Excerpts About "Foot Stomping Cheers" From Kyra D. Gaunt's Book "The Games Black Girls Play"

Edited by Azizi Powell

This pancocojams series features excerpts of Kyra D. Gaunt' book The Games Black Girls Play: Learning The Ropes From Double -Dutch To Hip-Hop (New York University Press, 2006). These excerpts provide an analysis of the African American originated girls' recreational activity that I refer to as "foot stomping cheers" (also known as "cheers", "steps" and other terms). Complete and partial words to versions of a few of these cheers are also included in these excerpts.

The content of this post is presented for folkloric, cultural, and recreational purposes.

All copyrights remain with their owners.

Thanks to Kyra D. Gaunt for her research and her writing. Thanks also to all of the girls whose play is documented in this excerpt.
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This is part of an ongoing pancocojams series on foot stomping cheers. Click the foot stomping cheers tag below for other posts in this pancocojams series.

[added August 29, 2017] Click https://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2017/08/values-expressed-in-foot-stomping_24.html of this series for a few videos that show performance movements that are similar to foot stomping cheers.

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Selected Excerpts From:"GAMES BLACK GIRLS PLAY: LEARNING THE ROPES FROM DOUBLE-DUTCH TO HIP-HOP"
[Excerpt from Chapter 3: "Mary Mack Dressed In Black: The Earliest Formation Of Popular Music"; sub-section titled "Cheers"]

[page 76]
"Cheers are the second type of play that occupies girls' musical and social play. They are also known as "scolds
in Memphis, and in urban centers like Philadelphia, as "steps". The latter links the practice of cheers to a competitive tradition of group identity, known as "stepping" that was practiced by black, Greek-lettered fraternity and sorority members throughout much of the twentieth century. It involves creating in-body formulas that represent the unique identity of each group, sampling and re-composing aspects of black vernacular style and expression as well as moments of popular recorded song from gospel to hip-hop, from preaching to playing the Dozens. Competing groups try to outdo one another by choreographing a funky routine of embodied percussive beats and chants, collectively enacted by the group that names individual members, while signifying their unique group identity (i.e. individuality within collectivity). Steeping began at predominantly white universities, where many of these black "Greek" organizations exist, as well as historically black universities and colleges. (HBCUs).

This practice occurs with several girls gathered in a circle or a row, reminiscent of ring games like Little Sally Walker. Together, the girls synchronize their individual performances of percussive choreography-based on a more polyrhythmic and multi-limbed sequence of handclapping gestures, thigh-slapping, and foot-stomping. While cheers and handclapping games share percussive gestures, cheers feature a greater degree of difficulty relative to physical coordination and musical expression.

In performing cheers, girls must learn to create the embodied percussion of the gestures separately: there is little or no contact with other to produce percussive sounds and gestures, as was the case in handclapping games. In order to transition from performing handclapping games to cheers, girls must learn to navigate a sea of embodied sounds that they initially

[page 77]

produced in tandem with another person and move to perform individually, yet collectively, in concert with others, rhythmically.

Who keeps the beat among the crew? Who synchronizes the timing of their collective gestures and moves to avoid cacophony and disarray? Everyone keeps the beat simultaneously, and no one person, per se, conducts the music-making. This is one of the earliest examples of the development of the so-called metronome sense frequently alluded to in musicological literature about African and African American aesthetics.

[...]

Following my interactions with the twins, Stephanie and Jasmine, I learned and collected a few handclapping games and cheers in the summer of 1995 from a group of black and biracial girls (ages 10-15) participating in a summer writing workshop for current or formerly homeless girls and boys. The program was held at Community High School in Ann Arbor, Michigan. And because boys were constantly lurking around when the girls were demonstrating their games during recess, this site elicited some interesting observations about female-male relations, in what often resembled scenes from commercial popular culture in reverse (i.e. boys dancing to the rhythms created by girls' play.)

One of the games I most enjoyed learning at Community High was a cheer performed by Tomika and Laura (ages 10 and 11) hat began "OO-lay, OO-lay/na-OO-tay/ Stay back that's me", and culminated with an antagonistic call-and-response: Call: "Oo! She thinks she bad." Response: Baby, bady, don't get me mad."....

