Topic: Movement - Hand Claps
Keeping time in music is a relatively recent western concept that only arose after clocks existed to introduce the concept of precise intervals, and after bars were introduced in music transcription. [1] Classical composers began to define tempo as the number of beats per minute and musicians used mechanical devices like metronomes set to those specifications to regulate their playing.
Speed is only one aspect of rhythm, which may include the standard view of a dominant beat followed one or two equally long offbeats represented by the time signature, patterns of long and short beats, or several different beat motifs played simultaneously.
Whites in this country tend to use their hands to keep time the same way they use their feet. They flatten them and bring the palms and fingers together in an upright prayer position, moving both hands to and from the center to make contact on the downbeats.
In contrast, Bess Lomax Hawes found African Americans used their hands to complement the rhythms set by stepping. She observed:
"To clap well, then, you must start with your feet, since the claps come after the weight changes (or ‘steps’) and thus occur on the normally unaccented beats of the measure (the second and fourth). The movement Mrs. Jones calls ‘stepping it down’ (putting the foot down without changing weight) coincides with the claps." [2]
More important, and contrary to the western assumption that rhythm reinforces the time signature, Hawes added:
"The footfalls, however, are light; the claps are loud, so the sounded emphasis falls on the "weak" beats, or offbeats, of the measure. Most of the time you cannot hear the "strong" beats at all, the feet step so quietly." [3]
Bessie Jones used the term "music" when she was "talking about the hand-clapping," [4] in part because she varied the pitch of the clap. She produced a low tone by cupping her hands slightly and striking the palms and right angles to each other. She created a higher tone by using the slightly bent fingers of one hand against the cupped palm of the other. Straightening the fingers and flattening the palm produced still higher pitches. [5]
The differences in sound can be heard in a video of Inez Andrews’ "It’s a Needed Time" made at the Thompson family reunion in 2008. Apparently, Jeff and his siblings or cousins were gathered in one corner of a hall while the women were preparing the meal and the men were seated at separate tables defining the spaces required by their family units. The intermingling of adults had not yet started, and the children were either with their mothers or off together somewhere. It was the prelude to the reunion.
Jeff was dressed more formally than the others in a shirt and tie, and may have been a preacher or church leader. He was holding a mike, but the camera did not pick up his voice. It was obvious at least some of them, primarily four women, had sung together, and others, especially two men, were drawn to the circle of music.
The song progressed from the prelude through a transition to the denouement. When they began singing the one verse they knew, the women began patting their thighs or moving one of their hands in a finger-snapping motion that produced no sound. One woman also was shifting her weight from foot to foot.
When they repeated the verse, they switched to clapping with flexed hands. The woman in an orange top had extended hands, while a woman in gray brought one hand down onto the other. Another woman in white also brought one hand down on the other and continued the downward motion. The claps grew louder when they entered the transition phase.
The woman in the singing group with a small boy used her free hand to pat her thigh. When he asked to picked up, she began shifting her weight from foot and rotating slightly to diagonals. When she was able to move him to one hip, she again used her freed hand to pat her thigh.
A small group of participants gathered a distance from the singers. One of the women was clapping very softly with cupped hands, and an older man seated between her and another clapping woman was bending his torso back and forth. A woman seated directly in front of the group held a young child and used a fan rhythmically as she leaned from side to side.
Two men slouched against the wall behind Jeff. The younger one kept time with his fingers close to his chest and moved his torso back and forth while bending one knee. The other one, partially hidden, was bending his knees.
The group probably had talked among themselves on how they would perform this song. The video began with Jeff singing the first line. He stepped forward onto his left foot. When the group began echoing his line, he stepped back and began sliding one foot to the other, then repeating the movement in the other direction. He did not raise his feet, and sometimes made the move by rotating his heels into a dancers’ open fifth position.
