombia’s recording industry and the dawn of its radio industry. However, the origins of música tropical sabanera and the local recording industry are to be found in the Caribbean cities of Cartagena and Barranquilla.⁸

The colonial city of Cartagena de Indias was one of the ‘official’ ports through which enslaved African people entered the Spanish-occupied territories. It was in its peripheral territories where colonists, cimarrones (marrons), and indigenous people met, giving birth to a plethora of miscegenated cultural expressions, some of which run deep in the musics we discuss. Barranquilla, not being a colonial post, rose as Colombia’s most prominent port in the Atlantic – a distinction it continues to hold – in the 1920s. In an era of rising modernization across Latin America, Barranquilla became a node through which foreign performers and imported commodities entered the country; this included recordings, musical instruments, and recording gear. On top of this, radio sets in cities such as Barranquilla were capable of tuning in to Cuban radio stations, by then one of the major players in the transnational music market.⁹ The city was then a cosmopolitan hub. During the first half of the twentieth century, Barranquilla and Cartagena received the most current international sounds. This included jazz, tango, bolero, guaracha, and mambo, among many others.

Cartagena and Barranquilla were also among the first cities with ‘modern’ music industries. Three developments were significant in this regard: the opening of performance venues and the emergence of local radio stations and record labels. In the 1930s, tea rooms, dance halls, and social clubs became meeting points were middle- and upper-class audiences congregated for a time of leisure.¹⁰ These establishments offered live entertainment for well-to-do families, employed local talent, and hosted international staples such as the Cuban Trio Matamoros and the Orquesta Casino de la Playa.¹¹ These visiting artists, plus the music local musicians were listening to through radio and recordings, were fundamental in shaping local jazz bands.¹²

Colombian jazz bands were equally influenced by local ensembles such as the aforementioned millo ensemble and banda pelayera. While the drummers we study did not perform in these indigenous ensembles, they were directly influenced by them. Since at least the 1940s, bandas pelayeras regularly travelled from nearby towns such as Monteria, Sincelejo, and San Pelayo to perform in Cartagena’s main square.¹³ In the case of Barranquilla, the millo ensemble has been an integral part of the city’s soundscape, particularly of its iconic Carnaval de Barranquilla. Therefore, while both of these local ensembles originated in peripheral areas, they were constantly listened to in the coastal cities.

Radio stations and record labels were also key agents. La Voz de Barranquilla and the Emisora Atlántico began operations in 1929 and 1934, respectively. In Cartagena, La Voz de Laboratorios Fuentes opened in 1934, directed by polymath Antonio Fuentes.¹⁴ Many of these stations broadcasted live music in radio-theatres. Antonio Fuentes’s record label Discos Fuentes was key in establishing música tropical sabanera. Bands that pioneered this sound such as Peyo Torres’s Orquesta Granadino (based in Sincelejo) and Simón Mendoza’s Sonora Cordobesa (based in Monteria) recorded for Discos Fuentes as early as 1952.¹⁵ Once in Cartagena, the musicians of these bands were hired to perform and record in other projects.¹⁶ This further illustrates the fluid musical circuit that existed between the coastal cities and their peripheries.

The high demand for jazz bands established this ensemble as a long-standing phenomenon. It was in the midst of this dynamic, cosmopolitan, and diverse context, that the drumming style we study emerged and developed. Knowledgeable of the rhythmic language behind transnational staples such as swing, mambo, and tango, but also deeply rooted in the wide array of local musics around them, the drummers we profile built the rhythmic foundation of what would eventually become a Pan-American phenomenon.

On Rhythms and Entextualization

The onto-epistemological implications of transcribing musics outside the Eurocentric canon have been dealt with at length by ethnomusicologists worldwide. As Ochoa Gautier has argued, entextualization, that is ‘the act of framing the musical object to be studied through multiple modes of “capturing” it’, has been essential in making non-Western musics ‘objects of knowledge’.¹⁷ While we acknowledge this, we also situate the musics we study as another instance of what Ochoa Gautier, following Garcia Canclini, calls Latin America’s ‘unequal modernity’. Being in a liminal space between the dynamics of media capitalism and rural cultural practices, música tropical sabanera is the product of such unequal modernity. Recordings constitute in themselves a form of entextualization.

