¿Por qué todo el mundo da la palmada en el mismo sitio?

We ask ourselves

• When a whole class claps, why does everybody land together?
• Where is the strong beat of a song: where your feet go, or where your hands go?
• Can you clap somewhere else and have the song survive it?
• Why do so many rock songs use the same three chords in the same order?
• What is a drummer doing when it looks like they are doing nothing?
• Why does music recorded sixty years ago still lift a whole arena?

Don't answer yet. We come back to these at the end.

The fragment

Before we play anything, we build it with the body. Count out loud — one, two, three, four — and start again, without speeding up.

• Feet mark all four numbers. That is the pulse and it never stops.
• Hands clap on one and on three.

That comes out by itself, because it is what a march does. Now move the clap one number to the right: two and four. The feet carry on unchanged. You will get it wrong, and so will the whole class, for a good while.

When it finally holds, you notice something else. With the clap on one and three the body marches. With the clap on two and four the body sways. Same pulse, same hands.

Now play Chain of Fools, all of it, with nobody talking over it.

What changed

What you just heard is a drummer who never moves for the whole song, which lasts under three minutes. The drummer, Roger Hawkins, puts the kick on one and three, and the snare on two and four. Nothing else. And nothing else is needed.

For centuries, in the music that was written down in Europe, the weight fell on the one. A bar of four was explained as strong, weak, medium, weak: beats 2 and 4 were the weak beats, the filler. That logic marches well, because the foot lands where the accent lands.

African American music in the twentieth century moved the hit onto the beats that were left over. That hit on two and four is called the backbeat, and it is the commonest case of a wider idea, syncopation: putting the accent where the ear is not expecting one.

It did not arrive all at once. For years it was a climax device: in Dixieland jazz it was saved for the last chorus, the shout chorus, when the band leaned in to finish. Earl Palmer, a drummer from New Orleans, said that is exactly where he took it from.

What Palmer did was strip out the ending. He put it in from the first bar to the last, always the same, always in the same spot. It stopped being a shove and became the floor everything else stands on.

Globe Poster, Baltimore, 1950s. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The other half of the invention is the frame: the twelve-bar blues. Twelve bars over three chords, then round again. With those two things — a hit that never moves and a loop everyone knows — you can play with people you have never met, with no sheet music in front of you.

And here is my own verdict: the frame wore out and the hit did not. Repeating those twelve bars with nothing new on top, by the mid sixties they already sounded like a formula. The backbeat is intact sixty years later.

The three songs in this unit prove it, and not one of them is a blues. Chain of Fools has one chord. Sweet Home Alabama has three, but not the blues ones and not in that order. We Will Rock You has no instruments at all for most of its length. In all three, the hit lands on two and four.

Hard facts. Clapping on the weak beat as early as "Roll 'Em Pete", Pete Johnson and Big Joe Turner, 1938. Backbeat marked from start to finish in "Good Rockin' Tonight", Wynonie Harris, 1948; Earl Palmer claimed "The Fat Man", Fats Domino, 1949 for himself.

"Lucille" was recorded on 30 July 1956 at J&M Studios in New Orleans and released in February 1957 on Specialty, with Palmer on drums. The twelve-bar blues is twelve bars over the first, fourth and fifth degrees of the scale.

The same device elsewhere

The backbeat is not only a rock thing, and you do not need a drum kit for it to exist. Three places where the hit also lands off the strong beat, and they are worth hearing back to back:

• Uptown Funk (2015) — the clap never moves off two and four. Everything else is deliberately off the beat, and you only notice because that clap is nailed down. It is in the library.
• Chopin's mazurkas — a bar of three, with the strong accents placed on the second or third beat instead of the first, and with no fixed order. Chopin wrote fifty-nine of them, between 1824 and 1849.
• Samba from Rio de Janeiro — the surdo de marcação, the deepest drum in the section, sounds on the second beat of the basic "one, two". Everything above it hangs off that second hit.

