Shirley Ellis – The Clapping Song (Clap Pat Clap Slap)

Of all the records I’ve played out at gigs over the last 20 years, one record is the most played of all of them, and it’s Shirley Ellis’s “Hand Clapping Song.”

This song has an almost mystical effect on a crowd that’s ready and receptive to a rhythm and blues / “Soul Night” type experience. It's exuberant and funky, child-like and knowing, simple enough for anyone to dance to but, you know, there’s like a whole series of “steps” you can do if you’re inclined*. It’s mostly just drums, bass, and Shirley’s unmatchably swinging vocal, so it’s got a proto hip-hop component, but is delightfully, obviously from the mid-60s in its sound and outlook. Its various parts have their genesis in jump rope rhymes and school yard rhythms, the part where our narrator is ratted out by her auntie for kissing a soldier is not only from a hillbilly song, but it bespeaks that cusp between childhood and adulthood where ridiculous social dances make the most sense, and the goose and the monkey are experimenting with ‘adult’ substances (for which, let us take a moment to acknowledge, they meet a tragic fate). In other words, it’s an absolutely perfect cross-generational anthem ideal for melting the inhibitions and hang-ups of audiences of all ages. If this song biffs at one of my gigs, that pretty much means the gig was a loss in the first place.

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DISCOVERING SHIRLEY ELLIS

I probably became conscious of Shirley Ellis as someone outside of the novelty universe of “the Name Game” when Southern Culture on the Skids released their album Dirt Track Date in 1995. There is a cover of her song “The Nitty Gritty” on that album, sung by the great Mary Huff. SCOTS was really coming up on the rock club touring circuit at that time, and I was really turning my record store towards a more soul/garage/rockabilly scuzzy roots focus from its original classic used record store vibe (basically after two straight years of making money it seemed like it was time to lose a bunch of it). 

I am pretty sure that SCOTS hipped me to the fact that their version of “Nitty Gritty” was based on Shirley Ellis, not Gladys Knight and the Pips’ later cover. They would come into Whizz Records after playing at the Blue Note in Columbia, MO and we’d talk about records for hours. Through these conversations I learned about the Shirley Ellis In Action album, a really mind-blowing fake live album featuring many of her non-"Name Game" singles and wild arrangements of other R&B hits of the time (her version of Sam Cooke's "Bring It on Home to Me" will knock your head off.) This album became a standard on my first radio show, but it wasn’t until a few years later that, digging around in stacks of 45s, I discovered “The Clapping Song (Clap Pat Clap Slap)”. The song never appeared on an LP, lesson #1 of 7,458 about why 45s are the greatest unit of musical storage and deployment known to humanity (and monkeys and geese).

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HAVE YOU PLAYED HAND-CLAP YET?

When Greg and I started doing the Admiral, the song that got the greatest response, out of all of our rare hyper-curated rock and roll, rhythm and blues, garage, funk, and whatever, was the Shirley Ellis “Clapping Song”.  People would charge into the venue from wherever they were and go absolutely nuts. We would have people come up to us asking if we’d played it yet, sometimes necessitating spinning it more than once a night, which was blasphemy for two record geeks so obsessed with keeping it fresh (and obscure!) they hated to play a record more than once a month. It soon became policy that we only played “Hand-Clap” when we got a request for it, which STILL meant it got played at least once a night. Eventually the policy became “It gets played at 1 AM”. And that was the slot it stayed in for most of the Admiral’s duration, and for the entirety of my residency of the Double Crown.

Having “Hand-Clap” as a compass for all those years is actually very useful as a DJ - long about 12:30 or so I’d have to figure out whatever weird theme I was working for the night could build itself towards “Hand-Clap” and although I like having it in my pocket as an almost sure-fire floor filler, I’ve always preferred to fill the floor and THEN play the sure shots ‘cause it usually takes thing to that energetic next level, whereas if you play your sure-fires to get people to come in, where do you go from there? The answer is usually more sure-fires, which can get to be exhausting for everyone.  

I have absolutely no idea how many times I have spun this song in my DJ career - if we figure 50 gigs a year for 20 years that is 1000 plays, so let’s say that.  As you can see from the header photo, the secret to playing a song 1000 times and have the record still sound good is to have a number of copies of the record. The five pictured here are the current stash - there are one or two soldiers who have fallen in battle for the cause. But this should also say something to vinylphiles who treat your records like they’re gonna fall apart after five or six plays - I have records that have been played hundreds of times in conditions that were far from “ideal” and those records are still fine. Someday I’ll do one of these about the In the Box theme song(s), two others that have gotten played every week for years.

Currently, I’m not playing super late night gigs (the Lowdown wraps up at midnight), and it feels weird to play “Hand-Clap” before Midnight, so “The Clapping Song (Clap Pat Clap Slap)" is on a well-deserved hiatus. It’s still always in my box, but it’s back to its request-only status. So a word to the wise: if you’re at one of the Get Downs at the Low Down and you want me to play it, you have to ask. 

