In 1969, a soul and funk band from Washington, D.C. called The Winstons recorded a single. The A-side was a love song called "Color Him Father." It won them a Grammy for Best R&B Song. The B-side was an instrumental called "Amen, Brother." Halfway through the track, the drummer Gregory Coleman plays a six-second solo — four bars of drums, with no other instruments.

The record sold modestly. The Winstons broke up within a few years. The song was largely forgotten.

In the mid-1980s, the first affordable digital samplers appeared. Producers began chopping up old records, looping short fragments, and building new tracks on top of them. Crate-diggers searching old soul and funk records came across "Amen, Brother."

Those six seconds, now known universally as the Amen Break, have since appeared on more than 6,000 commercial recordings, by some estimates. They form the rhythmic backbone of entire genres. Early hip-hop tracks, including songs by NWA and Salt-N-Pepa, built on it. The British genres of jungle, drum-and-bass, and breakbeat hardcore are essentially built on chopped and re-pitched variations of the Amen. The break appears on records by David Bowie and Slipknot, and in countless television advertisements and theme tunes.

Gregory Coleman, the drummer who actually played those four bars, never received a cent in sample royalties. Sample copyright in the 1980s and 1990s was legally unclear, and The Winstons had never registered the underlying recording for derivative-works income. By the time the music industry caught up, the break had already been everywhere.

Coleman died homeless in 2006. The most-used drum break in recorded music history earned its creator nothing.