The Winstons were in an Atlanta studio in early 1969 to record their future hit “Color Him Father,” and nothing for the B-side.
One minute and 26 seconds in, the horns drop and the drummer, Gregory C. Coleman, plays four bars by himself, totaling seven seconds on a throwaway B-side.
In a 20-minute session, they cut an instrumental based on the gospel standard “Amen” and a guitar part Curtis Mayfield had once played for their bandleader, Richard Lewis Spencer.
Those seven seconds became the most sampled recording ever made, prominently featuring on thousands of hip-hop, drum-and-bass, and jungle songs. Coleman received nothing for his work, dying in 2006, homeless and destitute, at 61, likely never knowing how much his 7-second drum break changed music history.
Twenty Minutes In Atlanta
“Color Him Father,” a song about a stepfather raising another man’s children, went to No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100. It sold a million copies by July 24, 1969, followed by a Best Rhythm and Blues Song Grammy win.
The Winstons were a Washington, D.C., band that rose to prominence as the backing band for The Impressions. Spencer played tenor saxophone and sang lead. Coleman drummed and sang behind him, alongside Phil Tolotta on organ, Quincy Mattison on guitar, Ray Maritano on alto saxophone, and Sonny Pekerol on bass.
Because the band featured Black and white musicians, Southern gigs kept falling through, contributing to the band’s breakup in 1970, less than a year after their record went gold.
Nobody in the band expected a 7-second drum break would immortalize them.
“Everybody was doing drum beats, you know?” Spencer told NPR in 2017. “It just was nothing new to me.”
Seven Seconds, Four Bars
What Coleman played seems small compared to its lasting impact. For two bars, he repeats the simple beat the song has been riding. In the third bar, he holds a snare hit back, and in the fourth, he leaves the first beat empty, plays a syncopated figure across the gap, and brings the crash cymbal in unexpectedly early.
The tempo sits around 136 BPM, allowing the loop to slow to a crawl in hip-hop or exceed 160 BPM for jungle without falling apart.
Producers have spent decades ruminating on why it works. Spencer, asked the same question by WFAE in 2017, said he had “tried to think” about it and came up with nothing.
The Break Gets Loose
The record found its second life in the 80s. In 1986, the compilation series for DJs, Ultimate Breaks and Beats, featured “Amen, Brother.”
Hip-hop artists like Salt-N-Pepa, Mantronix, and NWA all sampled it. British producers went another direction, chopping, reversing, and time-stretching it until the four bars were almost unrecognizable, and building jungle and drum and bass on top of it.
Even the theme from Futurama uses it, along with music icons like David Bowie and Amy Winehouse.
Counts vary, but NPR put the figure at roughly 2,000 songs using the sample as of 2017. The sampling licensor Tracklib has since put it above 6,000.
Spencer held the copyright and did not know any of this was happening until 1996, when a record exec visited him at his job with the Washington Metro to ask for the master tape. The statute of limitations for copyright infringement was three years, so the window had closed long before he knew it existed. Interestingly, a 2024 Supreme Court ruling has since changed the three-year window to be from when the plaintiff became aware of the infringement.
The recording predated Feb. 15, 1972, so sound recordings like it sat outside federal copyright protection anyway. Had the band re-recorded the track after 1972 and licensed it properly, it likely would have been worth millions of dollars.
Spencer tried twice. He said he wanted “to see if I could regain some of my money,” and that “it was just too expensive.”
“[Coleman’s] heart and soul went into that drum break,” he told The Economist in 2011. “Now these guys copy and paste it and make millions.”
By 2015 he had softened some and told the BBC it was “not the worst thing that can happen to you,” and it was “flattering” for a stranger to want to use something he was part of.
Coleman himself passed away on Feb. 5, 2006, at 61, reportedly homeless and destitute.
He reportedly moved to Atlanta after the band ended and picked up work where he could find it.
Spencer said it was unlikely his drummer ever understood his impact.
A Gesture Of Goodwill
In February 2015, a British DJ named Martyn Webster set up a GoFundMe page to raise money for Spencer. The goal was only £1,000, which it surpassed on the first day.
Webster was careful about what the campaign was. “In no way a means to try to chase royalties, fees or to pay for sample clearance,” he wrote. “It is nothing more than a gesture of goodwill.”
By the campaign’s end, it raised roughly $26,000 from nearly 2,000 donors who realized and were grateful for The Winstons’ outsized impact on modern music.
“You guys are the best,” Spencer said. “Thank you very, very much.”
He had already built a normal life of his own, far from music in his hometown of Wadesboro, North Carolina, where he was a high school history teacher. He told NPR he was prouder of his son’s college degree than of the Grammy.
The North Carolina Music Hall of Fame inducted him in October 2017, and he passed away on Dec. 27, 2020, at 78.
On May 14, 2026, the Library of Congress added “Amen, Brother” to the National Recording Registry, the list it keeps of recordings with “cultural, historical or aesthetic importance in the nation’s recorded sound heritage.”
No royalty has ever been paid for the break.