# Question about musical rhythm used in Hollywood pictures about Native Americans. **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [February 5, 2018, 8:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/question-about-musical-rhythm-used-in-hollywood-pictures-about-native-americans/808257 "2018-02-05T20:30:06Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![fritzkep](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/278dde/32.png) [@fritzkep](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/fritzkep)\ **Post date:** [February 6, 2018, 9:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/question-about-musical-rhythm-used-in-hollywood-pictures-about-native-americans/808257/21 "2018-02-06T21:50:12Z")
I’m afraid I’m not a musician, I sing in a choir but have a dilly of a time reading the music. ---
**Author:** ![Frylock](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/ce7236/32.png) [@Frylock](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Frylock)\ **Post date:** [February 6, 2018, 11:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/question-about-musical-rhythm-used-in-hollywood-pictures-about-native-americans/808257/22 "2018-02-06T23:00:34Z")
> [@fritzkep](#): > > I’m afraid I’m not a musician, I sing in a choir but have a dilly of a time reading the music. **fritzke** your definition was correct, not to worry! I’m not sure what the poster above was misunderstanding about what you wrote. Possibly they thought you meant playing all four notes comprising “three adjacent whole tones” simultaneously but… it would be very strange for anyone to mean that. ---
**Author:** ![Dale\_Sams](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/779978/32.png) [@Dale\_Sams](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dale_Sams)\ **Post date:** [February 6, 2018, 11:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/question-about-musical-rhythm-used-in-hollywood-pictures-about-native-americans/808257/23 "2018-02-06T23:05:36Z")
I have unsuccessfully tried to track down the origins of the stereotypical BUMMMMMMM-bum bumbumbumbummmmm bum bumbumbumbummmmmm…otherwise known as that ‘chop song’ Braves fans (or is it Indians?) do. I think it also appears in an FSU fight song. ---
**Author:** ![fritzkep](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/278dde/32.png) [@fritzkep](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/fritzkep)\ **Post date:** [February 6, 2018, 11:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/question-about-musical-rhythm-used-in-hollywood-pictures-about-native-americans/808257/24 "2018-02-06T23:32:28Z")
It’s very odd, I’m sure that the rhythm did not come out of nowhere, but I’m quite perplexed as to how it came to be associated with and a stereotype of Native Americans. ---
**Author:** ![terentii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/terentii/32/212_2.png) [@terentii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/terentii)\ **Post date:** [February 6, 2018, 11:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/question-about-musical-rhythm-used-in-hollywood-pictures-about-native-americans/808257/25 "2018-02-06T23:55:26Z")
> [@fritzkep](#): > > It’s very odd, I’m sure that the rhythm did not come out of nowhere, but I’m quite perplexed as to how it came to be associated with and a stereotype of Native Americans. The movies? :dubious: 😕 ---
**Author:** ![fritzkep](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/278dde/32.png) [@fritzkep](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/fritzkep)\ **Post date:** [February 7, 2018, 12:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/question-about-musical-rhythm-used-in-hollywood-pictures-about-native-americans/808257/26 "2018-02-07T00:05:20Z")
> [@terentii](#): > > The movies? :dubious: 😕 Yes, the question is how Hollywood came to associate that rhythm with Native Americans, whether they invented it out of whole cloth at the beginning of the sound era, or whether they appropriated it from somewhere else. ---
**Author:** ![jerez](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/c68b51/32.png) [@jerez](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jerez)\ **Post date:** [February 7, 2018, 7:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/question-about-musical-rhythm-used-in-hollywood-pictures-about-native-americans/808257/27 "2018-02-07T07:33:57Z")
> [@](#): > > …_ **an interval** _ of three adjacent whole tones, Ah, bolding mine, my bad. Let us know. ---
**Author:** ![Meurglys](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/258eb7/32.png) [@Meurglys](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Meurglys)\ **Post date:** [February 7, 2018, 11:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/question-about-musical-rhythm-used-in-hollywood-pictures-about-native-americans/808257/28 "2018-02-07T11:37:18Z")
The first couple of minutes of this [youtube track](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAxaTMVW1f0) from 1970 is an Indian chant where they seem to be using the ‘Hollywood’ rhythm. They may have borrowed it from the movies but they were quite proud of their Native American heritage. ---
**Author:** ![psychonaut](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/psychonaut/32/4655_2.png) [@psychonaut](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/psychonaut)\ **Post date:** [February 7, 2018, 1:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/question-about-musical-rhythm-used-in-hollywood-pictures-about-native-americans/808257/29 "2018-02-07T13:06:58Z")
> [@Meurglys](#): > > The first couple of minutes of this [youtube track](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAxaTMVW1f0) from 1970 is an Indian chant where they seem to be using the ‘Hollywood’ rhythm. > They may have borrowed it from the movies but they were quite proud of their Native American heritage. The track you link to is from Redbone, a rock band popular in the 1970s. They incorporated indigenous elements into their music, but were never sticklers for historical authenticity. ---
