The Hippest Trip in America (4 page)

Al Bell, then president of Stax Records, was ambitious, highly political, and a proud black nationalist and major supporter of the show. Almost every major act on the Stax roster except Isaac Hayes would soon perform on
Soul Train
: Rufus Thomas, Carla Thomas, the Staple Singers, the Bar-Kays, the Emotions, Luther Ingram. This grew out of a concert Bell organized in 1972 at the massive Los Angeles Coliseum with virtually every act on his roster. Tickets were only a dollar. Reverend Jesse Jackson led the crowd in a roaring chant of a poem called “I Am Somebody.” While it obviously promoted the Stax label, the event also attempted to provide moral and spiritual support to LA's black community. So it was no surprise that Bell would make his acts available to TV's first national black music show.

Motown Records, who'd just come west themselves, provided a number of performers as well (Junior Walker, Edwin Starr, the Originals), but none of its biggest names (Diana Ross, the Temptations, the Four Tops, Stevie Wonder). Berry Gordy's empire, though supportive of the show, took a bit of a wait-and-see approach to
Soul Train
when it came to its marquee talent.

While the industry was being introduced to
Soul Train
, Cornelius was establishing some enduring production habits. The animation of the opening-title graphics and the rumbling soulful train would be a staple of the show, while always being updated, as would the stage itself. Originally the
Soul Train
intro featured stick-figure animation with the names of the stations airing the show as slates on the train tracks. In addition, there was a circular railroad sign and a caution strip across the stage. As the show added more stations, the lights became neon and had flashing wheels. During the disco years, the obligatory light-reflecting disco ball was added, with
SOUL TRAIN
lined up around it. At one time, the stage was glass. Another version had flashing wheels and lights in front that backlit the
Soul Train
line.

For the majority of
Soul Train
's history, the animation for the opening, as well as the bumpers, was done by a man named John Cole, who took the train from dancing on its hind legs to puffing smoke to shooting fire as it passed through a cityscape. Though most people saw the show on Saturday mornings, a number of fans report being scared by the animation as children, that despite the great music that opening would lead them to, it also created great unease.

Cornelius wrote all the scripts that first year and would write them right through 2006. “No one really understands how many hours he put in writing the show,” said his son Tony, who watched his father work. “Obviously, when he hosted the show for years, people would listen to the dialogue and think, That's the same dialogue I heard last week. But he really put in a lot of time to make sure he did his research on these artists. He knew exactly who they were, he knew exactly what songs they were going to perform, and he tried to get into their soul, but he got into their soul his way. People don't realize how difficult it is to write scripts and think about questions to ask artists who may or may not be prepared for certain questions. He really went beyond the call of duty to take it upon himself to sit down every night and write scripts for almost thirty years or more.”

The
Soul Train
scripts, like the show itself, were an extension of Don's career in black radio. They deftly captured the slang and flavor of the radio disc jockey and were filled with enough catchphrases to fill an MC's rhyme book. Just as idiosyncratic as the scripts was Don's interview style. Comic Cedric the Entertainer, who grew up watching the show in Missouri, had a humorous take on it. “I realized it had to be his show because his interview skills was one that I could not easily understand,” he recalled. “I mean, 'cause he never really asked a question. He was the only person I knew that made statements and, you know, posed them as questions. ‘So you're on tour?' Pause. ‘Yes, I am on tour.' ‘The album is selling.' Pause. ‘Yes, it's selling.' You know that was Don's style. But he was smooth with it.”

For Fab 5 Freddy Brathwaite, the future
Yo! MTV Raps
host who watched the show growing up in Brooklyn, Cornelius's interview style was defined by his height. “He's taller than everybody he's probably interviewed,” said Brathwaite. “He had such a cool and commanding presence. Literally the epitome. Nothing ever cooler on TV except for maybe if a James Bond movie was playing. When I think of Don's interview style, he didn't say a lot. He asked a couple of key questions, let you get your thing off, and that was it. His demeanor was the essence of cool.”

Cornelius's relationship with the dancers, with a few warm-hearted exceptions we'll get into later, remained the same for the show's more than one thousand episodes. “Don Cornelius was like a dad sitting in the room over in the corner,” said dancer Derek Fleming. “He didn't have a lot of time for you. He was very stern, very focused, and I wouldn't say cold, but he was at work, and you had to be careful how you crossed him while he was at work.”

But, especially in
Soul Train
's early years, his words were appetizers, and the dancers were the main course.

 

THE DANCING
was the alpha and omega of the
Soul Train
story. It is more important than Don Cornelius's slang, the scramble board, and even the stars gracing its stage. The show's impact on dance starts from a very basic fact of black life: “Around the time we started
Soul Train
, wherever you would go in the United States, there was a different style of dancing,” Don said. “You would go to Detroit and they would be doing one thing. You could go to Chicago, and it was real cool . . . And you would go down south to Atlanta, and there was a whole 'nother flavor.”

I can cosign this. I remember many summer vacations going down to Virginia from Brooklyn, and my sister and I were grilled about the latest dances up north and forced to demonstrate until the steps had been passed on. Part of the appeal of James Brown's live show was that he, like an anthropologist of movement, had collected dances as he traveled, turning the Camel Walk into either a record or a piece of his impeccable show. Dick Clark's
Bandstand
certainly played its role in establishing many national dance trends (such as the 1960s phenomenon that was the twist). But the few black Philadelphia high school kids who got onto
American Bandstand
had a huge impact on what dances made it onto the broadcast. So while black dance style was included in Clark's broadcast, it was in small doses and often performed by white teens imitating their black peers. This kind of cultural co-optation was typical of American culture for most of this nation's history: black style—in music, dance, slang, and attitude—watered down for white mass consumption.

