About a minute and a half into “Amen, Brother”, a 1969 B-side by the Washington, D.C., soul band the Winstons, the rest of the band falls silent. For four bars, roughly six seconds, only Gregory Coleman’s drums are left. That passage is a drum break. It has been looped, sped up and cut apart in more than 1,500 other songs, the BBC reported in 2015. In May 2026 the Library of Congress added the record to the National Recording Registry. Nobody in the Winstons ever saw royalties from the sampling.
A drum break is where the band stops and the drums play on
In funk and soul, a break is a short stretch where everything except the rhythm falls silent: no bass line, no vocal, no guitar. Sometimes the drummer plays alone, sometimes with a conga or a tambourine. It usually lasts a few bars and comes late in the song, as a release before the full band returns.
For the musicians who recorded them, breaks were arrangement details. James Brown called for one on “Funky Drummer” with a shouted “give the drummer some”. The Winstons added theirs because “Amen, Brother” was too short. The track was cut in Atlanta in the spring of 1969 as filler for the single “Color Him Father”, and bandleader Richard Lewis Spencer stretched it with a drum solo, he told the BBC.
These few seconds became raw material because they are clean. A break contains a complete groove with nothing on top of it. Whoever lifts it out gets a rhythm section with no melody to clash with a new song.
Kool Herc stretched breaks with extra copies of records
The first people to lift breaks were DJs. In the Bronx in the early 1970s, Kool Herc built a part of his DJ sets that he called the Merry-Go-Round, playing all the records he had with beats in them, one by one, he told The New York Times in 2006. As he acquired extra copies of certain records, he could extend their percussion passages indefinitely by working the turntables by hand, the newspaper wrote.
The record he leaned on hardest was “Apache” by the Incredible Bongo Band, a studio project put together by the MGM executive Michael Viner. The album it came from, “Bongo Rock”, sold poorly. In the Bronx, the opening drums and bongos of “Apache” became what Herc called “the national anthem of hip-hop”. Who actually played drums on it is disputed. The session drummer Jim Gordon is usually credited, while the 2013 documentary “Sample This” names Kat Hendrickse, the Vancouver Sun reported.
Samplers let producers loop and chop breaks without turntables
In the mid-1980s, samplers became affordable enough for hip-hop producers, and a break no longer had to be looped by hand on two turntables. It could be recorded once and repeated by a machine. Two releases from 1986 put the material within reach. “In the Jungle Groove”, a James Brown compilation, brought “Funky Drummer” back into circulation. The same year a record collector named Lenny Roberts and the remixer Louis Flores began the “Ultimate Breaks and Beats” series. Its 25 volumes of break-heavy tracks, released up to 1991, were used by producers as a do-it-yourself production kit.
The breaks on those compilations became hip-hop’s shared vocabulary. Clyde Stubblefield’s pattern on “Funky Drummer”, recorded with James Brown’s band and released as a single in 1970, runs under Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” and more than 1,000 other songs, Rolling Stone wrote when he died in 2017. The 1973 single “Impeach the President” by the Honey Drippers, a protest song about Richard Nixon on the small Alaga label, offered a dry, tight kick and snare. Lyn Collins’s 1972 single “Think (About It)” gave producers both a drum pattern and a shouted “Yeah! Woo!”.
Chopping, as opposed to looping, began almost by accident. Marley Marl was trying to sample a riff from a record when he caught the snare drum just before it. The sampled snare sounded better than the one in his drum machine, he told NPR in 2013. Once single hits could be cut out of a break, a producer no longer had to repeat someone else’s groove. The kick, snare and hi-hat could be rearranged into a new pattern that kept the sound of the original room and the feel of the original player.
The Amen break built jungle, and its drummer was never paid
The “Amen break” reached hip-hop in the mid-1980s. Salt-N-Pepa’s “I Desire” from 1986, which uses it slowed down, was one of the first tracks to sample it, and N.W.A’s “Straight Outta Compton” came later. The bigger change came in Britain in the early 1990s. Producers of jungle and later drum and bass sped Coleman’s four bars up far beyond their original tempo and rearranged the hits into rolling, stuttering patterns. The break’s syncopated rhythm made it easy to chop up and rearrange, and its punch made it sound unique, the artist Nate Harrison, who made a documentary about it, told the BBC. Oasis and David Bowie both used it in 1997.
The Winstons split up in 1970. Spencer, who owned the copyright to “Amen, Brother”, received no royalties from the sampling and at first called it plagiarism. Coleman died homeless in Atlanta in 2006. In 2015, two British DJs started an online fundraiser for Spencer, which had raised more than £18,000 by the end of March that year. By then, Spencer said that as a black man in America he found it flattering that someone wanted to use something he had created. Stubblefield’s story was similar: he was not credited as a writer of “Funky Drummer” and saw little from the sampling. “I think it’s disrespectful not to pay people for what they use,” he told The New York Times in 2011, as quoted by Rolling Stone.
Bonham’s “When the Levee Breaks” drums carry the sound of a stairwell
Not every classic break comes from funk. The two-bar drum intro to Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks”, from the band’s fourth album in 1971, has been sampled by the Beastie Boys and many others. The sample carries the room as much as the playing. The engineer Andy Johns set John Bonham’s kit up in the lobby of Headley Grange, a house in Hampshire, and hung two Beyerdynamic M160 microphones up the first flight of stairs. He ran them through heavy compression and a Binson Echorec delay, he told MusicRadar in 2013.
A drum machine does not capture that kind of room. Machines such as the ones behind the house and techno records of the 1980s produce a fixed, identical hit every time. A sampled break keeps one drummer on one kit in one room, with every small push and drag left in.
Producers still chop breaks, but a sample is not free to use
The workflow has hardly changed since Marley Marl’s snare: record the break, cut it into single hits or short slices, then play the slices back in a new order, often layered with programmed drums. The steps are the same on a hardware sampler, as in this SP-404 MK2 workflow, and in software on a computer. Breaks suit practice. They are short, they groove, and nothing else is in the way.
Releasing music built on someone else’s break is a different matter. In the 1980s sampling was still a legal grey area, the BBC noted in its story about the Amen break. A recorded song carries two separate copyrights: one in the sound recording and one in the underlying composition, which can belong to different owners, as the US Copyright Office explains. Sampling a break from a record copies both, so clearing it means permission from the owner of the master recording and from the owner of the composition. A producer who wants to release such a track can clear the sample, use breaks recorded and licensed for sampling, or program new drums in the spirit of the originals, the way drum machine sounds are often recreated rather than copied.
None of the drummers recorded these passages to be sampled. Coleman was filling out a B-side and Stubblefield was playing a pattern of his own on a James Brown session. Bonham was playing at the bottom of a staircase because the engineer had an idea. The few seconds they left behind are still being looped and cut up today.
Last fact-checked: 21 October 2026