A History of Musical Screaming
If I asked you to name as song with a great scream in it, you’d probably have one in mind before I finished the sentence. Your criteria would more than likely be generational: maybe it’s the Beatles’ version of “Twist and Shout,” or “Won’t Get Fooled Again” by The Who. It could be Pixies’ “Tame” or “Buried Alive” by Otep Shamaya. Regardless, musical screaming has been with us a long time. The weird thing is, apart from some lists of great songs with screams in them, there’s precious little literature out there on this particular use of the human voice in music. When did people start screaming on recordings? Why? What is being conveyed?
This essay is my attempt at an answer. I started with what I thought was the most basic, and easy to answer, query: what is a scream?
“Boy, that is the million dollar question,” psychologist and Emory University professor Harold Gouzoules told me. “There isn’t a clear-cut definition of a scream.”
Gouzoules collects screams. He gets them from movies, television, YouTube, and non-actors. One thing he’s found is that, although science has given the subject relatively little attention, people have little problem identifying a scream and what it means.
Gouzoules and his graduate students present participants with “a full range of nonverbal vocalizations. Some of them were screams, some laughter, crying, yelling — all that sort of thing. What was really striking is what kind of strong agreement there is in terms of identifying screams. So it seems a particularly salient kind of vocalization that we recognize, and yet science hasn’t come up with an agreed-upon definition.”
Trained as a zoologist, Gouzoules was initially interested in monkey screams and how they were used. Now he’s on to the human version. “You can search the internet and find rabbit screams,” he said. “Remarkably, they sound very human, don’t they? And goat screams and llama screams… So, evolutionarily, it seems like a very conserved class of vocalizations. It hasn’t changed that much. And yet, we humans use screams in a variety of contexts that other animals don’t.”
People hypothesize that the first evolutionary purpose of screaming was to startle a predator, and even now there is a type of frog who screams when picked up. Monkeys and chimpanzees use screams in another context, one associated with fighting — they do it to recruit support. “Monkeys and apes typically have allies in their social groups,” Gouzoules explained, “and these tend to be kin — matrilineal kin, for the most part. And if you get in trouble and you scream, there’s a likelihood that someone’s going to intervene on your behalf. What we found is that, in that context, different species of monkeys have different types of screams, and those types convey information about the severity of the attack, the dominance rank of the attacker, and so forth. This is information that will be pertinent to an ally that might intervene on your behalf and what kind of tactics might be used.”
Humans have significantly broadened the use and meaning of screams. “Humans scream in fear and pain of course,” Gouzoules told me, “but also in excitement and aggression, when startled, and sometimes during sex. Those are all different contexts. And the question is, are there acoustically different kinds of screams that convey information about the context in which they were produced?” Gouzoules then pointed out a situation familiar to parents of young children: those few moments spent trying to decide if the distant screams of your kids are signifying fighting, terror, or joy.
Gouzoules and his team label screams on the basis of context, some of which includes fear (separate from actually being attacked), joyful surprise, startle, and aggression. For the most part, his subjects are able to identify what the scream is meant to convey. (Apparently, fearful and happy screams are harder to distinguish, as parents can attest.)
How does this fit into music? I believe the music helps clue us in to the emotional context of the scream. If, for example, you’re listening to your kids screaming in the distance and knew they were at a playground, you might not be so quick to rush to their aid. Similarly, the song in which someone is screaming will also put us in a contextual environment to help us better understand what they mean.
First, let’s define our term. In the absence of a scientific definition, and for the purposes of this article, a “scream” is a non-verbal vocalization delivered with something called vocal roughness, which Gouzoules says “corresponds to rapid modulation in amplitude.” Anyway. We’ll know it when we hear it.
At some point, screaming became a part of popular music. The exact date and recording is hard to pin down, but what follows will be a useful primer, if not a definitive statement. What might surprise you is that the genesis of musical screaming is Black, Southern, and sanctified.
It all started with the Reverend J.M. Gates, according to Robert Darden, director of the Black Gospel Music Restoration Project at Baylor University. “Gates is a Black pastor in Atlanta, and he is one of the earliest to start recording sermons on 78s,” Darden told me. “And he and about a half-dozen other guys start recording their sermons in the ’20s and ’30s and they become the best-selling race music of all time, at that point.”