While the musics we study were influenced by and used techniques derived from Eurocentric knowledge, i.e., orchestration and arrangement techniques, instruments, performance settings, etc., we locate their percussive elements in a space of in-betweenness. Local rhythmic structures intertwined with foreign ones. Importantly, this percussive lexicon existed outside Eurocentric music textualities. The transcriptions below and their respective analysis are then approximations of a rich, fluid, and highly improvisational practice and they constitute themselves an act of entextualization.

Merecumbé, Cumbia, and Porro: The Colombian ‘Tropical’ Sound

The 1950s saw the boom of the Colombian recording industry. Modernized iterations of cumbia (from accordion as well as millo ensembles) and porro pelayero – musics previously deemed as rural and racialized – rose to the national sphere. First emerging in the private clubs, radio stations, and recording studios of Barranquilla and Cartagena, cumbia and porro eventually made it to similar spaces in the Andean cities of Medellín and Bogotá. This was indicative of a major shift in the nation’s aural politics. Such moves came along significative aesthetic changes. Presenting a sophisticated demeanour, the bands leading this charge were those of Edmundo Arias (1925–1993), Antonio María Peñaloza (1916–2005), Francisco ‘Pacho’ Galán (1906–1988), and Luis Eduardo ‘Lucho’ Bermúdez (1912–1994). Such demeanour was matched by the music’s composition. Fully notated arrangements for jazz band ensembles, occasional solos with background accompaniment, and a playful yet controlled rhythmic section were salient characteristics.

Following Wade, scholars have used the concept of whitening to theorize this transition from rural sounds to national soundtrack.¹⁸ Proposing a ‘modernist teleology’ suggesting that bands such as those of Galán and Bermúdez diluted the music’s rhythmic complexity, wore formal garments, and portrayed an aura of sophistication in order to appeal to a middle- and upper-class bourgeois sensitivity, Wade argues that these aesthetic and sociocultural shifts were concomitant with a racialized perception white mestizos (broadly speaking, miscegenated yet predominantly racially, and most importantly ethnically, white populations) had of these rural musics. Adapting music techniques and production values derived from the Euro-American canon was thus an aesthetic manifestation of these whitening racial dynamics.

We nuance this argument by suggesting that these bands’ percussive aspects complicate such a claim. Put differently, we find in the rhythmic lexicon we study a rich, inventive, and intricate drumming technique that, although not ‘traditional’, is also not ‘modern’ in the teleological sense the whitening concept presupposes.¹⁹ Furthermore, we find in this music practice a delicate balance between creativity and media industries. Record labels, composers, band leaders, performers, venues, and consumers were all part of a network of distributed agency.

Similar to Euro-American dance crazes such as the charleston or the twist, in the 1950s, Colombian band leaders sought to establish novel dance rhythms in the market. Bermúdez’s gaita and Galán’s merecumbé were among the few that achieved national (and international) relevance. Created by Pacho Galán in collaboration with drummer Pompilio Rodriguez (1929–2007), the merecumbé – its creators argued – was a combination of merengue and cumbia (as performed by millo ensembles).²⁰ In 1929, Rodriguez’s father Francisco Tomás Rodriguez founded the orchestra Nuevo Horizonte. Pompilio toured with his father since age twelve, performing a wide array of styles. By the time he started working in Galán’s orchestra in 1956, he was a veteran. Rodriguez explains that, in creating the merecumbé, he was inspired by Galán’s brass arrangements.²¹ According to Rodriguez, Galán asked him to build a groove that would fit the genre’s self-proclaimed originality.

The merecumbé became a major hit, prompting Galán to record entire albums in this style.²² Compared to other structures in this chapter, merecumbé is less improvisational. In the track ‘Rico Merecumbé’, released in 1958 by the label Ondina, Rodriguez built three variations of the groove (Example 4.1) that match Galán’s arrangement. We transcribe the basic structure of each variation and number them using Arabic numerals. Variation number one is the merecumbé proper. With it, Rodriguez accompanied the only sung section of the piece; a chorus intercalated with a call and response arrangement between the saxophones and trumpets. Importantly, the actual merecumbé groove (variation one) only appears when the chorus sings ‘hay que rico merecumbé’, making the connection between Rodriguez’s rhythmic structure and the genre explicit.

