_Three young men walk from the shadows toward the viewer accompanied by music that sounds eerily like the soundtrack to Halloween. Yet the initially sinister tone quickly develops into one of swagger and then exuberance. They begin a display of graceful, precise ticking movements and heel-toe steps, showcasing some of the best of Memphis street dance in 1993. G-Style—the hip-hop trio of Wolf, Hurricane, and Romeo—in their music video for “Gangsta,” debuted gangsta walkin’ to the world. Each group member performs coordinated, joint dance moves, while also displaying their own individual flair. Indeed, gangsta walkin’ provides an opportunity to showcase both teamwork and individual ingenuity amid the vitality of Memphis music and culture.

As well as embodying its fundamental spirit, G-Style also demonstrates many essential elements of Memphis hip-hop choreography. Movements start from the ground up. They begin by performing the buck jump, a kind of rhythmic knee lift, each leg in succession, as though they were being jerked up by marionette strings. The dancers are revving themselves up for what follows: a side-buck jump, where alternating knee lifts expand to either side. The dancers’ feet pitter-patter, their bodies animated almost robotically to the staccato beat of a Memphis rap rhythm, before turning those light movements into a glide that carries them in a neat circle or across the floor. Your feet become your instruments, your weapons, and your symbols of power and grace all at once.

As G-Style member Romeo says during the video, the dance “is an expression”—both of the cultural and creative heritage of Memphis, Tennessee, and the personal experience of the dancers who performed it. Watching the group move together, you realize how much of the dance depends on the movement of the feet. It is mesmerizing to watch gangsta walkin’ in action; you see evidence of choreography, yet the movement also appears natural and instinctive. The entire statement of the dance is a particular confidence—a swagger that would have been cultivated on the streets of Memphis in the 1980s and early 1990s. This swagger was born out of Memphis’s experience as a “post-soul” city—wrestling with, and being inspired by, the trials of deindustrialization, persistent racism, class conflict, and the tribulations of working for Black civic and political advancement.

Today, it’s called “jookin’,” a term that reflects how the style has evolved to include many street dance moves alongside the gangsta walk, its original predecessor. The gangsta walk—a dance style characterized by precise, vigorous footwork and Michale Jackson–ish smoothness—was popular at Memphis’s Crystal Palace Roller Rink, where the dancing that would become jookin’ got its start. The Palace’s iconic red roof stretched the length of the building, with the venue’s name spelled out in white letters, encircled with gold swooshes that make the name appear like a big top tent at the circus. Even seven years after its closing, residents of Memphis still speak of the Crystal Palace as a place where everyone could have fun—and stay out of trouble. The public outcry that accompanied its loss was a testament to its importance during the 1980s and 1990s, when hip-hop and Memphis were both evolving in new and intriguing directions.

Southern hip-hop’s own history is a complicated tale—one that is easy to argue begins in the 1990s when André 3000 told the overwhelmingly bi-coastal crowd at the 1995 Source Awards that “the South got something to say,” or, going back to the late 1980s, with the rise of the Geto Boys and 2 Live Crew in Houston and Miami, respectively. In Memphis, DJ Spanish Fly and his successor DJ Squeeky utilized tools such as the Boss DR-660 drum machine to craft a sound that revolutionized hip-hop in the city. That first generation of Memphis hip-hop artists—often inspired by horror film soundtracks, along with soul and r&b—crafted the sound that would give rise to gangsta walkin’ and, eventually, jookin’: raw, dark, up-tempo, supported by booming bass, and filled with gritty themes as well as creative and emotional energy.

In the documentary Memphis Gangsta Walkin’, released in 2001, Memphis-based rapping legend Al Kapone explains how music and dance styles played a key role in each other’s development in the Memphis hip-hop scene. “Gangsta walkin’ go hand in hand with the music. The music is what makes people do the gangsta walk,” he says. “Memphis rappers realized you gotta make songs like that…you wanted to make a song that’s gonna make them do that.”

That music, and the dance it inspired, was born when Memphis was at a cultural crossroads. For some, the heyday of Memphis music was in the past. The decline of Stax Records in the late 1970s, coupled with the death of Elvis Presley in 1977, seemed to indicate the end of Memphis as a major power in the music industry. However, in 1981, Ebony magazine pointed out how Memphis was still trying to recover from the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. more than a decade after it happened. The murder “so polarized the city’s Blacks and Whites that even now, after 13 years, the racial barrier is still as evident as the Mississippi is muddy.” The article itself, like Memphis, exhibited hope for the future along with a dash of pessimism about how this city could be an example of the worst of the late twentieth-century version of the New South: a few benefiting from new opportunities, with the vast majority of the city—primarily Black citizens—being left behind by an evolving economy. “The key word for Memphis is ‘potential,’” the Ebony article stated, “and it is the city’s massive Black population which has extraordinary potential for great economic and political power.”

