Entry · catalog no. 3606
call and response
/ /ˌkɔl ən rɪˈspɑns/ /kawl uhn rih-SPONSS
noun · The Sea Islands and the plantation South, then everywhere Black people sing · 1860s
✓ Verified
1.
A structure in which a leader's phrase is answered by a group, in singing or in playing or both at once. The backbone of the work song, the spiritual, the blues, gospel, jazz, and the record.
“The whole second half is just him calling and the harp answering him.”
2.
The live exchange between a Black preacher and the congregation, where the answering shapes the sermon as it is being preached.
“By the third point the church was answering on every line, and he preached off what they gave him.”
Origin & Attribution
West and Central African performance practice, retained and reworked by enslaved Africans in the American South and documented from the Sea Islands forward. The people doing it had their own word first. William Francis Allen, collecting in 1867, reported that the lead singer starts the words of each verse, often improvising, and the others, who base him, as it is called, strike in with the refrain. Basing is the community's term. Call and response is the later analytic label, standard in ethnomusicology by the middle of the twentieth century; the archive can name no coiner for it and does not invent one. One honest qualification: lining out, in which a precentor gives a line for the congregation to return, is documented in the Westminster Directory of 1644 and in Scottish Gaelic psalmody. William T. Dargan's argument, which the archive follows, is that Black American practice is a fusion rather than a pure retention. That does not make it less Black. It makes it more precisely what it is.
1867
Allen, Ware, and Garrison publish Slave Songs of the United States and record the singers' own word, basing
1914
Henry Edward Krehbiel gives the structure its first book-length musicological treatment
1948
Richard Alan Waterman formalizes the African-retention argument in the Journal of the American Musicological Society
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide / diaspora
The Sea Islands and the plantation South, then everywhere Black people sing · 1860s
Spoken by
Enslaved and freed Black Southerners, work gangs, and congregations — then every Black musical form that came after
$CALLANThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady159 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
90/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1867
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
Hear it spoken
By region — how it actually sounds
@auntiereg
Atlanta, GA
@deltasoul
Memphis, TN
Contribute your pronunciation
Citations & Sources
■
William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison, Slave Songs of the United States, A. Simpson, 1867
book
■
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, "Negro Spirituals," Atlantic Monthly, June 1867
magazine
■
Henry Edward Krehbiel, Afro-American Folksongs, G. Schirmer, 1914
book
■
Richard Alan Waterman, "'Hot' Rhythm in Negro Music," Journal of the American Musicological Society 1, no. 1 (1948): 24–37
scholarly article
■
+ Cite a sourceWilliam T. Dargan, Lining Out the Word, University of California Press, 2006
book
See also