Example 4.1 Four stages of Pompilio Rodriguez’s merecumbé groove in Pacho Galán’s ‘Rico Merecumbé’

In the track, Rodriguez used most timbres of his hybrid drum kit composed of kick, snare, and cymbals with timbales and cowbells. The cowbell, that only appears at the beginning of the cycle, marks a ‘broad downbeat’, becoming an anchor point for an otherwise syncopated structure. The transition from cáscara to timbal high and low was designed to counterpoint Galán’s merecumbé-style brass arrangement.²³ The resolution on the second off-beat of the second bar is characteristic of cumbia as performed by millo ensembles. While in traditional formats this accent is played on the indigenous bass drum– like tambora, Rodriguez used the timbal low to emulate the instrument’s low-pitched sonority. In variation two, he ‘opened up’ the groove into the crash cymbal playing the constant off-beat stylistic of traditional banda pelayera and millo ensemble. In jazz band formats, this off-beat is played by the hand-held cymbal doubled by the maracón rattle. The one-quarter-note-two-eighth-notes pattern found in most musics called cumbia appears in variation three. In both the second and third variations, Rodriguez added ornaments. The syncopated eighth note he placed in between the main line (second beat of bars 1 and 2 of variation two, and the first beat of the second bar of variation three) gives the groove more drive.

Along with cumbia and merecumbé, porro was the most popular type of música popular sabanera in the 1950s and 1960s. In fact, porro arrived in México before cumbia.²⁴ While musically distinct, all of these rhythms were circulated outside Colombia under the single name cumbia.²⁵ Being one of the most transnationally successful bandleaders of this scene, Lucho Bermúdez’s porro composition ‘Arroz con Coco’ is illustrative of this style’s rhythmic structures.²⁶ Recorded in 1956 for the label Silver, the track features Nicolás Cervantes on drums. Brother of drummer Reyes Cervantes, Nicolás was part of the Barranquilla-based Emisora Atlántico Jazz Band.

In variation one, Cervantes held a strong downbeat on the cowbell (sometimes doubling it with the kick) and phrased in a fluid and syncopated fashion with his other hand. The one-hand roll (bar 1) and eighth note phrasing (bars 2, 3, and 4) illustrate Cervantes’s mindful equilibrium. On the one hand, Cervantes held the downbeat with the cowbell to provide the dancer with a clear sense of beat. On the other hand, Cervantes played fluidly on the timbales, keeping the groove fresh and engaging. In variation two, Cervantes transitioned from half notes to the quarter-note-eighth-note rhythm on the cowbell in a more soloistic fashion. We transcribe a passage of these variations in Example 4.2. Moving between kick, floor tom, and snare, Cervantes shows great dexterity. While on some occasions Cervantes used the kick to support the downbeats, he also used it to orchestrate the improvised phrases built around the cowbell pattern.

Example 4.2 Two stages of Nicolás Cervantes’s porro groove in Lucho Bermúdez’s ‘Arroz con Coco’

The Cuao family deserves a special mention in the history of música tropical sabanera. Formed by brothers Wilfredo (Lucho Bermúdez’s drummer for several years), Cecil (also known as ‘Ciser’ or ‘Calilla’), Tomás (‘El Mono’), and Juan Carlos (‘Juancho’), all born in the city of Santa Marta, the Cuao drumming dynasty was deeply influenced by Panamanian drummer Ruben Dario Romerín. Romerín arrived in Santa Marta with a jazz band, eventually settling there. His influence speaks of the crucial role Panamá and Panamanian musicians have had in the history cumbia. We focus on Cecil Cuao’s rendition of the cumbia ‘La Pollera Colorá’, composed by Juan Bautista Madera and Wilson Choperena. Cecil Cuao recorded this version in 1960 with the orchestra of Pedro Salcedo (1910–1988). This track contains several of the rhythmic structures that became staples of cumbia, as performed by these formats, especially its opening section. In it, Cuao focuses on the timbal low and cáscara playing a series of breaks (Example 4.3, variation one).

