call-and-response

[kawl-uhn-ri-spons]

adjective

1. noting or pertaining to a style of singing in which a melody sung by one singer is responded to or echoed by one or more singers.

2. noting or pertaining to rapid, spontaneous verbal and nonverbal interaction between speaker and listener, in which all statements are punctuated by expressions from the listener.

noun

1. call-and-response singing.

2. call-and-response interaction between speaker and listener.

call-and-response

noun

1. a form of interaction between a speaker and one or more listeners, in which every utterance of the speaker elicits a verbal or non-verbal response from the listener or listeners

Word History and Origins

Origin of call-and-response¹

First recorded in 1820–30

Example Sentences

At the rally, thousands took part in call-and-response chants they have memorized over the last two years of the war.

Read more on Los Angeles Times

The latter tidbit starts “Piece of Mind,” a growler of country-leaning rock tune in which Shires is alternately spiteful, vengeful and longing, playing call-and-response with a scorched-earth fiddle because there’s no one else to answer her.

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“How do you turn that into flesh-and-blood music? I began to think about him being called up, with a kind of call-and-response in the music.”

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They did call-and-response chants and held up the now-familiar array of signs protesting police violence or white silence, and honoring the equally familiar litany of black people’s names: George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, Mike Brown — as you know, we could go on.

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Here, as one of the rare rock acts to headline Coachella over the last decade or so, Armstrong and his bandmates knew just how to engage the giant festival crowd with call-and-response routines and crisp video production.

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