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.
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.
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: 
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.
Ah, bolding mine, my bad. Let us know.
The first couple of minutes of this youtube track 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.
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.
Maybe some film composers had in mind something like the pounding rhythms of the Rite of Springas “exotic” music, and the idea just stuck.
Just want to say this is a great question!
I don’t have any answer, but I did find this recording from 1924 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, which are an interesting read).
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):
Trochaic Tetrameter has this rhythm:
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”)
Family Guy’s disc jockey, in a world in which native Americans were dominant.
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.
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.
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.
This is the Wiki for “The Oriental Riff”
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.
Is that the one that goes There’s a place in France Where the naked ladies dance… ?