Samba and funk share an African root. The mazurka has nothing to do with either. And all three find the same thing: the body answers better when the hit does not land where it was due.

And here at home?

While Earl Palmer was recording "Lucille" in New Orleans, nothing like it was on Spanish radio. Rock and roll did not come in here through the broadcasters: it came in through a foreign military base.

The Madrid Pacts of 1953 brought three United States Air Force bases to Spain: Torrejón, Morón and Zaragoza. Zaragoza Air Base was USAF from 1958 to 1992. The records arrived with the airmen, and the first Spanish rockers arrived with the records.

The best known was called Rocky Kan, and he worked there. He put it like this: "It all started in 1960, more or less. On the base, since I had good English and listened to people like Elvis Presley and Paul Anka, I caught the bug." The press of the day called him Spain's "first rock and roller".

Alongside him were Baby, Gavy Sender's and Chico Valento. Zaragoza was an odd case: here rock came out as a solo singer, while in Madrid, Barcelona or Valencia the norm was bands. Around those same years the two members of Dúo Dinámico were doing military service in the city.

They made their names on Plataforma de Estrellas, a Sunday-morning contest held at the Teatro Fleta, and at the summer Festivales de Arte in the Jardín de Invierno.

Foto: Jzh2074, CC BY-SA 4.0, vía Wikimedia Commons

Cinema did the rest. King Creole, the Elvis film, is from 1958 and opened in Zaragoza in 1961.

Now count the years, because this is the uncomfortable part. "Lucille" comes out in 1957. Rocky Kan starts "in 1960, more or less". The Elvis film arrives three years late. The backbeat landed here about five years behind, through the back door, and no Spanish station brought it.

Classroom activities

• While Chain of Fools plays: the whole class claps on two and four from the first guitar, before the drums come in. Count how many bars go by until the snare agrees with you.

• While Sweet Home Alabama plays: half the class claps only on two, the other half only on four. Nobody does both. The first slip is audible.

• While We Will Rock You plays: one group does the two stomps, another does the clap. The hands group is playing the backbeat with no drums and no instruments.

• Play: we build Chain of Fools with the band. One chord, and the drums do exactly what this unit is about. The full-band chart and the tab are attached to its own article. Anyone who wants more chords can go to Sweet Home Alabama, which has them.

• Find an exception: everyone brings a song of their own. While it plays, the class claps on two and four. The one that resists is the interesting one.

Key vocabulary

• Weak beat — parte débil: los tiempos 2 y 4 del compás de cuatro
• Backbeat — el golpe en los tiempos 2 y 4, donde la gente da palmas sola
• Syncopation — síncopa: poner el acento donde el oído no lo espera
• Shout chorus — el último estribillo del jazz de Dixieland, de donde salió el backbeat
• Twelve-bar blues — blues de doce compases: doce compases sobre tres acordes

Resources

The songs in this unit are in the library, each with its own article, full-band chart and tab: Chain of Fools, Sweet Home Alabama, We Will Rock You.

The song the unit opens with — Chain of Fools, Aretha Franklin (1967). Its article, with the full-band chart and the tab, is in the library.

The backbeat with nothing on top — Sweet Home Alabama, Lynyrd Skynyrd (1974), also in the library.

The backbeat with no drum kit — We Will Rock You, Queen (1977), also in the library.

Where the hit stops moving — "Lucille", Little Richard (1957), with Earl Palmer on drums.

The accent out of place, on a piano — Chopin's Mazurka Op. 7 No. 1, played by Krzysztof Książek, on the Chopin Institute channel.

The second beat in charge — the drum section of the Mangueira samba school, live. Listen for the deepest drum.

Spain's first rock and roller — Rocky Kan sings "Dixieland Rock" and "King Creole".

• The same hit in current pop — "Uptown Funk", Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars (2015), in the library.
• Where all this comes from — "Pioneers of Rock and Roll: Little Richard, Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry", in the library.
• The companion unit — "Who is playing the drums on this song?", on the drum machine, in the library.