Question 1

What does “slow jam” mean?

Accepted Answer

a slow, romantic R&B song — the record you play for somebody, not at them

Question 2

Where does “slow jam” come from?

Accepted Answer

The thing came before the name: Black radio had been stacking slow love records back-to-back since the quiet storm format took hold in the late 1970s. The name was fixed in place in 1983, when Midnight Star put a ballad titled 'Slow Jam' on their double-platinum album 'No Parking on the Dance Floor' — written by a then-unknown Kenneth 'Babyface' Edmonds with Belinda Lipscomb and Bo Watson, his first major credit as a songwriter for hire. Never released as a single, the song lived on airplay alone, which tells you the audience already knew exactly what a slow jam was. The term became the working vocabulary of Black radio and bedroom R&B through the 1990s — R. Kelly's 'Down Low (Nobody Has to Know)' (1995) and Usher's 'Nice & Slow' (1998), his first Hot 100 number one, are the genre operating at full strength. Mainstream usage borrowed the word whole from Black radio; it did not arise generically.