**Author:** ![fritzkep](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/278dde/32.png) [@fritzkep](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/fritzkep)\ **Post date:** [February 7, 2018, 2:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/question-about-musical-rhythm-used-in-hollywood-pictures-about-native-americans/808257/30 "2018-02-07T14:32:25Z")
Yes, I remember Redbone, a good group. You hear those who sing for a living making use of other rhythms, a fusion of Western and Native, but informal groupings that gather together for powwows and other groupings, even here in Virginia, use the unstressed rhythm when drumming and singing. I was wondering about the syllables in some of the singing that seem to be repeated, don’t know much about them, though I have heard that extra syllables are added to a line to fit the length of a verse, in effect just like the la-la-la that Johnny L.A. alluded to earlier. ---
**Author:** ![PatrickLondon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/patricklondon/32/4422_2.png) [@PatrickLondon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PatrickLondon)\ **Post date:** [February 7, 2018, 2:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/question-about-musical-rhythm-used-in-hollywood-pictures-about-native-americans/808257/31 "2018-02-07T14:49:00Z")
Maybe some film composers had in mind something like [the pounding rhythms of the Rite of Spring](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rq1q6u3mLSM&feature=youtu.be&t=586)as “exotic” music, and the idea just stuck. ---
**Author:** ![Eonwe](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eonwe/32/240_2.png) [@Eonwe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Eonwe)\ **Post date:** [February 7, 2018, 2:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/question-about-musical-rhythm-used-in-hollywood-pictures-about-native-americans/808257/32 "2018-02-07T14:56:28Z")
Just want to say this is a great question! I don’t have any answer, but I did find [this recording from 1924](https://folkways.si.edu/hopi-katcina-songs-and-six-songs-by-chanters/american-indian/music/album/smithsonian) of Hopi songs. The last six tracks contain drumming, and at least to my ear none of them have that heavy downbeat accent. Interestingly, though, the voices _do_ provide the accent. (Also, here are the [liner notes](https://media.smithsonianfolkways.org/liner_notes/folkways/FW04394.pdf), which are an interesting read). ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [February 7, 2018, 3:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/question-about-musical-rhythm-used-in-hollywood-pictures-about-native-americans/808257/33 "2018-02-07T15:19:40Z")
Hollywood has a way of creating its own standards and clichés that come to be heavily associated with a thing, which makes it instantly identifiable. Just look at the "flat-topped " image of Frankenstein with the neck bolts. Or the way they use Loon sounds to indicate the Desert, even though no loon would find itself in a desert. Or the way they use a rattling sound to announce the presence of large spiders. the indian chants I have heard have nothing like the stereotypical DUM-dum-dum-dum DUM-dum-dum-dum rhythm that is stereotypically “Indian”. I don’t know where it comes from, but I have noticed that a lot of the stereotypes of Indian ways have entered American Pop Culture from one of two sources – the writings of James Fenimore Cooper and “The Song of Hiawatha” by Longfellow. It’s from Cooper and his “Leatherstocking/Hawkeye/Natty Bumppo” stories that we get, for instance, the notion that Indians said “Ugh!” Longfellow’s case is interesting, because he was trying to create a National Cycle of Poems, and there is much that is creditable about Hiawatha. He brought native American Mythology and Culture to popular notice (and against much resistance). On the other hand, he mixed it in with other things that were alien to it, and he created stereotypes that weren’t really appropriate, so a lot of his stuff seems inappropriate and even insulting today. It’s a weird situation. In adapting the myths of the Chippewa, he strung them out on the same trochaic tetrameter rhythm that is in the Finnish epic Kalevala, which isn’t really like native Americvan rhythms. Longfellow and his contemporaries thought they were, though. according to Henry Rowe Schoolcraft (from whom he got his myths, and who had used the same rhythm, probably inspiring Longfellow’s use of it): > [@](#): > > The meter is thought to be not ill adapted to the Indian mode of enunciation. Nothing is more characteristic of their harangues and public speeches, than the vehement yet broken and continued strain of utterance, which would be subject to the charge of monotony, were it not varied by the extraordinary compass in the stress of voice, broken by the repetition of high and low accent, and often terminated with an exclamatory vigor, which is sometimes startling. It is not the less in accordance with these traits that nearly every initial syllable of the measure chosen is under accent. This at least may be affirmed, that it imparts a movement to the narrative, which, at the same time that it obviates languor, favors that repetitious rhythm, or pseudo-parallelism, which so strongly marks their highly compound lexicography. > **[The Song of Hiawatha](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Song_of_Hiawatha)** > > The Song of Hiawatha is an 1855 epic poem in trochaic tetrameter by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow which features Native American characters. The epic relates the fictional adventures of an Ojibwe warrior named Hiawatha and the tragedy of his love for Minnehaha, a Dakota woman. Events in the story are set in the Pictured Rocks area of Michigan on the south shore of Lake Superior. Longfellow's poem is based on oral traditions surrounding the figure of Manabozho, but it also contains his own innovation... Trochaic Tetrameter has this rhythm: > [@](#): > > A line of trochaic tetrameter has the following rhythm: > 1st foot > > 2nd foot > > 3rd foot > > 4th foot > > DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da Maybe it was this rhythm, associated with American Indians because of Longfellow (and Schoolcraft) that got bastardized into the "classic’ rhythm the OP asked about, the same way Famous Quotes get bastardized into a different form that’s remembered inaccurately (“Play it again, Sam”) ---
