Watermelon Man

As part of my current J Dilla binge, I was excited to find a track where he flips a Herbie Hancock sample (no, not “Come Running To Me“, though that one is great too.) This sent me down a rabbit hole with “Watermelon Man.” This track has had quite a journey, both in its prehistory and in its afterlife.

I love that whenever Herbie tries to do something cynically commercial, it always ends up being an iconic work of art. “Maiden Voyage” was written for a Fabergé ad. “Rockit” was a last-ditch attempt to keep from getting dropped by a label. And “Watermelon Man” was meant to be ear candy to attract more listeners to Herbie’s debut album as a leader.

Herbie tells the story of the tune in this interview:

Here’s a chart. It’s essentially a twelve-bar blues in F, but with bars nine and ten repeated three times. Because the last two bars are harmonically identical to the first four, it can be hard to hear where one chorus ends and the next begins. Herbie exploits this formal ambiguity in his 1973 recording; we will get to that in a minute.

Shortly after writing “Watermelon Man,” Herbie did some work as a substitute pianist in Mongo Santamaría‘s band. Donald Byrd suggested that Herbie play the tune for Mongo, who heard its latent guajira groove, and asked if he could record it. Mongo’s version was a huge hit, both in the US and in Latin America.

Here’s Mongo playing “Watermelon Man” in Summer of Soul:

The discussions of Afrocentric fashions in this clip relate to Herbie’s music of the 1970s in ways we will discuss below.

Mongo’s version is formally the same as Herbie’s, except that he tacks two extra bars of groove onto the end of the second time through the head. He plays it quite a bit slower, and of course with a Latin groove. Notice the way he phrases the end of the melody, too. Herbie’s band plays it a little behind the beat on the original recording, but Mongo drags it much more noticeably. Pancho Sanchez did a cover of Mongo’s arrangement that lies the melody even further behind the beat. It’s pretty sweet.

Over the course of the 1960s, uncountably many people recorded covers of “Watermelon Man.” Most of them were vaguely Latin-sounding lounge jazz, but Johnny Taylor bucked the trend with his raging soul version.

Herbie’s arrangement on his 1973 funk/fusion smash Head Hunters begins with percussionist Bill Summers blowing on beer bottles and singing in a distinctive yodel-like way. Summers has a degree in ethnomusicology, and he was recreating a field recording of a young Ba-Benzélé woman singing and playing a one-note flute.

The word “hindewhu” is not the title of the song, it’s an onomatopoeic word that the Ba-Benzélé use to describe how this style of singing and flute playing sounds. Here’s Francis Bebey explaining the technique.

The Head Hunters recording is a very strange jazz arrangement. It has no solos! The keys and sax play the written melody and chord parts with minimal variation throughout. The bass and drums play a little looser, but they are still locked into the groove. The tempo is about 75 BPM, which is extraordinarily slow, less than half as fast as the 1962 recording. Herbie replaces the last two bars of the form with a new section whose key jumps unexpectedly up a minor third. Here’s my transcription:

The structure is strange too. When I say the A section, I mean the first half of the head from the 1962 version. When I say B section, I mean bars 9-12 of the 1962 version. When I say C section, I mean the new part.

  • 0:00 – 15 bars – “Hindewhu” 
  • 0:46 – 4 bars – bass enters
  • 0:59 – 4 bars – drums enter
  • 1:18 – 8 bars – clavinet enters
  • 1:44 – 6 bars – B section
  • 2:04 – 9 bars – C section (but you could count the last bar as being part of the next section, I guess?)
  • 2:33 – 7 bars – the first actual statement of the A section melody, and that first E-flat is held over from the last Gb7 in the C section, so hip
  • 2:55 – 6 bars – B section
  • 3:15 – 3 bars – C section (so short!)
  • 3:25 – 7 bars – A section 
  • 3:48 – 6 bars – B section
  • 4:08 – 9 bars – C section
  • 4:37 – 7 bars – outtro groove 
  • 5:00 – “Hindewhu” fadeout to end

There are not too many people trying to perform the Head Hunters arrangement. When they do, they generally regularize the form into a more normal head-solos-head structure, and they always play too fast. The Head Hunters track has had its main afterlife as a widely used hip-hop sample. Sometimes producers go for the intro, sometimes the bass groove, sometimes part of the melody, and sometimes all of the above. Here are a few standout examples, starting with “Escapism (Gettin’ Free)” by Digable Planets.