Gates is one of the “Big Three” of these recorded preachers, according to Darden. And while I definitely think you should put ears on his “I’m a Soldier in the Army of the Lord,” or Reverend J.C. Burnette’s “The Downfall of Nebuchadnezzar” (both from 1926), I want to highlight what must be the most metal of these recordings, the Reverend A.W. Nix’s “The Black Diamond Express Train to Hell (Part 1)” from the following year:
Nix is the embodiment what the gospel community calls “shouting,” which is distinct from screaming. The term shouting can be traced back to Ring Shouts, early slave music from the Georgia Sea Islands. “The shouting, which is a sign in the gospel world of emotional investment and passion — whether it begins with Gates or the people Gates was hearing on the radio — as an emphasis,” Darden told me. “What Wagner calls ‘inarticulate speech of the heart.’ Like prayer, but caught up in the spirit.”
(“Music,” composer Richard Wagner said, “is the inarticulate speech of the heart, which cannot be compressed into words, because it is infinite.”)
You can hear the spirit enter Nix as he gets his groove on during “The Black Diamond Express.” He sing-talks the sermon, his voice increasingly hoarse, as crowds of the damned board his express train at every stop. But — and, at least to me, this is a distinction with a difference — he doesn’t scream.
That, especially in the secular context, is another thing altogether for the gospel community.
“Screaming is what they call ‘clowning,’” Darden said. “Hysterics, histrionics to impress Sister Flute on the back row. But shouting is reserved for religious emotional release.”
Gates, Burnette, and Nix influenced Rebert Harris, a young gospel singer from Texas. R.H., as he was known, joined a group called Five Soul Stirrers from Houston around 1937. So much can be credited to Harris: he occasionally sang in a high falsetto, unusual for gospel at the time, and with African roots; he introduced polyrhythms to the music; and he later hired (and majorly influenced) a young Sam Cooke, who would ultimately cross over to pop music in a big way. Also, as evidenced by this recording of “Precious Lord” from around 1939, Harris was a shouter.
Harris is considered one of the founders of “hard gospel.” As Robert Darden explained, “Hard gospel is where you have a hoarse, urgent, emotional, and shouting lead singer who sings with a quartet backing him that provides a counterpoint. At the end, there’s a vamp and the singer exhorts and testifies and lets the spirit overcome him. Before that, gospel is much tamer. It’s much closer to Jubilee, whether a capella or with a band.”
It’s instructive to listen to another of Harris’s influences, the blues singer Blind Willie Johnson — who in turn, according to Darden, “sat outside churches, particularly Pentecostal and COGIC [Church of God in Christ] churches and heard them sing.” Vocally, Johnson is clearly the counterpoint of people like Reverend Gates, even if he’s the flip side of the spiritual coin. This is his 1928 recording of “It’s Nobody’s Fault But Mine,” a song later covered by Led Zeppelin:
There can be little doubt that Johnson was influenced by J.M. Gates as well. The church was monolithic in Black culture. “I’ll tell you a great story,” Darden said to me when I asked for an example. “On the south side of Chicago, the Dixie Hummingbirds had a godawful-early 15-minute radio show every morning. Like 4:45 or 5:45 a.m. And I’ve heard multiple stories from people who tell me they would walk to work and never miss a minute of it because everybody’s window was open and they were all on the same show. Radio stations that played Black artists, whether it was religious or secular, were so rare and so loved — because there were no stations owned by African Americans until much later. There were only a few Black newspapers, there was no Black book publishing, there were no Blacks on TV, hardly. And so, the little discs that they had, and then the radio stations that played Black artists — it ruled.”
So, throughout the twenties, thirties, and forties, we have both sacred and secular music which is emotional and exciting, but features no screaming. That was about to change. Enter Archie Brownlee of The Five Blind Boys of Mississippi. Brownlee is the undisputed master of hard gospel — “the greatest shouter of all time,” Darden told me. “No question.”
Brownlee gets little credit now, but he was an enormous influence on popular music. His performing energy was unparalleled. Though blind, he would occasionally jump off the stage and into the crowd. Though clearly shouting in early recordings like “Standing in the Safety Zone” (ca. 1946), it’s the Blind Boys’ single “Our Father (Which Art In Heaven)” that contains one of the earliest, if not the first, musical screams. Here it is, John Lennon and Pixies and Screamo fans. This is it. Ground zero.
