Should You Clap on the 1 and 3 Beats or the 2 and 4?

It turns out how you groove says a lot about who you are.
Listen to this clip of blues legend Taj Mahal playing a concert in Germany in the 1990s. The crowd is clapping along happily to “Blues with Feeling,” but Taj stops the performance mid-song.

“Wait, wait, wait,” Mahal says. “This is schwarze music.” Mahal explains that crowd’s beat might be right for Mozart, Chopin, and Tchaikovsky, but for his jazz/blues style, they should be clapping like, “one-TWO-three-FOUR.”

This got me thinking about clapping, snapping, tapping our feet, and otherwise rhythmically reacting to music, and whether there’s a right or wrong way to do it. It turns out to be a complicated question that touches on race, identity, and history. 

So, a-one-and-a-two-and-a-way we go…

Should You Clap on the 1 and 3 Beats or the 2 and 4?