By 1992—the year before the “Gangsta” music video was released—the Lorraine Motel, the site of Dr. King’s assassination, had been made into the National Civil Rights Museum. In a sense, the gangsta walk is an appropriate symbol of this post-soul era.

A term coined by Nelson George, “post-soul” helps to give shape to the varieties of Black culture that grew up across the United States throughout the twentieth century. With Black culture becoming as mainstream as it had ever been, it was evident that culture in, say, the Carolinas was different from that in Memphis, and both were different from that in Oakland, California. But there were similarities among all of them. And Black cultures across the United States—and throughout the Black diaspora—shared common traits that stretched back to Africa itself.

Professor Thomas DeFrantz explains that Black social dances, such as jookin’, or the Crip walk from Los Angeles, or Chicago’s footwork, are usually the outgrowth of the natural interaction of Black people at parties, family reunions, and other cultural events where creation and recreation intersect. “They’re all in one kind of like stew of Black American creativity,” DeFrantz says of the various dances in Black regional cultures. Historically, social dance operated as a cultural safe haven for Black Americans to be themselves beyond the white gaze. The motions and stomping of gangsta walkin’ have much in common with “wing” dancing from the nineteenth century. This style of dance emphasized flapping, wing-like gestures with the arms and legs. It also emphasized the use of feet and creating a percussion-like instrumentation for the body. You continually see this in the gangsta walk and jookin’. As Professor DeFrantz points out, a tradition within Black dance is “illusion” stepping, making it seem as though the body is not merely just moving gracefully, but is almost floating across the dance floor. The masculine power associated with hip-hop has always occupied a place side-by-side with a thoughtful inventiveness and creativity about dance and understanding Black life in America. The gangsta walk allowed Memphis citizens to link back to their own proud past, as Black Americans daring to be free against incredible odds.

The birth of gangsta walkin’ and its gradual transformation into jookin’ accompanied the city’s own transformation in the post-soul era. The growth of Federal Express—FedEx—since the early 1980s helped propel Memphis from a traditional transportation hub to global city. Since the late 1990s, Memphis hip-hop acts such as Three 6 Mafia, 8Ball and MJG, Project Pat, and Gangsta Boo—among so many others—have achieved both underground and mainstream success. Jookin’ has become a global phenomenon, performed in a wide variety of music videos and dance tours. In an interview for Dance magazine in 2018, Memphis dance legend Lil Buck, real name Charles Riley, expressed the hope that dance can help share Memphis’s proud cultural heritage. When it began as gangsta walkin’ in the 1980s, Memphis street dancers and partiers alike at the Crystal Palace Roller Rink could not have imagined how big the dance would grow.

In fact, if there is an era in which jookin’ could flourish, it might be this one. The advent of social media allows dancers the opportunity to show off their skills in their local communities and to the entire world. “Memphisjookin” on Instagram and TikTok provides almost daily examples of the dance, showcasing collaborations with global brands like Nike. The dance is no longer a hidden gem of the Bluff City.

The career of Lil Buck may be illustrative of what the future holds for jookin’. What vaulted Lil Buck into international fame was a brief film of him dancing to a performance of the Camille Saint-Saëns piece “The Swan” performed by cellist Yo-Yo Ma, filmed by director Spike Jonze. Since that video, Buck has performed on tour with Madonna, on film for Spike Lee (in 2014’s Da Sweet Blood of Jesus), and with famed dance artist Mikhail Baryshnikov for luxury fashion brand rag & bone. Lil Buck’s theatrical dramatization of the dance, Memphis Jookin’: The Show, received a favorable review in the New York Times in 2023. Declared “sincere entertainment” by Times critic Brian Seibert, the show was meant to show jookin’ and, in Lil Buck’s words, “the world it comes from,” giving a crash course in both the dance and the music that inspired it. Lil Buck’s performance of Memphis Jookin’ at the Kennedy Center in 2018 had, by August 2024, over 312,000 views on YouTube. There is no doubt that jookin’ has provided Buck a unique platform—which he has used to not only promote himself, but the larger art form of Memphis dance to the entire world.

Jookin’ shares something with the blues, r&b, rock & roll, the excitement of Memphis Tiger basketball, and the raw violence of professional wrestling at the Mid-South Coliseum. The dance reflects a deeper quality about life in Memphis—the ability of its residents to borrow from various strands of Southern and Black American life to create something fresh. Above all, though, it showcases the genuine magic unleashed when Black people are, for a moment, allowed to be themselves—without a historical, cultural, or social price to pay.

This story was published in the print edition as “Jookin’ Everywhere I Go.” Subscribe to the Oxford American with our year-end, limited-time deal here. Buy the issue this article appears in here: print and digital.