The Hippest Trip in America

by Nelson George

  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 purcha
sed 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.”

  Freeman’s journey into dance history began on a Thursday night at Maverick’s Flat when she and some girlfriends spotted a group of young men doing a dance she’d never seen. Don Campbell, Joe Chism, Jimmy “Scooby Doo” Foster, and some others were just starting to kick the tires on a dance soon to be famous internationally as “locking.” “I thought it was the most magical thing I’ve ever seen,” she told Stephen McMillian more than twenty years later. But it wasn’t until the next night at Climax, another hot club, that Damita Jo got the courage to dance with the boys, make friends, and later bond over a postparty meal at Fat Burger.

  What exactly did Freeman see those first two nights? Jeffrey Daniel, in a few years to be a big part of this scene, said with awe:

  Don Campbell in the club? My God, why wasn’t that filmed? Why wasn’t that filmed? Taking off his hat, spinning it, putting it on his head. Throwing his car keys in the air, catching it in his hip pocket all to the beat of the music. Doing double splits, screaming, grabbing the ceiling, coming down a slap, and you could hear his hands slap the floor, these wooden floors, real dance floors. Just hear his hand. Pow! He just fills the whole club. I mean it was just amazing watching this guy.

  Campbell, a street-dance innovator, the creator of locking and founder of the Lockers, was born in St. Louis in 1951 but raised in South Central. Drawing was his first artistic expression, and it’s why he attended Los Angeles Trade-Technical College to study drafting. While he was in college, Campbell became part of the local club scene and developed his trademark dance moves.

  The funky chicken, a southern dance, became a national hit in 1969 when Rufus Thomas recorded “Do the Funky Chicken.” Campbell was having a hard time mastering the dance’s rocking movement. As performed by Thomas, who even in his sixties could gyrate with the best, it was a rocking, wobbly move that involved arm movements that mimicked barnyard fowl. For whatever reason, Campbell couldn’t do the dance smoothly, finding that his arms would freeze or lock, creating a comical hesitation that cracked up his friends. “No matter what type of mistake I made, they clapped,” Campbell said in The Vibe History of Hip Hop.

  Quickly this embarrassment became a trademark that Campbell, along with some other folks he met at LA clubs, began embellishing with leg lifts, splits, dives, and knee drops. Because people often guffawed at the locking movements, the Uncle Sam (in which he pointed at viewers à la the famous army recruiting poster) became a standard move. Another signature move, leg lifts accompanied by hands clenched together in front of the body, looked fantastic when done by two or three dancers at a time (a move echoed in Psy’s “Gangnam Style” video in 2012).

  After those first two nights of dancing with Campbell and company, Freeman left LA for a month to dance in a musical. Upon her return home, on a Wednesday night she went back to Maverick’s Flat, where she was spotted by a Soul Train scout who encouraged her to audition at Denker Park that Friday. That’s where she met producer Tommy Kuhn and Don Cornelius, who she recalled were dressed in smart, fly coats like the title character’s in the blaxploitation flick Shaft. Not surprisingly, both Freeman and Campbell were invited to Soul Train tapings that Saturday and Sunday morning.

  While Freeman and Campbell would soon be celebrated for their dancing on that very first weekend on the Soul Train set, the duo didn’t impress Don. As soon as they went into their locking moves, several dancers complained to the staff that Freeman and Campbell were “invading” their space, as Freeman recalled. She said Don told them, “I want you two in the back over there in the corner.” So they were moved behind singer Thelma Houston, away from the cameras.

  Freeman, one of the few at the taping with show-business experience, wasn’t very impressed with the amenities for the dancers. Lunch was a box of chicken, a Coca-Cola, and one drink of water. (I visited the Soul Train set in the early 1980s and will never forget seeing a mountain of Kentucky Fried Chicken boxes stacked up for the dancers.) The changing rooms were the studio restrooms. She couldn’t do anything about these conditions, but she would have an impact on another backstage aspect of Soul Train.

  Dancers were not allowed to use the studio pay phone to call parents, friends, or anyone else. Freeman wouldn’t accept that and called her mother, who, upset about the restriction, called the police. The next day an LAPD officer stopped by the studio to let Cornelius know that he couldn’t prevent the minors on the set from having access to a phone. They had the right to call their parents to let them know they were all right and to set up rides back home. Freeman also argued for herself and others to get Soul Train ID cards that would allow them to park in the studio parking lot.

  The lanky lady’s popularity helped Soul Train, but she may have created some tension with its host. “I remember Don Cornelius was looking at me angry because he didn’t want the dancers to interact with guest stars,” she said of her legendary dance with Jo
e Tex. “I just knew this would be my last time on Soul Train. But the episode aired, and the show’s ratings went up.” Whatever his reservations at the time about Damita Jo, Don would, in 1982, admit that her freestyle with Tex helped Soul Train’s popularity.

  After she danced with Brown on the show, the Godfather invited her to open for him at a concert at the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena. Damita Jo brought many of the dancers she’d met at Maverick’s Flat (Little Joe Chism, Scooby, Gary Keys, Alpha Omega Anderson, Perry Brown) with her, setting two precedents that would define the rest of her career: she’d quickly build a life away from Soul Train; and she’d empower other dancers using doors opened by her.

  Freeman’s first big non–Soul Train opportunity came via Dick Clark’s American Bandstand, which made her a contestant in its national dance contest. Of course Freeman, dancing with Soul Train partner Joe Chism, won the contest and a free trip to Hawaii. In 1973 she appeared in the musical Two Gentlemen from Verona at the Music Center. In 1974 she danced as part of Diana Ross’s show in Las Vegas. After that, her list of credits rolled on as she became a mainstay of LA show business, choreographing for TV specials and tours, including Clark’s American Music Awards up through 1992. She even had a brief fling with acting, appearing in the 1980 Goldie Hawn comedy Private Benjamin.

  Freeman’s participation in American Bandstand was no accident. Dick Clark was very aware of the talent Don Cornelius’s show was unearthing. The next year that same American Bandstand dance contest featured two other Soul Train regulars, Tyrone Proctor and Sharon Hill, and they won. But more than just poaching dancers, Clark actively tried to co-opt Soul Train’s black audience. (But it’s a little early for that part of the story.)