Call and Response

Call and response is a musical conversation. One performer or group sings or plays a phrase, the call, and another answers it, the response. The answer can repeat the call, complete it, or comment on it, and the exchange keeps going back and forth.

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Where it comes from and where you hear it

Call and response is central to many West African musical traditions, and it traveled to the Americas with enslaved Africans. It shaped African American work songs, spirituals and gospel, where a leader sings a line and the congregation answers. It runs through the blues, where a sung line is answered by the guitar, and through jazz, where big-band sections answer one another and soloists "trade fours." From there it passed into soul, rock, funk and hip-hop: whenever a singer shouts a line and the crowd shouts it back, that is call and response. Versions of the practice exist in many other cultures as well, and in children's echo songs.

Kinds of call and response

• Leader and group: a soloist sings, a chorus answers with a refrain.
• Voice and instrument: a singer's phrase answered by a guitar, piano or horn fill.
• Section and section: brass against saxophones, or one hand of the piano against the other, as in the example.
• Echo: the response copies the call exactly, a favorite teaching game.

In written music

Composers use the same idea when they pass a phrase between instruments or choirs. Music for two choirs placed apart, answering each other, is called antiphonal. Within a single melody, a period pairs a "question" phrase with an "answer" phrase: see Question and answer.

Try it yourself

In a 12-bar blues, each four-bar line leaves room for an answer: sing or play for two bars, then let another instrument respond for two. At the piano, play a two-bar call with the right hand and answer it with the left, keeping the rhythm and changing the ending. It is also one of the easiest ways into improvisation.