The Amen Break: six seconds The Winstons thought were nothing

In 1969 The Winstons released “Color Him Father”, the story of a man who marries a woman with seven children and raises them as his own. It worked: it won Richard Spencer, who wrote it and sang it, the Grammy for best rhythm and blues song.

On the other side of the single sits “Amen, Brother”, two minutes and thirty seven seconds of an instrumental take on a gospel hymn. That is the side that changed the next thirty years of music.

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Six seconds in the middle of the track

Partway through, the instruments drop away and Gregory Coleman is left alone on the drums. Six seconds, then the band comes back in.

It is not a solo and was never meant to be one. It is a drummer holding time by himself, with the margin of imprecision that a click track in the headphones would have taken out. In 1969 nobody in that room thought anything had happened.

“Everybody was doing drum beats,” Spencer told American public radio in 2017. “It just was nothing new to me.”

The Winstons broke up the same year. Spencer went to work for the Washington public transit system and went back to school.

Eleven years of silence, then a compilation

The break resurfaces in 1980, when Afrika Bambaataa picks the record up for his sets. The account comes from Louis Flores, known as Breakbeat Lou, who was part of what happened next: “I didn’t find it, Afrika Bambaataa did. I credit Afrika Bambaataa, it was in 1980.”

Flores and Lenny Roberts put it on the first volume of Ultimate Breaks & Beats, the series that handed producers isolated breaks on vinyl, ready to use. Flores also explains the trick they used: they played it at 33 RPM instead of 45.

From there it spread by contagion. N.W.A were among the first, in 1988 on “Straight Outta Compton”. In England hardcore producers sped it up until it became something else, and jungle and drum and bass were built on that acceleration. David Bowie used it in 1997 on “Little Wonder”.

The bill that never came

In 1996 Spencer took a call from an English producer who wanted to license the break. It was the first time anyone had asked.

But the track was recorded before 1972, and recordings from that period fall outside federal copyright protection in the United States. Spencer tried anyway: “I tried a couple of times to see if I could regain some of my money, I guess, and it was just too expensive.”

Gregory Coleman died homeless in 2006.

There is another part of this story that rarely gets told, and Spencer states it on the radio without raising his voice: the band’s photograph was kept off the record sleeve, because Southern distributors refused to handle anything that looked like it promoted racial integration. The group was mixed.

I had nothing after the record. I had a high school education and a Grammy, which had no value. So I had to go back to college.

He did go back. A PhD in political science at Howard University, then a return in 2000 to Wadesboro, North Carolina, teaching history at the local high school.

In 2015 the English DJ Martyn Webster opened a fundraiser in his name. Almost two thousand people gave around 26,000 dollars. They are not royalties and nobody pretends otherwise.

What is left

Breakbeat Lou puts it plainly: “this record itself they say is the most sampled record in history. There is no record that was more sampled than that one.”

Six seconds cut in a hurry on the wrong side of a single, by a band that would break up within the year and thought nothing of them.