This performance is extraordinary for so many reasons. To me, it’s the analog of Jimi Hendrix’s feedback-drenched version of “The Star Spangled Banner” from Woodstock almost twenty years later. It makes an old trope newly relevant. The Five Blind Boys put a cultural touchstone — the Lord’s Prayer — in a hard gospel setting, and it’s religious. And it rocks. It also crossed over.
Recorded for the Peacock label in 1950, “Our Father” became a hit on the R&B charts. “Five blind boys, aided by a slam-bang drummer, wail out a prayer opus of unusual strength,” wrote Billboard on October 7. “Should be a big one.” The song broke the Top 10.
I can’t say that this is the first recorded musical scream, but I think it’s the most important because of its success. I looked to Robert Darden to clue me in to earlier screams, but he couldn’t.
“The Black Gospel Music Restoration Project here at Baylor is the largest in the world,” he told me about the organization he directs. “We have more gospel music than the Library of Congress. We don’t know if we have one percent or ten percent of it, because there’s never been a definitive database. We get records in, literally every week, from donations — people going up into grandma’s attic — that I’ve never seen, on labels I’ve never heard of. So I don’t know if some of the early things by Rebert Harris and the Soul Stirrers or the Hummingbirds doesn’t have shouting. It may be that Brownlee is the first one that we have, but that’s my weasel way out.”
Meanwhile, in Florida, another blind African American performer was getting his start in the business. “During those years I was totally in love with Nat King Cole’s music,” Ray Charles once wrote. “I ate, slept, and drank everything Nat King Cole. I wanted to be like him because he played the piano and sang and put all those tasty little things behind his singing. That’s what I wanted to do, so he became my idol. I practiced day and night to sound like Nat Cole, and I got pretty proficient at it, too. One morning I woke up and, still laying in bed, something said to me, Where is Ray Charles? Who knows your name? Nobody ever calls you, they just say, ‘Hey, kid, you sound like Nat Cole,’ but they don’t even know your name. I knew right then I was going to have to stop singing like Nat, but I was scared to because I could get jobs sounding like him. I finally told myself, ‘Ray, you have got to take a chance and sound like yourself — period.’”
By the time Charles signed with Atlantic Records in June 1952, he had invented his own sound: a horn-inflected mix of gospel, blues, and R&B that we now call Soul. In addition, he added a sound to his vocal repertoire that his heroes Nat “King” Cole and Louis Jordan did not: Charles became a proficient screamer. There are many examples, but “Come Back Baby,” recorded in 1954, is particularly impressive.
That shriek that Charles produces after the breakdown toward the end! Let’s talk about that. It may match the intensity of Archie Brownlee, but it’s certainly not sanctified. I wonder where Professor Gouzoules would put it in his classification of screams. It seems, especially given the context of the song, equal parts frustration and sexual audition. “If I could holler like a mountain jack,” Charles sings, “people, I’d call my baby back.”
We can be sure that Charles grew up in the church, was probably familiar with radio preachers and hard gospel, and certainly heard The Five Blind Boys of Mississippi. Because of the success of “Our Father,” Charles would have likely considered using that kind of technique to establish his own musical identity as separate from Nat Cole.
Once, in the mid-1990s, Charles was interviewing Adam Swyer, auditioning to write articles on his behalf. To test the depth of Swyer’s knowledge about himself, Charles asked, “In your opinion, who’s the most influential singer you’ve never heard of?” When told Archie Brownlee, Charles was delighted. “That man knows his shit!” he said. Swyer was hired.
The gospel influence continued. In 1954, Charles had a hit with “I’ve Got a Woman,” which he later admitted was, um, “influenced” by The Southern Tones’ “It Must Be Jesus.” (Charles also claimed credit for “Come Back Baby,” but it was written by Walter Davis in 1940.)
Men weren’t the only successful gospel shouters. One of the greats was Marion Williams of the Clara Ward Singers. This is her 1964 version of “Surely God Is Able,” in which she sounds like she was plugged into a light socket right before tape rolled.
A flamboyant young African American singer from Georgia named Richard Penniman was highly influenced by Williams. As Little Richard, he would record hit after hit for Specialty Records, building the foundation of rock and roll. Here’s his frantic version of “Keep a Knockin’” from 1957, which features Williams’ electric “woohs” as well as some vicious screams. (Also note Charles Connor’s drum intro, later borrowed by John Bonham for Led Zeppelin’s “Rock and Roll.”)