Madonna samples the main groove on “Sanctuary”, co-produced by the great Nellee Hooper. The clash between the Mixolydian mode sample and the natural minor song on top is spicy.

The J Dilla track that set this blog post in motion is an unreleased beat called “Zen Guitar.” It flips the groove in a surprising way.

I did my best to transcribe this beat:

Rapsody’s song “Whoopi” is an even more radical sample flip.

People have also sampled the Mongo Santamaría cover.

The Johnny Taylor version has been sampled a few times too.

I am attracted to situations where people sample music that is itself based on samples. Herbie didn’t literally sample “Hindewhu”, but Bill Summers’ recreation functions like a sample. Was this a problematic act of cultural appropriation? In an article entitled Pygmy POP. A Genealogy of Schizophonic Mimesis, Steven Feld argues that it was. Herbie didn’t ask permission to quote the Ba-Benzélé, or attempt to pay them. In 1985, Feld asked Herbie whether he felt any obligation toward them. Herbie replied:

[Y]ou’ve go to understand, this is a brothers kind of thing, you know, a thing for brothers to work out. I mean, I don’t actually need to go over there and talk to them, I could do it but I know that it’s OK ’cause its just a brothers kind of thing… [W]e’re the people who’ve lost the most, who’ve had the most stolen from us. We know what it means to come up with, you know, a sound or a tune, then to have it copped and turned into a big hit or something like that. We’ve been through all of that. But this isn’t like that. This thing, you see, brothers, we’re all making African music, that’s what I’m talking about (quoted in Feld 1996, pp. 5-6). 

Herbie saw himself as operating squarely within the communal norms of Black music. Remember that he got the original idea for “Watermelon Man” by transcribing the way that women in his neighborhood called out to the guy selling watermelon. Herbie didn’t see the Ba-Benzélé recording any differently. Like many Black musicians in the 1970s, he was intentionally embracing a pan-African identity. You can see it in the title of Head Hunters, and in its cover imagery, especially the studio gear transformed into a Baoulé mask.

Pan-Africanness is visible in the musicians’ clothes and hairstyles, and in the shekere that Bill Summers is holding. It’s also clearly audible in the music: harmonically static, rhythmically complex, formally open-ended, with the synths and bass running through wah pedals and other envelope filters to give them vocalistic timbres. Also, Herbie released three albums before Head Hunters under the name Mwandishi, which is the Swahili word for “writer” – Herbie seems to have taken it to mean “composer”.

Feld points out that while Herbie may be part of a marginalized population within the US, he is also a major pop star who profited materially from quoting the Ba-Benzélé. Madonna had to pay Herbie for her “Watermelon Man” sample, and she listed him as a co-writer on “Sanctuary.” Herbie was under no such obligation to the anonymous “Hindewhu” performer. Should he have been? Feld is reluctant to pass overt judgment, but he is clearly uncomfortable about this situation.

Some of Feld’s discomfort is due to the fact that he sees himself and his fellow ethnomusicologists as complicit in the appropriation of their field recordings. After all, if they hadn’t made and released those recordings in the first place, then there would be no pop musicians appropriating them:

The intentions surrounding a recording’s original production, however positive, cannot be controlled once a commodity is in commercial circulation. Both as tokens of academic and of marketplace authenticity, documentary field recordings have served to validate very diverse agendas, many of which were unanticipated and may now be unwelcome or distasteful to recordists or those recorded… Unwittingly or not, they – we – have been central players in creating a global schizophonic condition whose consequences are now vastly more complex and open to contestation than any of its participants could have anticipated (p. 11).

I would never have known about the original Ba-Benzélé recording without Herbie’s quoting of it, but I also would never have found out about it from Herbie directly. I had to stumble across it on WhoSampled.com. I heard the “Watermelon Man” intro as just generally signifying “tribal-ness”, and didn’t think any further into it. That is a problem. In a perfect world, everybody would be attributing their influences.

Hear a mix of the music discussed in this post:

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