Fifty years after late songwriter Roy C. Hammond self-released "Impeach the President," its crisp funky drum sample continues appearing in hundreds of rap songs.

Sampling has quietly reshaped music over the past five decades. A snare hit here, a vocal yelp there, maybe a drum loop that becomes the foundation for an entirely new genre. It’s wild how a forgotten ...

It didn’t take long for Clyde Stubblefield to start hating his greatest creation. The 20-second drum break, which he first played in a Cincinnati studio near the end of an exhausting 1969 tour with ...

Jay Mumford was attending Mamaroneck High School in the early Nineties when he made a hip-hop demo tape that sampled the drums from “Midnight Theme,” a song by the Seventies funk band Manzel that’s ...