Example 4.3 Three stages of Cecil Cuao’s cumbia groove in Pedro Salcedo’s ‘La Pollera Colorá’

Following the local terminology, we call these repiques. We do so to stress the geopolitical specificity of this drumming practice and avoid faux homologies with Euro-American counterparts such as ‘fills’ or ‘comping’. Repiques are passages where the basic groove is ornamented, leaving the main rhythmic structure altogether at times. Deeply rooted in local drumming practices, repiques are an expression of enjoyment and virtuosity. Although common in transitional parts of the structure, repiques can happen at any time and with different intensities.

In ‘La Pollera Colorá’, Cuao’s repiques derive from the rhythmic structures of the tambora as performed in millo ensembles. These structures are fundamental to set the tone of the track. We include the llamador hand drum in the transcription (replaced on this track by a conga) to show the polyrhythmic quality of the groove. The phrasing constantly driving towards, and often resolving on, the second off-beat (bars 2 and 4 of variation one) is particularly stylistic. After the introduction, Cuao added the cáscara, using flams that emulate the tambora sound and technique (bars 1 and 3 of variation two). In variation two, Cuao used a mixture of rim shots and repiques to accompany the instrumental melody. Finally, when the voice appears, Cuao played a bare-bones version of the tambora cumbia groove in variation three.

Gaitas and Fandangos Binarios: José Mariá Franco and the Rural-Cosmopolitan Sound

José María Franco was one of the most creative drummers of música tropical sabanera. His work with Orquesta Emisora Fuentes, Orquesta A No. 1, Sonora Curro, and band leaders Pedro Laza (1904–1980) and Rufo Garrido (1896–1990) are particularly salient. The sound of these bands has been characterized as ‘rootsy’.²⁷ Arguably, this notion has been constructed in relation to Lucho Bermúdez’s and Pacho Galán’s bands. The latter presented a more sophisticated image and a sound more in line with the Latin American dance bands of the era. In contrast, Laza’s and Garrido’s bands were less stylized. Showing a more direct connection to banda pelayera, their performers displayed a sense of technique and sound quality mostly unconcerned with Eurocentric standards. Under the guidance of Discos Fuentes’ owner Antonio Fuentes, Pedro Laza made the connection explicit by naming his band Pedro Laza y sus Pelayeros.

Drumming-wise, José María Franco’s style was improvisational and deeply rooted in rural traditions. Using a hybrid drum kit composed of snare, kick, hi-hat, cymbals, and timbales, Franco adapted the distributed percussion traditionally performed in banda pelayera (snare, hand-held cymbals, and bass drum) into a single kit. In ‘La Compatible’, Franco performed four variations of the groove (Example 4.4). In the introduction (variation one), eighth notes on the cáscara are overlaid by a constant off-beat on the timbal low, a common trait in the gaita style. During the brass melody (variation two), Franco ‘opened up’ this syncopated feel into the crash cymbal, ornamenting on the timbales. The one-quarter-note-two-eighth-notes cumbia pattern appears with the clarinet melody/solo (variation three), played on the cáscara with some important variations we consider below. For the trombone solo (variation four), Franco ‘closed up’ the groove, avoiding variations and transitioning from cáscara to woodblock/cha cha bell (also called ‘coquito’), playing straight eighth notes at times and making the overall texture more articulated.

Example 4.4 Four stages of José Franco’s gaita groove in Pedro Laza’s ‘La Compatible’

The excerpt from Franco’s repique in La Compatible we transcribe in Example 4.5 illustrates the music’s improvisational nature and rhythmic style. The eighth-note-to-quarter-note rhythmic resolution towards the second off-beat (bars 1 and 8) and the dotted eighth notes transitioning between downbeats and off-beats (bars 2 to 6), all of them in the timbal’s low register, are stylistic of traditional cumbia as performed by tambora in millo ensembles.