After two verses the group changed to repeating one line, "you don’t know what tomorrow may bring." They probably got this far from past experience or the preliminary conference, but it was unlikely they decided on repeating the phrase twelve times. Unfortunately, the camera was panning the audience when they changed from the long line to "we need him."
They repeated the shorter line twenty times. Again, they did not need to keep count. Jeff raised his right arm when he wanted them to change to the final line, a repetition of "you don’t know what tomorrow will bring" with the last note extended.
Performers
Vocal Soloist: Jeff T.
Vocal Group: four women
Vocal Director: Jeff made signs for transitions
Instrumental Accompaniment: a guitar was playing rhythm softly; the player was not shown in the video.
Rhythm Accompaniment: hand claps
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Verses: it’s a needed time/tell your son/you don’t know
Vocabulary
Pronoun: you, we
Term for Deity: Him
Special Terms: father was used to tell both the daughter and the son it was a needed time.
Basic Form: three phases
Prelude: repeated verse two times
Transition: the group sang "you don’t know what tomorrow may bring" twelve times while Jeff spoke. He either was repeating part of the line or mentioning Jesus.
Denouement: the group sang "we need Him" twenty times while Jeff spoke. One line was "you know about Jesus."
Ending: repeated "you don’t know what tomorrow may bring"
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: Inez Andrews
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: group, with soloist embellishing the text
Singing Style: unornamented, one syllable to one note except for the word "time." Only the last note was sustained. They sang in unison in voices with distinctive timbres. This was what I called timbraic harmony in Camp Songs. [6]
Solo-Group Dynamics: in the prelude Jeff sang a line and they repeated it; it was not a strict call-response, since they would have sung their lines even if he did not sing his part. In the transition and denouement, the group sang and Jeff spoke while they were singing.
Notes on Performance
Occasion: Thompson Family Reunion, 2008
Location: large hall
Microphones: Jeff was holding a hand mike connected by a cord
Clothing: Jeff was wearing taupe slacks, with an orange shirt and tie. The rest were dressed more casually: the women in skirts or slacks and tops, the men in slacks and long-sleeved shirts.
Notes on Movement
Four movements were used by the group of singers: stepping, clapping, patting the thigh, and a silent finger snap.
Notes on Audience
The men at the tables were quiet and watching, but did not participate in any way. There was applause at the end. The women in the group who had held their hands at waist or chest height raised them to their faces, lengthened their hands, and clapped side to side.
Availability
YouTube: uploaded by NikkiNacole01on 28 July 2008.
End Notes
1. A. M. Jones noted a transcription of drumming "would be manageable if African music was susceptible to our divisive system of regular time-bars, 3/8, 4/4 time and so on: but it is not." He added that, after spending 21 years in Northern Rhodesia, "we shall not be able to draw bar-lines right down the score as in our Western custom. To do so would be to produce a score showing accents and rhythms which would be a travesty of what the African played." (Studies in African Music. London: Oxford University Press, 1959. 1:8 and 1:14.)
William Francis Allen transcribed songs he heard around Beaufort, South Carolina, during the Civil War. He wrote: "the difficulty experienced in obtaining absolute correctness is greater than might be supposed." (iv) Even though "The negros keep exquisite time in singing," (iv) their variations produced "apparent irregularities in the time, which it is no less difficult to express accurately." (vi) He did fit the tunes to standard measures, but despaired of providing a tempo, and only said "most of the tunes are in 2–4, and in most of these a quarter note equals 100–(say) 100-120." (William Francis Allen. "Introduction." The Slave Songs of the United States. Edited by William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison. New York: A. Simpson and Company, 1867. xliv)
2. Bessie Jones and Bess Lomax Hawes. Step it Down: Games, Plays, Songs, and Stories from the Afro-American Heritage. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987 edition. 20. Bessie Jones was first mentioned in the post for 27 October 2017.
3. Jones. 21.
4. Jones. 19.
5. Jones. 22-23.
6. Camp Songs. 196-198.
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