“Street cheers"  are a new form of call & response chants that are performed in choreographed routines that emphasize bass sounding foot stomps.  The earliest documentation of sidewalk chants that I have found is in a record called Old Mother Hippletoe: Rural and Urban Children’s Songs (New World Records, Library of Congress No. 78-750524).  This 1978 record included several cheers performed by a group of Washington, D.C. girls.  The record’s notes said that the girls imitated cheerleaders connected with college sport teams by including rhythmical foot stomping, hand clapping and such acrobatic moves as back flips in their performances.  I don’t think that slips, and flips and other acrobatic moves are included in these routines anymore.  Nowadays sidewalk chants emphasize feet stomping routines, popular dance motions, personal hand clapping, and other hand motions.

Although dance style cheerleader's cheers are clearly a source for many of the chants, I believer that they belong to a related, but separate category of children's folk rhymes & chants that I will refer to as "street cheers".  It should be noted that there is actually no established term for these chants.  Most people call them "cheers", while others call them “steps."  Performing these chants is sometimes called steppin  because it is very similar to the choreographed movements that is performed by predominately African American Greek letter university fraternities & sororities, and, more recently, by school, church, and community based high school, and middle school formalized youth step teams. Performing street cheers is also something like the uptempo, choreographed routines performed by African American drill teams.