Concussion idiophones or Clappers. Instruments derived from the ancient use of animal ribs are commonly made of flat hardwood sticks, about 15 cm long and slightly curved. They are played in pairs (usually a pair in each hand); one ‘bone’ is held between the first and second fingers, pressed to the base of the thumb, and the other, held between the second and third fingers, is clacked against the first with a rapid flicking of the wrist. The bones produce a castanet-like sound capable of great rhythmic complexity. The bones were played in China before 3000 bce, in Egypt around that date, and in ancient Greece, ancient Rome and medieval Europe. There are occasional references to bones (as ‘knicky-knackers’) in 17th-century English sources. They are also known in sub-Saharan Africa. In the USA, they are associated primarily with black tradition and the minstrel show. It has been suggested that when the use of drums by slaves was banned in the 18th century the bones were used as a substitute. Their use by black Americans before the 1840s is little documented. In the early minstrel shows, however, the bones were an essential rhythmic constituent in the ensemble (fiddle, banjo, tambourine and bones); they also played solos, usually imitations of drums and horses. There has been a minor revival of interest in playing the bones.
O. Logan: ‘The Ancestry of Brudder Bones’, Harper’s, lviii (1878–9), 687–98
H. Nathan: Dan Emmett and the Rise of Early Negro Minstrelsy (Norman, OK, 1962/R)
S. Marcuse: A Survey of Musical Instruments (London, 1975)
D.J. Epstein: Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War (Urbana, IL, 1977)
R.B. Winans: ‘Black Instrumental Music Traditions in the Ex-slave Narratives’, Black Music Research Newsletter, v/5 (1982), 2–5
R.B. Winans: ‘Early Minstrel Show Music, 1843–1852’, Musical Theatre in America, ed. G. Loney (Westport, CT, 1984), 71–97
ROBERT B. WINANS