Later that year, ... I happened upon a variant of the same cheer performed by my cousin's daughter Arielle (age 10). Arielle grew up on an Air Force base

[page 78]
in Denver, Colorado, a region influenced by Mexican heritage. And her version may reflect an adoption of Hispanic local practice or may parody it (Oo-lay in Tomika's version was pronounced Oh-la in Arielle's.) Arielle learned her version from her membership in junior high school (O-la, O-la/ Now who thinks they're bad!").

Arielle's version seemed less sophisticated and less complex, no as "funky" as the body of musical games I participated in and observed during my upbringing and research in black settings. Though the rhythm of the vocal dimension was initially the same, there are key differences between the two versions. Tomika's emphasizes more of the ideals associated with musical blackness.

[...]

Cheers offer a more polyphonically-embodies percussion that involves all four limbs, creating additional timbres from finger0snapping, handclapping, thigh-slapping, and foot-stomping. They tend to feature more syncopation, swinging of he beat, and rhymed linguistic play, facilitating a competitive nature within such play (more of an emphasis on individuality within collectivity). The fun of performing cheers is the synchronization of the voiced chants and the uniformity of emodiment, signaling a

[page 80]
team or group effort, even while many cheers internally feature antagonistic narratives of self-assertion within the group, often through call-and-response structures. All of this becomes apparent in the act of naming the self, and claiming to share a group identity that is black and female.

Jigalow" and Michael Jackson
"Jigalow" is a cheer that I learned from Jasmine and Stephanie that reveals a different aspect of the relationship between girls' games and popular songs by male artists. In this case, the artist is the young, emerging soloist Michael Jackson. And the aspect highlighted here concerns the use of kinetic orality, or transmission of movement or motion that are used to key into an older dance.

[...]

The expression "jig-a-low", which sonically resembles the word "gigalow", features call-and-response between two or more girls, with opportunities for each player to "do their thang": show off their individual dancing and identity. I imagine the "jig" in "jig-a-low" refers to dancing, or perhaps even "getting down", in its colloquial meaning in black dance. Definitions of "jig" in the Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary include "to move with rapid jerky motions," and "to dance in a rapid lively manner of a jig" (1999). These movements are not lost here.

Note the lyrics of the latter part of the game-song, which describe the action that accompanies how to "jigalow":

Well, my hands up high / My feet down low
And this the way I jig-a-low
Well, her hands up high / Her feet down low
And that's the way she jig-a-low
Refrain:
Jig-a-low/ Jig-a-low

[page 81]
Simple claps on beats two and four accompany the refrain,while the call-and-response sections lack any significant body-slapping, clapping, or finger-snapping. In that sense, this is an unusual cheer. But movement is not lacking here:dance or dancelike gestures are privileged in this game-song, following its name.

In introducing herself, each player inserts her name into a scripted verse of call-and-response, in dialogue with the other girls (one or more) playing the game....

The cheer actually explores contemporary "street" dance styles...

[...]

[page 82]

Jiglow
Refrain (Unison)
Jig-a-low, jig, jig-a-low
Jig-a-low, jig, jig-a-low

Part I
(Call) Jasmine: Hey Stephanie!
(Response) Stephanie: Say what?
Jasmine: In-troduce yourself!
Stephanie: Know what?
Jasmine: In-troduce yourself!
[They exchange roles here.]
Stephanie: My name is Ste-phanie
Jasmine: Yeah!
Stephanie: I got the mucle.
Jasmine: Yeah!
Stephanie: To do the hu-stle
Jasmine: Yeah!
Stephanie: I do my thang
Jasmine: Yeah!
Stephanie: On the video screen
Jasmine: Yeah!
Stephanie: I do the ro, ro, ro, ro, ro-bot (punctuates each syllable with Do Do Brown)
Jasmine: She do the ro, ro, ro, ro, ro-bot (Jasmine imitates Stephanie's version of the dance)

Refrain (Unison)
Jig-a-low, jig, jig-a-low
Jig-a-low, jig, jig-a-low

Part 2
Stephanie: Hey Jasmine!
Jasmine: Hey what?
Stephanie: Are you ready?
Jasmine: To what,?
Stephanie; To jig
Jasmine: Jig-a-low?
(unison): jig what?

