Songfacts®:

• As a singer, Vanessa Williams is best known for ballads like "Save The Best For Last" and "Colors Of The Wind," but her first single was "The Right Stuff," a #1 Dance hit. For her second album, she got back in the groove with "Freedom Dance (Get Free!)," a song about expressing your true self on the dance floor, and by extension, in life.
• "Freedom Dance" was written by Reggie Stewart and Kipper Jones, the same team that wrote the title track to The Comfort Zone album. Jones, who wrote the lyrics, also co-wrote "The Right Stuff."
• Vanessa Williams has a large following in the gay community, which she targeted with this song. In a Songfacts interview with it's co-writer Kipper Jones, he told the story: "I, at that point, was really delving into this whole dance music thing. House music was getting really big in '86 through '90. Madonna had done 'Vogue' at that point. I told Reggie [Stewart] I really want to do a dance record with Vanessa. She's got a big gay following that is a dance-crazed audience, and she needs to address that audience, so he came with this track, and I didn't quite have a lyric for it, but one morning, I woke up and Nelson Mandela was being released from prison. And 'Freedom Dance' was born.
  
  That's where the lyric came from, but then it was also about how I was a very closeted gay kid. I didn't know how to do any of that, and I didn't have any tutelage, so it was also a cry for help. All these years later, 'Freedom Dance' is a huge LGBTQ anthem, and I didn't even know that's what I was doing when I was doing it. But that's what I did, and it is, and I'm so happy and honored by that. If it helps anybody, then great."
• One of the backing singers on this track is Brian McKnight, who two years later had a breakthrough when he duetted with Williams on the hit "Love Is."