Six seconds from a 1969 B-side are in thousands of tracks

My flatmate played me the same bit of drums in five tracks in a row, from five different decades, and asked me whose it was. It was six seconds from the B-side of a 1969 single that hardly anyone bothered to listen to, and today they're in thousands of songs: drum and bass, jungle, hip hop, sped-up TikTok remixes. They were played by Gregory Coleman, who died in 2006 without ever getting paid a thing for them.

I told him no clue. I spent the whole night looking it up. It's called the “Amen break”.

Coleman was the drummer in The Winstons, a soul band from Washington. In 1969 they put out a single with two sides. The good one, “Color Him Father”, was written by the singer, Richard Spencer, and won a Grammy in 1970. The other side, “Amen, Brother”, was a cover of a gospel song, and hardly anyone flipped the record over to hear it. Halfway through that track the band drops out and Coleman is left on his own for four bars. Six seconds, give or take.

In the late eighties, hip hop producers started chopping little bits off old records with samplers and looping them. Someone found those six seconds. Then, in the nineties, the jungle crowd in England sped them up until they sounded like a chase scene. And from there they made their way into ads, TV shows and video games.

It's as if the Minecraft dirt block turned up in a thousand games and whoever drew it wasn't in the credits of any of them.

The song was Spencer's, not Coleman's. But neither of them ever got paid for all those songs that used their bit. Spencer said he found out way too late, when there wasn't much left to claim. According to the people who later set up an online fundraiser, Coleman died broke and homeless.

That fundraiser came in 2015. Two British DJs, Martyn Webster and Steve Theobald, set up a page so the people who'd made money off the Amen could chip in something, even if it was just a gesture. They raised £24,000. The money went to Spencer: Coleman had been dead for nine years.

To me, £24,000 for the most used piece of music on the planet is a tip, and on top of that it came too late for the guy who played it.

I told my flatmate the next day and he only held on to one thing. Hardly anyone plays “Color Him Father”, the Grammy one, anymore. The one you hear everywhere is the other side.