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SHIRLEY ELLIS & LINCOLN CHASE

"The Clapping Song” is the apex of a collaboration between Ellis and songwriter Lincoln Chase, during her tenure on the Congress label. This was a once-in-a-lifetime pairing of personality and viewpoint that resulted in a series of absolutely singular R&B records. From the genuinely bizarre noveltly smash “the Name Game” through their atom bomb tinged Christmas classic “You Better Be Good World” to the rhythmic propulsion of “Nitty Gritty” to the kiss-off jazz put-down of “Get Out” to the head-melting “Ever in Your Life Seen a Diver Kiss His Wife While the Bubbles Bounce Above the Water?” (that’s right, no parenthetical on that one), to the aforementioned up-tempo “Bring It on Home” (perhaps that’s Chase doing the Frogman Henry part on this one?) and the superbly funky version of Chase’s earlier hit “Such a Night” (that one for Clyde McPhatter’s iteration of the Drifters), there are no records in R&B’dom that have the same sonic signature and sensibility as the Chase/Ellis collaborations.  Literal collabs they were, too.  “Name Game” and “EIYLSaDKHWWtBBAtW” among others bear Ellis songwriting credits and I’m willing to bet others deserved them. Her “up for anything” attitude and ability to say the most complicated things quickly and in the pocket were perfect for a writer/arranger whose ideas were unconventional to say the least.

Chase worked in the R&B field for years, having odd-ball hits with tracks like Lavern Baker’s “Jim Dandy”. “Such a Night” was an R&B standard, and Elvis did a great version of it. Chase had a number of daffy singles under his own name for labels like Dawn and Columbia (“Our Love is Satisfactory” b/w “Riddle of the Papawhoos” on the former is quite a record, as is “Sweet Torture” on the latter) and a cool swing/jump R&B LP on Liberty, but I get the feeling his stuff was too weird for people to come back for seconds until he met Shirley. Chase went the way of Eugene McDaniels and other early 60s associated R&B writers by putting out a stoner/hippified psychedelic jazz album called Lincoln Chase ’n’ You in 1973. 

One wonders if Ellis’s career was hampered by this string of unconventional hits that are too compelling to just be “novelty” records but are too odd to “take seriously” once records started doing that a little more in the post-Beatle era. She was signed to Columbia and put out one LP, containing the beloved 21st century soul-dance-night classic “Soul Time”, “Sugar Let’s Shing-A-Ling” and one more single written by Chase, “Birds, Bees, Cupids and Bows”, which is sadly the weakest of the three and a little too frantic to really work. She has a credit on “Sugar” and gets sole credit for “Soul-Time” and both really update her Congress-era sound for the post-Stax/Motown era very nicely, both led by her unstoppable rhythmic vocal felicity. I wonder if the fact that these records didn’t really chart convinced potential record execs that, “oh, she’s just that “Name Game” chick, nothing there for us”. Which is a shame, she coulda tore a hole in some funk.

Here’s a great video of Shirley and Lincoln working “the Name Game” on Merve Griffin in 1964, live!

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THE CLAPPING SONG, POST-ELLIS

Part of this song’s enduring appeal as a DJ item is its many reincarnations and appearances in films, TV shows, and commercials. I know a lot of DJs don’t like it when a beloved track shows up in this kind of context, but I’ve always figured it gives the crowd something to plug into so they can also enjoy the stuff they don’t know. I mean, do we really care that people are stoked to dance to “Goo Goo Muck” because of its presence in Wednesday? Is it a bummer when a movie resurrects some filthy tidbit in the back of the box, or a cause for celebration because it makes the gig a little easier? I know everyone’s miles vary here, but as someone who is always happy for someone to tell him where a song I’ve been playing for years has been sampled, I like it, as a usual rule (except when I don’t and then I really don’t).

Hand-Clap was fertile territory for the drum-heavy 80s, and in a post-“I Want Candy” landscape both the Belle Stars and Pia Zadora did electro versions (the latter is pretty good). Iggy Pop did his best to keep it underground with the majestic “Loco Mosquito”, but it was hip-hop’s thorough embrace of it as a jam helped bring it back. The biggest of these, especially if you do weddings, is that beloved apex “play this as soon as the kids and grandma are shunted off to bed” number, Lil Jon’s “Get Low”, where one presumes the goose and monkey hook up after their wine and blunts. Cupid, Katalyst, and Icona Pop have all appeared on peoples’ wedding playlists, and when I go to check them out and discover, “Oh, this is just Hand-Clap” I figure out how to plug into the playlist a little more.

But of course for me the original will always be the greatest - its irresistible call to audience involvement and uncanny ability to adapt to any context make it the perfect component to any party centered on 45s.

Don’t you hate it when a song gets stuck in your head?

*what do you call ‘steps’ if it’s mostly hand gestures?