The Human Hambone

The Human Hambone. Produced by Ed Bedrosian and Cameron Burr. Directed by Mark Morgan. (Brooklyn, NY: First Run/Icarus Films, 2005. $298.00 DVD or VHS 47 min, $198.00 VHS 30 min) An informative and entertaining documentary, The Human Hambone explores and celebrates the body as percussion instrument. The point of departure is hambone, a rhythmic expression primarily involving the slapping of thighs, chest, and mouth, but the film addresses many other forms of body percussion. The artists, an array of professionals and amateurs, invite us to rejoice in rhythm. The exposition starts with a discussion of the human tendency to entrain, a function of our inherent rhythmicity. Hambone, as demonstrated in this film by practitioners Sam Grier (Chicago), Steve Hickman (Virginia), David Holt (North Carolina), Derique McGee and Keith Terry (California), and Sandy Silva (Quebec) , is an exemplar. The prevailing theory for origins looks to Africa, where drums have long transmitted messages across distance. In the documentary, Cornell University historian Margaret Washington discusses as having developed when the use of drums was denied to African slaves in America by their white owners. Applying the term hambone to this elaboration of body percussion signifies the manner in which it makes something out of almost nothing, the way the slaves made soup using the or ham hocks. (Alternatively, ethnographer Kyra Gaunt suggests that the term derived from hand-bone [Gaunt 2006:63].) The film then presents a segment on stepping, a practice popular among African American college fraternities and sororities that involves synchronized, choreographed movements performed by groups of as many as twenty participants, all using hands, feet and vocal sounds, and often incorporating elements of hambone. Stepping has spread to high school campuses and elementary school playgrounds. Like hip hop, it has gained a following that crosses racial lines. (Other film treatments include Steppin' [Harkness 1992] and Stomp the Yard [White 2007].) For historical comparison, I recommend the Pete and Toshi Seeger Film Collection in the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress, which contains footage of Sonny Terry and J. C. Burns performing hambone. The segment shows a clear continuity of moves between the of an earlier generation and the stepping of today (Seeger and Seeger 2003) . The film proceeds to several varieties of percussion produced by extensions of the body. Shoehorn, a saxophone player, provides his own percussion by tap dancing. Tap dancer Jimmy Slyde and percussionist Bob Moses demonstrate their impressive rhythmic collaborations with the fluidity of verbal conversation. Street performers tap dance with found metal objects tacked to the bottoms of their shoes. Artis the Spoonman skillfully plays spoons, an eclectic offshoot of body percussion. Radioactive, from San Francisco, and Click the Supah Latin, from Los Angeles, present beat box, a form using mouth sounds to imitate a drum machine. The final section of the film sums up the occurrence of rhythm in the cycles in nature and in our own bodies. A documentary film on and other forms of body percussion is long overdue, and The Human Hambone covers material that has thus far received sparse treatment. Alan Lomax's choreometric films Palm Play (Lomax and Paulay 1979) and Step Style (Lomax and Paulay 1979), though both provide footage exploring the use of hands and feet in dance, manage to sidestep hambone. …

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