The Git Up

Album: Honeysuckle & Lightning Bugs (2019)
Charted: 14
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Songfacts®:

  • Blanco Brown is a country trap singer and producer. His differing music tastes were influenced by:

    His upbringing in Atlanta, where he grew up listening to hip-hop artists.

    Brown's summers visiting his grandma in Butler, Georgia, where he learned to appreciate country music.
  • This fusion of country with elements of rap and hip-hop is Brown's debut single. A line-dance song, it starts with the singer urging the listener to "grab your loved ones" or "your love partner." He then offers simple instructions on how to perform the dance.
  • "The Git Up" started going viral after Lil Nas X's rap and country crossover "Old Town Road" began to break in spring 2019. It was aided by Brown's four-step dance tutorial, posted on May 15, 2019, which quickly began racking views on social media. The song was also helped by a viral dance challenge that played out on the TikTok app and YouTube.
  • The song was inspired by the mantra of Blanco Brown's grandmother. He told Billboard: "'The Git Up' is dedicated to my grandmother telling us every morning, 'Get up. Go do something productive in the world.' It's about messages [in] my music; bigger than anything is chasing your purpose in life."
  • "The Git Up" jumped 4-1 in its fifth week on the Country chart, the quickest trip to the tally's summit since Sam Hunt's "Body Like a Back Road" climbed 2-1 in its second week on the February 25, 2017 listing.
  • The song originated with Brown messing around with a lap steel guitar that one of his pals brought to the studio. He told Genius:
    "I had never played the lap steel before, so it sounded horrible, as we can imagine. And I tuned it like I tuned my guitar over E and I made one chord bar fret and then I kind of made the loop. And then I added the beatboxing, the kick drums, the 808s, the snares, the spoons, the tambourines. And after I got finished doing that, I was like, 'The song is so joyful, I've got to make some lyrics that feel just as exciting.'"

    Joy and dance is one and the same to Brown; this is because his joy comes from the church, and when people get joyful at church they jump around. "So, the joy in the record was telling me maybe if I give people a little direction with what I wanted to do, then I can make a 2019/2020 'Achy Breaky Heart' or something," he explained.
  • As Brown doesn't say "Git Up" anytime in the song, he dedicated the track to his grandmother: "Git Up, be joyful."
  • The music video was directed by Eric Welch (Carrie Underwood's "See You Again") and filmed in the quaint town of Watertown, Tennessee. We see Brown instructing various people, including firefighters and senior citizens, how to do "The Git Up." After practicing the moves, the group all gather together in a field and dance to the song's commands.

Comments: 1

  • Gary from California I like the story about the song, but why is it spelled “git” instead of “get”? I don’t suggest it’s your responsibility to teach the world, but every song or billboard that has a common word misspelled makes it that much harder to teach proper English to children. Maybe consider that? Maybe not?
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