Example 4.5 José Franco’s repiques in Pedro Laza’s ‘La Compatible’

In ‘El Arranque’, also recorded in 1960 for Discos Fuentes and released in the album Fandango, Laza and Franco elaborated on the traditional style of fandango as performed by banda pelayera. While the traditional fandango is ternary, El Arranque’s subdivision is mostly binary. Due to the fact that the track is called a fandango in the record but that it is binary, we use the denomination fandango binario. Using a similar drum kit configuration, Franco kept a steady line on the kick throughout (Example 4.6). The structure he used in variation one is found in musics across the Americas; it is commonly known as the Cuban tresillo (♩. ♩. ♩).This cell is also found in several musics of the Colombian-Caribbean. Importantly, the rhythmic feel of the figure is neither binary nor ternary. This probably has to with the track’s fast tempo, but also with Franco’s familiarity with these percussive languages. In particular, the second dotted eighth note falls in a rhythmic space non-quantizable under Eurocentric standards. This is crucial in building the overall character of the track.

Example 4.6 Four stages of José Franco’s fandango binario groove in Pedro Laza’s ‘El Arranque’

As Franco held this figure on the kick, he phrased on the snare. The technique and style are deeply influenced by banda pelayera. The unarticulated rolls and sudden and syncopated rim-shot accents with a three-against-two feel are stylistic of this tradition. The maracón, playing a constant figure departing from the off-beat and landing on the downbeat, created a polyrhythmic, syncopated, and ‘ahead-of-the-beat’ feeling. In the second variation, Franco transitioned to the cha cha bell in ‘coquito’ style. In variation three, Franco doubled the maracón. However, on this occasion, Franco muted the crash cymbal on the downbeat, a common technique used in música tropical sabanera.

In Franco’s style, and particularly in his collaborations with Pedro Laza and Rufo Garrido, we find a language deeply influenced by banda pelayera. However, cosmopolitan influences are also salient. The use of timbales and Franco’s orchestration on the cáscara and cowbells shows a strong link to Afro-Cuban musics, especially to guaracha. As a matter of fact, the bands of Garrido and Laza recorded several ‘Colombian guarachas’. On top of that, the fact that a drum kit was used and that these local musics were being performed by jazz band ensembles signals a strong connection to US swing music. We observe similar influences in the drumming techniques employed by all the drummers considered in this chapter.

Closing Remarks

We have used the term música tropical sabanera to group a wide variety of sociocultural contexts and music practices. On the musical side, two characteristics connect them; the jazz band format and an aesthetic practice that syncretized rural musics of the Colombia-Caribbean with transnational ones such as swing and guaracha. The emergence of these musics was concomitant with the advent of the Colombian music industry in the twentieth century.

This process of commercialization and syncretisation does not imply a teleology in which music continuously evolved to reach Euro-American (read white) standards – what we have called modernist teleology. The aesthetic practices and racial dynamics of música tropical sabanera tell a much more nuanced story. While the music of Pacho Galán, Lucho Bermúdez, and Pedro Salcedo did portray a more sophisticated aura, its percussive lexicon was anything but ‘diluted’ or ‘simplified’ (adjectives often used to describe these musics vis-à-vis the style of millo formats). The rhythmic structures we have analysed tell us about a creative, exciting, and idiosyncratic music practice. Signalling a different aesthetic practice, the bands of Pedro Laza and Rufo Garrido developed a sound more influenced by local practices, particularly banda pelayera. For all practical purposes, the idea of whitening forwarded by Wade and other scholars accounts for the fact that, while Bermúdez, Galán, Edmundo Arias, and Pedro Salcedo rose to transnational prominence, Pedro Laza, Rufo Garrido, Clímaco Sarmiento, Peyo Torres, and bands such as La Sonora Cordobesa did not. Bermúdez, in particular, toured transnationally in México, Cuba, and Argentina, performing his arrangements with local orchestras. These tours were important – though not the only – agents in circulating cumbia across Latin America. In this light, the drummers behind these rhythmic structures are the unsung heroes of a sound that spread throughout an entire continent.

As fundamental as these drummers are, their stories and legacy continue to be mostly unknown, even for Colombian drummers studying traditional musics. While the turn of the millennium brought a renewed interest for rural musics by academically trained musicians, the drumming practices of música tropical sabanera have fallen under their radar. Ignoring that such a process already took place half a century before them, contemporary drummers go back to banda pelayera and millo ensembles and re-adapt these rhythms to the drum kit, thus reinventing the proverbial wheel. Be that as it may, the music created by these drummers continues to resound through an entire continent and, nowadays, with cumbia’s international prominence, the entire world.