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

Africa

Africa is the world's second largest and second most populous continent, after Asia. At about 30.2 million km² including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of the Earth's total surface area and 20.4% of the total land area...

n cultures and throughout the African diaspora

African diaspora

The African diaspora was the movement of Africans and their descendants to places throughout the world—predominantly to the Americas also to Europe, the Middle East and other places around the globe...

. 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 is an expression of profound spirituality and connectedness to the earth. It also 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' 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

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....

, 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 Caucasian disc jockey

Disc jockey

A disc jockey, also known as DJ, is a person who selects and plays recorded music for an audience. Originally, "disc" referred to phonograph records, not the later Compact Discs. Today, the term includes all forms of music playback, no matter the medium.There are several types of disc jockeys...

, Bill "Hoss" Allen, who used it on his nightly soul music shows on Nashville, Tennessee

Nashville, Tennessee

Nashville is the capital of the U.S. state of Tennessee and the county seat of Davidson County. It is located on the Cumberland River in Davidson County, in the north-central part of the state. The city is a center for the health care, publishing, banking and transportation industries, and is home...

 station WLAC

WLAC

WLAC is a clear channel radio station based in Nashville, Tennessee, operating at 1510 kHz on the AM dial.-Early history:Its first broadcast took place on November 24, 1926. The call letters were chosen to contain an acronym for the first owner of the station, the Life and Casualty Insurance...

.