[Exchanged roles again]

Jasmine: Well, My hands up high, my feet down low.
and THIS's the way I jig-a-low
[Jasmine creates a stylized move on THIS's]
Stephanie: Well, My hands up high, my feet down low.
and THIS's the way she jig-a-low
[Stephanie mimic Jasmine's stylized move on THIS's.]

[...]

[page 83]

The actual dance that Jasmine and Stephanie performed in place of the Robot in "Jig-a-low", was the Do. Do. Brown. This dance involved a rapid locomotive action, popping one's pelvis back and forth... It accompanied the song from which its name was taken: "C'mon Babe [Do Do Brown Version]," recorded by Miami-based entrepreneur Luther Campbell (aka Luke Skywalker) ....1990.

[...]

[page 84]
Whether girls are conscious of it or not, "Jig-a-low" is linked to the historical popularity of the song "Dancing Machine", the dance the Root, and the rising star of Michael Jackson..."Jig-a-low" is linked to black girls' fascination with boy singers, like Jackson, as teen idols; linked to youthful trends in black dance, and girls' significant participation to it; linked to girls' imitation of mediated black popular culture "on the video screen", from the Supremes to doing the Robot, as I once did.

[...]

[page 85]

Through the rhythmic and timbral patterns created from handclapping and finger-popping, body-patting and foot-stomping, jumping and dancing, all three types of play-handclapping games, cheers, and double-dutch- operated withing the everyday musical landscapes of language, rhythm, sound, and gesture of black female experience."...

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[Excerpt from the chapter "Who's Got Next Game?:Women, Hip Hop, and The Power Of Language" and the interview sub-section titled "Women, Music And Other Things Besides Singing"]

[page 131]
"Tosha (b 1972) recalled that she and her friends in Memphis, Tennessee, referred to cheers as scolds. In other cases, cheers are known as steps- linking them with the popular black, Greek-lettered fraternity and sorority tradition known as "stepping". I invited Tosha to explain what she thought scolds meant, and she speculated that it probably had a lot to do with the competitive exchanges and put-downs-the call-and-response that often took place between performers within the frame of specific cheers. She couldn't recall specific examples but likened scolds to playing the Dozens."

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[Excerpt From "Conclusion"]

[author referring to a presentation that she did in 2003]
[page 181]
"My presentation rekindled the memory of several games once forgotten by a beautiful sister with locks who grew up in suburban Chicago....LaShonda waited after the talk to perform for me. The cheer began with a triplet rhythm into the downbeat-sung to a refrain that was remarkably familiar to my hip-hop ears:
Rock Rock to the Planet Rock / BAM!/ Don't stop!/
Rock Rock to the Planet Rock / BAM!/ Don't stop!/

[....]

[page 182]
LaShonda was clueless about the significance of [Afrika Bambaataa's hip-hop song "Planet Rock"] outside of her realm of memory of performing it with her sister. She may not remember it, but "Planet Rock" was surely the hot track circulating around the sub-culture of her adloescnece as a teenager in the late seventies and early eighties. The oral-kenetic transmission of black girls' play was her direct feed.

A few weeks later, I invited LaShonda to visit my hip-hop course to teach her version of ""Planet Rock"and several other cheers she grew up performing. They were all based on funk hits from the early 1980s, including Kool and the Gangs' "Hollywood Swinging" and the S.O.S. Band's Take Your Time". Upon hearing Afrika Bambaataa's original for the first time, she had no recollection of ever hearing it before.

[...]

[page 183]
What was fascinating, which I was unable to research and include in this book, was how many of LaShonda's versions of cheers [she remembered cheers and not handclapping games or double-dutch rhymes] involved a great deal of individual improvisation within the collective expression of many chants. It was the first time that I had observed this phenomenon, the invention of vocal expression in the context of social performance of a girls' game. Does that suggest a change in the transmission or performance practice of girls games?....Was Chicago in the early 1980s somewhat a different locale of expression than outside Detroit, where I collected games in 1994-95? This can only be left for further study."

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This concludes this pancocojams post of excerpts about cheers from Kyra D, Gaunt's book The Games Black Girls Play.

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