The summer anthem in 2025 of black America can be an online dance imbued with history and African tradition.
The catchy song “Boots on the Ground” of the rapper of Southern Southern 803Fresh seems to be everywhere – during picnics, reunion, lawyers before, block festivals, cruise ships and festivals – with mass of African -Americans by waving fans and singing the viral sentence, “Where fans?”
The Southern Southern Soul Line dance song was released in December. He recently increased in popularity after people and everyday celebrities began to put on cowboy outfits and to make the choreography for a Tiktok challenge.
The momentum did not continue to build.
“Southern Soul Music has been underground for years, but this particular song brings cowboys cultivation in a place where everyone can participate,” the Hometown Heat “said Brown, a former hip-hop jockey record at 105.3 kjamz in Tulsa, Oklahoma. “It brings a feeling of country to urban life.”
Some of those who participated in the viral challenge “Boots on the Ground”, which has millions of views on social networks, are the former NBA star Shaquille O’Neal and the first lady Michelle Obama.
THE official clip For the song, published on YouTube two months ago, was seen 12 million times.
During a hindrance at the Winter Park Jazz Festival du Colorado last weekend, a jockey record joked that someone paid $ 100 to play the song.
And when he did, hundreds of things present, whatever the breed, found the small space available on the large crowd crowded to take a look. Others have risen to watch it and learn it.
The critic of culture Blue Telusma attributes the success of Beyoncé’s album in 2024 “Cowboy Carter” with the way to “Boots on the Ground”.
“Carter” won the Grammy Awards For the album of the year and the best country album by exploring and highlighting the neglected contributions of blacks to music and culture.
While some were removing the official entry of Beyoncè into the country, Telusma said that it was an instrumental step towards recovery of the genre for people of color.
“Blacks, Mexicans and Latinos have a deep history in the culture of cowboy for which we often do not get credit, and the same ancestral DNA that I suspect that Beyoncé has exploited by making” Cowboy Carter “is what line dance means in the black community,” said Telusma.
Traditionally, for the ancestors and enslaved Africans who built America, online dance was a form of spiritual community dance.
“It was a way for people during the really bad moments to come together in a barn or speakeasy and dance as a collective,” said Telusma.
Some say that the way the sounds of “boots” allow an intergenerational appreciation of the song. Part of the song is derived from the culture of the trails, where black southerners would have barbecuees before riding their horses while it was dressed in colorful vests and cowboy outfits and traveling different districts to show their cattle, said China Scroggins, resident of Denver, 37 years old. It also applies that the song is linked to ancestral African traditions.
“There is something very culturally and historically healthy about how black Americans and their ancestors have evolved to overcome,” said Scroggins, who taught dance after watching several viral videos earlier this year. “The song came out when people needed to hear him out of a presidential election – being in tune. And the song and the dance were easy to adapt, and it was fun.”
Radio-friendly dances such as “electric slide” in the 1980s and later the “Shuffle Cupid” and “The Wobble” have long been part of black culture.