Richard’s scream on “Keep a Knockin’” is different from Ray Charles’s and Archie Brownlee’s. It’s a whoop of abandon, an expression of pure enthusiasm. And, I think, it recalls Professor Gouzoules’s idea of screaming used to “recruit support.” This is screaming as a communal appeal; something to elicit a response in the listener, rather than just attract attention. The goal — and boy does it work for me — is energetic resonance.
At long last, white people got into the act. Although considered the king of rock and roll, Elvis wasn’t a screamer. There were a few rockabilly bands from that time, though, that could cut it loose. One of the best was Johnny Burnette’s Rock ‘n Roll Trio. This is their version of “Train Kept A-Rollin’” from 1956:
I’ve probably spent too much time thinking about the provenance of Burnette’s screams. Professor Darden allows that, in the South, Black and white communities were listening to each other’s music, and as a Southerner I know this is the case. But I can’t help thinking about the rebel yell, famous from the Civil War 90 years before. I don’t know if Johnny Burnette was a supporter of the Confederacy, but I do know that — at least in form if not function — this is how Southern white boys popped off for generations. As an example, here is a film of some decrepit Confederate veterans reenacting the rebel yell in the 1930s. “We can’t give you much,” says one, “but we can give you what we got left.”
By the mid 1960s, the dominant form of popular musical expression was being imported from England. The Beatles changed the world with their take on American music. Some of the sounds they adopted were Little Richard’s “wooh’s” and penchant for screaming just before an instrumental solo.
“I could do Little Richard’s voice, which is a wild, hoarse, screaming thing, it’s like an out-of-body experience,” Paul McCartney once said. “You have to leave your current sensibilities and go about a foot above your head to sing it.” McCartney was confident enough in his proficiency to do some Little Richard songs for John Lennon on the day they met. (“I did my Little Richard imitation, went through all the stuff I knew. John seemed quite impressed.”) The band covered 11 Little Richard songs.
There are so many great Beatles screams — both Lennon and McCartney were absolute experts — but the one I want to highlight here is from John Lennon’s first solo album, 1970s Plastic Ono Band. His voice-shredding screams at the end of “Mother” are not about sex, anger, or abandon.
“John Lennon, if you listen to ‘Mother.’ Now that’s gut wrenching, isn’t it?” Harold Gouzoules mused. “Because it is a kind of agonized scream in that case. It’s not rage, it’s just a sort of pitiful wailing.” Lennon was engaged at the time in something called Primal Scream Therapy, which Gouzoules dismissed as “basically nonsense. It’s just one of these things that became a fad.” In any event, the singer was reliving the painful and premature death of his mother, something which changed the course of his life. I can’t say if Lennon’s screams were therapeutic, but they’re certainly affecting, and unprecedented in popular culture.
Rock and roll screaming at that time was primarily, but not exclusively, male. Janis Joplin grew up in Texas, and was influenced predominantly by black artists: Bessie Smith, Aretha Franklin, Odetta, and Leadbelly. Had she been singing gospel she would have been called a shouter. Instead, we got kozmic blues like 1968s “Piece of My Heart,” with a lovely bit of inarticulate anguish toward the end.
And that’s basically that. All subsequent musical screaming stemmed from these originators. On the Soul side there was Wilson Pickett, who could somehow scream in octaves. In an early recording with The Falcons in 1962, he screams so hard he blows his voice out, sounding like some sort of demented baby. There was also James Brown, whose piercing howls at the end of 1973s “The Payback” are as exciting as they are harrowing.
Rock turned into punk and then post punk. In The B-52’s “Strobe Light” from 1979, after Fred Schneider tells them he’s going to kiss their pineapple, Cindy Wilson and Kate Pierson scream like highschool girls. (I believe that one should go in Professor Gouzoules’s “joyful surprise” category.) Certain forms of death metal utilize a “death growl,” a kind of distorted screaming technique for the entire vocal performance. “If you scream all the time,” Gouzoules wondered, “I think that it would tend to have the listener to become less responsive through a general process of habituation, but I don’t know.” I don’t know either, but tend not to think so. For some listeners at least.
I’ll leave you with one last thing. The great Cab Calloway recorded a version of “St. Louis Blues” with his Orchestra in 1930. It may sound tame now, but this record was about as punk as jazz got in those days. After some breakneck word-working, and right before the out riff, Calloway emits a nonverbal sound that resembles squealing tires. I tend to think of it as a scream, which might cast the rest of this otherwise neat and orderly piece into question. To be honest, I love that kind of disruption.
