#BMM30 Day 3 — Earl Young was Disco’s heartbeat — and drum beat

The culture of Disco in the mid and late 1970s was a spectacle, a movement and an era all its own — a dance-friendly genre of music that catered exclusively to underserved populations of partygoers — women, the LGBTQ community and Black and Latino folks, those who preferred to look good and party.

The music they danced to was a combination of powerful drums, insane basslines and string arrangements that blew your mind. The drum pattern that became the template for Disco came from one drummer in particular — the creator of “Four on the floor,” former Philadelphia International session drummer and drummer for The Trammps, Earl Young.

Earl Young was a well-established drummer and Philly International favorite among producers and fellow musicians by the time Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes (vocally led by a young guy named Teddy Pendergrass) were set to record a song called “The Love I Lost” in 1973.

According to John Jackson’s awesome historical book “A house on fire: The rise and fall of Philadelphia Soul,” Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff wrote “The Love I Lost” as slow ballad, but the song wasn’t connecting in the studio.

Huff decided to try it up tempo and it was there, on the fly, that Earl Young created his famous “four on the floor” drum pattern, which meant four bars to a beat. He used the hi-hat cymbal as the basis for this new pattern and it was a simple groove for anyone to dance to, even if you had two left feet. (See Earl’s explanation and demonstration of Four on the Floor here.)

“The Love I Lost” spent Thanksgiving week of 1973 at the top of the R&B charts and cracked the pop top 10, and before long, plenty of records copying Earl’s drum pattern created scores of Disco hits until the Disco Sucks backlash killed it off in the summer of 1979.

You can listen to a song like “Get down tonight” by KC and the Sunshine Band, “Dance Dance Dance” by Chic and “Don’t leave me this way” by Thelma Houston (a cover of a Blue Notes song, by the way) and the drum beat will give you a sure enough sign that Earl Young’s influence was and is all over disco.

The basslines and the strings are what people remember about Disco, but with dance music, you have to have a strong beat to step to and Earl Young’s Four on the four proved to be the strong, thumping heartbeat that made Disco legendary.