Get down is a stance, posture or movement in many traditional

Africa Africa is the world's second-largest and second-most populous continent, after Asia in both cases. At about 30.3 million km2 (11.7 million square miles) including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of Earth's total surface area ...

n cultures and throughout the

African diaspora The African diaspora is the worldwide collection of communities descended from native Africans or people from Africa, predominantly in the Americas. The term most commonly refers to the descendants of the West and Central Africans who were e ...

. It involves bending at the waist and knees, bringing the body low to the ground in moments of ecstasy or intensity. Bending at the knees and waist indicates suppleness and conveys qualities and values of vitality, youthfulness and energy. In Gahu choreography, often dancers move counterclockwise in a circle of alternating men and women; their performance includes "long passages of a lightly bouncy basic '

step Step(s) or STEP may refer to: Common meanings * Stairs#Step, Steps, making a staircase * Walking * Dance move * Military step, or march ** Marching Arts Films and television * Steps (TV series), ''Steps'' (TV series), Hong Kong * Step (film), ' ...

' leavened with brief 'get down' sections in which the dancers lower their center of weight and move with intensified strength and quickness." The term "get down" in popular music and slang is directly related to this particular element of the

African aesthetic While the African continent is vast and its peoples diverse, certain standards of beauty and correctness in artistic expression and physical appearance are held in common among various African societies. Taken collectively, these values and standa ...

, filtered through the African-American experience. Use of the term by white Americans since the middle-20th century, though, is credited to the influence of a

white White is the lightest color and is achromatic (having no hue). It is the color of objects such as snow, chalk, and milk, and is the opposite of black. White objects fully reflect and scatter all the visible wavelengths of light. White on ...

disc jockey A disc jockey, more commonly abbreviated as DJ, is a person who plays recorded music for an audience. Types of DJs include Radio personality, radio DJs (who host programs on music radio stations), club DJs (who work at a nightclub or music f ...

Bill "Hoss" Allen Bill Allen (a.k.a. "Hossman" or "Hoss"; born William Trousdale Allen III, December 3, 1922 – February 25, 1997) was an American radio disc jockey who attained fame from the 1950s through the 1990s for playing rhythm and blues and black go ...

, who used it on his nightly soul music shows on

Nashville, Tennessee Nashville is the capital city of the U.S. state of Tennessee and the county seat, seat of Davidson County, Tennessee, Davidson County. With a population of 689,447 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 U.S. census, Nashville is the List of muni ...

station

WLAC WLAC (1510 AM) – branded ''Talkradio 98.3 & 1510'' – is a commercial talk radio radio station licensed to serve Nashville, Tennessee. Owned by iHeartMedia, the station covers the Nashville metropolitan area. The WLAC studios are located ...

.According to Wes Smith in his ''The Pied Pipers of Rock 'n' Roll: Radio Deejays of the 50s and 60s'' (Longstreet Press, 1989).

References

{{African-American dance African-American dance Dance moves