**Author:** ![Son\_of\_a\_Rich](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/son_of_a_rich/32/5439_2.png) [@Son\_of\_a\_Rich](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Son_of_a_Rich)\ **Post date:** [February 7, 2018, 3:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/question-about-musical-rhythm-used-in-hollywood-pictures-about-native-americans/808257/34 "2018-02-07T15:46:50Z")
[Family Guy’s disc jockey](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=octtLcjJshw), in a world in which native Americans were dominant. ---
**Author:** ![fritzkep](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/278dde/32.png) [@fritzkep](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/fritzkep)\ **Post date:** [February 7, 2018, 4:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/question-about-musical-rhythm-used-in-hollywood-pictures-about-native-americans/808257/35 "2018-02-07T16:03:28Z")
That’s quite feasible and entirely possible, thanks, CalMeacham! And thanks for the old recording of Hopi songs and liner notes, Eonwe! The Hopi songs have a more complex rhythm than one hears in recordings of Plains Indian music, but still, none of the Hollywood cliché. At first I had thought that the rhythm came from early encounters with Natives east of the Mississippi, but this seemed unlikely the more I checked it out. ---
**Author:** ![fritzkep](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/278dde/32.png) [@fritzkep](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/fritzkep)\ **Post date:** [February 8, 2018, 4:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/question-about-musical-rhythm-used-in-hollywood-pictures-about-native-americans/808257/36 "2018-02-08T16:38:05Z")
I really like the connection of the drum rhythm to the cadence of Longfellow’s poetry, something which long predates sound movies. It’s not something provable or directly connectable, but the linking of the two certainly feels right! I appreciate all of your answers and suggestions, thank you! I live on a Longfellow Street, by the way. ---
**Author:** ![Johnny\_L.A](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johnny_l.a/32/1084_2.png) [@Johnny\_L.A](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johnny_L.A)\ **Post date:** [February 8, 2018, 4:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/question-about-musical-rhythm-used-in-hollywood-pictures-about-native-americans/808257/37 "2018-02-08T16:40:33Z")
> [@Johnny\_L.A](#): > > That one appears to have lyrics. What about the ones where they’re just singing ‘HEY-yay-yay-yay, hey-yay-yay-yay…’ Is that a Hollywood thing? Or is it the Native American version of ‘La-la-la’? > [@Son\_of\_a\_Rich](#): > > [Family Guy’s disc jockey](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=octtLcjJshw), in a world in which native Americans were dominant. Yeah, that’s the one. ---
**Author:** ![fritzkep](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/278dde/32.png) [@fritzkep](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/fritzkep)\ **Post date:** [February 8, 2018, 5:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/question-about-musical-rhythm-used-in-hollywood-pictures-about-native-americans/808257/38 "2018-02-08T17:31:00Z")
> [@Johnny\_L.A](#): > > Yeah, that’s the one. It does appear that many songs add syllables to fill up space needed, so in that sense, it would be equivalent to a la-la-la or in a much earlier time hey-nonny-nonny. ---
**Author:** ![drad\_dog](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/aeb1de/32.png) [@drad\_dog](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/drad_dog)\ **Post date:** [February 8, 2018, 6:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/question-about-musical-rhythm-used-in-hollywood-pictures-about-native-americans/808257/39 "2018-02-08T18:37:20Z")
This is the Wiki for “The Oriental Riff” > **[Oriental riff](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oriental_riff)** > > The Oriental riff, also known as the East Asian riff and the Chinaman lick, is a musical riff or phrase that has often been used in Western culture as a trope to represent the idea of East or Southeast Asia. The riff is sometimes accompanied by the sound of a gong. > The Oriental riff is a Western creation. The first known example of a precursor, showing similar rhythm if not yet melody, is the "Aladdin Quick Step", composed around 1847 and used in an Aladdin stage show named The Grand Chinese Spe... I had seen it when I was trying to find out who wrote the snakecharmer song. I think the article gives a good idea of how we get these memes, even if the indian theme isn’t addressed. The idea may have come from prefilm entertainments or Hollywood. I suppose if you can date it before 1930 it would be pre-cinema. ---
**Author:** ![Johnny\_L.A](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johnny_l.a/32/1084_2.png) [@Johnny\_L.A](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johnny_L.A)\ **Post date:** [February 8, 2018, 6:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/question-about-musical-rhythm-used-in-hollywood-pictures-about-native-americans/808257/40 "2018-02-08T18:48:14Z")
> [@drad\_dog](#): > > I was trying to find out who wrote the snakecharmer song. Is that the one that goes _There’s a place in France Where the naked ladies dance…_ ? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/question-about-musical-rhythm-used-in-hollywood-pictures-about-native-americans/808257.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/question-about-musical-rhythm-used-in-hollywood-pictures-about-native-americans/808257.md?page=3)