Encyclopedia > Back beat

  Article Content

Back beat

Back beat is a style of percussion in common time where a strong rhythmic accent is sounded on the second and fourth beats of the bar, often from striking a snare drum.

The style emerged in the late 1940s in rhythm and blues recordings, and is one of the defining characteristics of rock and roll. Drummer Earl Palmer states the first record with nothing but back beat was "The Fat Man" by Fats Domino in 1949, which he played on. Palmer says he adopted it from the shout [last] chorus in Dixieland.



All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

 
  Search Encyclopedia

Search over one million articles, find something about almost anything!
 
 
  
  Featured Article
UU

... is a disambiguation page; that is, one that just points to other pages that might otherwise have the same name. If you followed a link here, you might want to go back ...

 
 
 
This page was created in 24.5 ms