Songfacts®:

• Eddie Kendricks followed up his first major post-Temptations hit, "Keep On Truckin'," with "Boogie Down," a disco-funk number about getting down with a girl on the dance floor and in the bedroom.
  
  Released in December 1973, the single peaked at #2 on the Billboard Hot 100 a few months later and was held off from the top spot by Terry Jacks' "Seasons In The Sun." It did, however, go to #1 on the R&B chart, making it his second consecutive single to do so.
• This was written by Frank Wilson, Leonard Caston Jr. and Anita Poree, the same Motown songwriting team behind "Keep On Truckin.'" The trio kept the former hit in mind while they were writing "Boogie Down," and retained some of the same elements.
  
  "We knew that they were both club records," Wilson explained in The Billboard Book Of Number One R&B Hits. "They were groove tracks with a gospel, churchy kind of background feel. We did an awful lot in terms of just letting the background ride over the vamp, so most of those songs were half-background grooves and the other half, of course, were leads."
• Wilson and Caston also produced the song together and did the arrangement with David Van De Pitte, the arranger behind Marvin Gaye's What's Going On and Let's Get It On albums. Van De Pitte praised Wilson's professionalism but not everyone at the session was a fan of his approach.
  
  "The rhythm section guys hated him," he recalled in The Billboard Book Of Number One R&B Hits. "Frank believed that the tune was made in the rhythm section, and he would work them to death down to the last detail."
• The Boogie Down! album, Kendricks' fourth solo effort, was his only album to reach #1 on the R&B albums chart.
• This was one of the first hits of the disco era to use the word "Boogie" in its title. The songs that hit the charts prior to 1974 referenced the boogie-woogie rhythms in blues and rock 'n roll music. Kendricks and his contemporaries adopted the term as a synonym for dancing. KC & The Sunshine Band, The Sylvers, Heatwave, and the Bee Gees are just a few of the other acts who hit big with boogie-themed singles.