This is precisely why
Soul Train
was so revolutionary. This was black dance by black dancers presented by a black producer via a mass-media platform. This wasn't isolated exposure on a black radio station at the end of the AM dial, or a brief appearance by James Brown or Jackie Wilson on the
Ed Sullivan Show
. This was a regularly scheduled get-down right in your living room, whether you were black or white.

What viewers saw on
Soul Train
wasn't just one style but a polyglot of approaches, some indigenous street dance, some just individual flamboyance, and often happy accidents discovered in the heat of competition. From the show's national debut up to when break-dancing went pop in the 1980s,
Soul Train
was the most important showcase for contemporary idiomatic dance in the world. Music videos eventually usurped that role, but it didn't happen immediately. Most of the dancers' profiles to come are of folks from that golden era.

Never had the vernacular dances of black folks—dances that have roots in African religious rites and that traveled, by force and DNA, across the Atlantic Ocean—had such a vivid national showcase. Moves that in Africa would have had a connection to a god of water or fertility had been transformed into a model of self-expression unique to the American experience. There was an ecstatic nature to the best
Soul Train
dances. The writer Albert Murray, in writing about the blues, used the phrase “Saturday-night ritual” to explain the raucous parties that happened at juke joints of the South. With
Soul Train,
it was Saturday-morning celebrations.

“In the history of dance,
Soul Train
has its own place,” said Debbie Allen, a choreographer, dancer, and actress with a highly distinguished show-business career: two Tony Awards, three Emmys, and a choreographer and star in TV's
Fame
series. So she knows dancing. “You know there are different generations and genres of dance that can never be duplicated but will always be imitated . . . And
Soul Train
has its own lane because it inspired millions and millions. Look how long it lasted, and look how many people went through that show . . . There's so many choreographers that you will never know that they honed their skills watching
Soul Train.
”

 

Soul Train
brought funky booty-shaking moves into America's living rooms.

 

The show was a Saturday ritual watched with religious fervor and dedication. Instead of putting a donation in the collection plate, you purchased Afro Sheen, read
Right On!
magazine, or simply imitated the dances you witnessed in an act of supplication.
Soul Train
wasn't explicitly church, though Don Cornelius would have been a spectacularly cool pastor. Yet there was a spiritual quality to the dancing in
Soul Train
that touched the soul of viewers. Damita Jo Freeman, Jeffrey Daniel, Fred Berry, Jody Watley, Tyrone Proctor, Lou Ski, Rosie Perez, and the scores of dancers who created the
Soul Train
tradition preached with their torsos, legs, and arms, speaking a human language that was as influential as any Sunday sermon.

 

DANCER PROFILE:
Damita Jo and Don Campbell

 

If you Google Damita Jo Freeman, one of the first items to pop up is a YouTube clip called “The sensational and dynamic Damita Jo Freeman.” It is a four-minute-twenty-second greatest-hits montage of the moves that years later earned her the title of
Soul Train
's “Best Creative Dance.” The clip starts with a taste of Damita Jo and several male partners grooving down the
Soul Train
line in four different episodes. Then it cuts to Freeman joining James Brown and the JB's during a driving version of “Super Bad.” The Hardest-Working Man in Show Business is clearly fascinated by Damita Jo's smoothly robotic moves. The next cut is to a historic dance with Joe Tex, a jovial, energetic maker of gimmicky dance jams, performing his salacious 1972 hit “I Gotcha,” with Freeman upstaging his lip-synched performance by gloriously pirouetting on her right leg. This clip encapsulates the
Soul Train
effect: well-known performer upstaged by an unknown dancer and loving it. Game recognizes game.

Unlike most of the dancers who defined
Soul Train
, Damita Jo was extremely well trained, having studied ballet in Los Angeles from ages eight to seventeen after her family moved west from St. Louis. Her ability to dance solidly, with her shoulders square, creating a straight up-and-down line while simultaneously balancing on one leg and snapping a limb out with panache, can be traced back to her classical training.

But that well-honed technique was in service to a fly, flamboyant sensibility that was as funky as an old bog of collard greens. Damita Jo's combination of precision and flair in popular dance is as rare now as it was then. No wonder the Godfather of Soul, himself one of the most influential dancers of all time, could barely take his eyes off her.

Love for Damita Jo was pervasive in black America. Freddie Jackson, one of the biggest R&B stars of the 1980s, speaks for many when he said, “Damita Jo used to teach. She used to give lessons. She used to give Saturday lessons. I don't think anybody kicked like her . . . She had moves. She had creativity. When you saw Damita Jo doing all that stuff, you used to see in clubs and watch people doing what Damita Jo Freeman had done that day on
Soul Train
. So I go back and say she was a teacher.”

Echoing Jackson, Nieci Payne, a popular 1980s
Soul Train
dancer, proudly admitted Damita Jo's influence. “I mean, I had my own style of dance, but Damita Jo Freeman was everything dance-wise to me . . . Her look, her expression, everything. I just copied it and did it and won dances and danced all over the world with that. She's a good friend, a very good friend of mine to this day, and I tell everyone I danced on
Soul Train
because of Damita Jo Freeman.”