Seven seconds of drumming built hip-hop, jungle and the Futurama theme. The drummer died homeless, and the band never saw a royalty

You have heard it, even if you have never heard of it. A cracking snare, a hissing cymbal, a kick drum that skips, then the whole thing loops. It has played under gangsta rap, rave tracks, car ads, video games and the theme of the cartoon Futurama.

It was recorded in Atlanta in early 1969 by a band almost nobody remembers, on the side of a record almost nobody turned over. The four bars that drummer Gregory Coleman played that day became, by the count of every major tally, the most sampled piece of recorded music in the world.

And the people who made it got nothing.

Who were the Winstons?

A soul and funk group from Washington DC, led by singer and saxophonist Richard Lewis Spencer, a North Carolina musician who had played tenor saxophone with Otis Redding and Curtis Mayfield. The Winstons were racially mixed, which in the late 1960s made them hard to book and hard to promote; promoters refused to show the integrated band in their publicity.

Their single “Color Him Father”, written and sung by Spencer, became a top-10 R&B hit and won him a Grammy for best R&B song. The band broke up in 1970.

Why was the drum solo there at all?

Because the B-side was too short. “Amen, Brother” was a quick instrumental riff on the gospel standard “Amen”, built on a guitar figure Mayfield had shown Spencer. Spencer later said the band wrote it in about 20 minutes. To stretch it out, Coleman was given four bars on his own.

Nobody treated the moment as special. The record came out, the A-side was a hit, and the B-side was forgotten for 17 years.

How did a forgotten B-side end up on “Straight Outta Compton”?

Through hip-hop’s first great habit: the breakbeat. Early hip-hop DJs in New York had learned that crowds danced hardest to the “break”, the stretch of a funk record where everything drops out except the drums. By looping two copies of the same record on two turntables, a DJ could make a seven-second break last all night.

In 1986 a compilation series called Ultimate Breaks and Beats, made for DJs, put “Amen, Brother” on a record alongside other prized drum breaks. Once it was on vinyl in every serious DJ’s crate, and once affordable samplers arrived that could capture a few seconds of sound and replay it on cue, the break was everywhere.

Here is how it spread:

1. 1986: Salt-N-Pepa’s “I Desire” is among the first tracks to sample it.
2. 1988: Mantronix’s “King of the Beats” chops and rebuilds the break so it becomes the whole track.
3. 1988: N.W.A puts it under “Straight Outta Compton”, and Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock use it on “Keep It Going Now”.
4. Early 1990s: British producers speed it up and slice it into hyperactive patterns, and it becomes the signature sound of jungle and drum and bass.
5. Later: It turns up in rock (including Oasis), in electronic music from Aphex Twin, in advertising, and on television, including Futurama’s theme.

What made those seven seconds so special?

Three things. It is a true solo: for those four bars nothing else plays, so the drums could be lifted off the record whole and looped without a stray guitar or voice. The pattern is busy and syncopated, but it still sits at about 136 beats a minute, a tempo that works for dancing and survives being pushed much faster. And the recording has a grainy “crunch” that survives being sped up, slowed down, chopped and distorted. Musicians have described that grit as part of its appeal.

Jungle producers in particular found that cutting the break into single hits and re-ordering them gave them an endless supply of new rhythms from one source, like a whole drum kit in four bars.

Why were Coleman and Spencer never paid?

Spencer owned the copyright to “Amen, Brother”. Neither he nor Coleman received royalties for the thousands of records that used the break.

Spencer did not even know until 1996, when a record executive asked him for the master tape. By then he had left music, gone to college, earned a doctorate from Howard University and was working in Washington. Under US law at the time, he had three years from an infringement to sue, and most of the famous uses were long past that window.

Looking back on the years after the hit, he said he was left with “a high school education and a Grammy, which had no value”. At different times he called the sampling plagiarism and, later, said he found it flattering.

Coleman’s story ended harder. He died homeless and destitute in 2006. Spencer said he believed Coleman probably never knew what his seven seconds had become.

Did anyone ever try to make it right?

In 2015 two British DJs, Martyn Webster and Steve Theobald, set up an online fundraiser for Spencer, framed as a thank-you from the dance music community that had built a scene on his band’s record. Almost 2,000 people gave about US$26,000.

Spencer went on to teach high school, become a licensed Baptist minister and write a novel. He was inducted into the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame in 2017 and died on 27 December 2020, aged 78.

In May this year the Library of Congress added “Amen, Brother” to the National Recording Registry, the list of recordings judged worth preserving for all time. Its citation was blunt about why: the B-side made the registry because of Coleman’s drum solo.

Why does this matter if you have never made a beat?

Because the Amen break is the reason the rules for music changed. In the early sampling years, producers lifted whatever they liked. Then the courts caught up. In 1991 a New York judge opened his ruling against rapper Biz Markie, who had sampled a Gilbert O’Sullivan song without permission, with the words “Thou shalt not steal.” In 2005 a US appeals court went further in a case over a two-second guitar sample: “Get a license or do not sample.”

Since then, almost every sample on a major release has had to be cleared and paid for, which is why many of the records built in hip-hop’s golden age could never be made the same way today, and why producers now spend money hunting for or recreating drum breaks instead of borrowing them.

The rules arrived too late for Coleman and Spencer. Every time the break plays in a new song, it still carries their seven seconds, and none of their name.