Soul Train was a syndicated American television show that ran, mostly on Saturdays during daylight hours, from October 2, 1971 to March 26, 2006. It was created and produced by Don Cornelius, who also hosted the first 734 episodes, out of a total 1,117. It was, in essence, a teenage dance-party show, a genre that had many iterations over the years but was long epitomized by American Bandstand (1952–1989). The difference between Soul Train and its predecessors was that its producer/host, cast, crew, and target audience—even its chief advertisers—were African-American. This, of course, was not an incidental detail. Soul Train was a product and expression of black pride, born at a time of increasing African-American economic as well as cultural self-determination. It also took dancing much more seriously than any of the other shows.

On American Bandstand, dancing was treated as an element of the adolescent courtship ritual. That some kids danced well was of no more importance than that most executed the steps dutifully if not haltingly. What was significant was that they were coupled, and nominally in tune with their times as represented by music and clothing. On Soul Train, by contrast, dance was an art form, a language, a field of research and innovation, an active response to the equally fecund and continually changing force of the music. The teenage dancers, who received no pay if you don’t count the two-piece box of fried chicken and can of grape soda they would be handed halfway through, endured sixteen- or seventeen-hour tapings once a month, practiced relentlessly the rest of the time, collaborated and competed with one another, spent time and significant sums on their outfits, and sometimes traveled long distances to get to the tapings. Some of them at length garnered recognition and developed followings. Some of the regulars lasted many years, some became pop stars, and some emerged with careers in choreography.

The show galvanized African-American households from coast to coast. People of all ages watched it religiously, although the audience was composed primarily of children and adolescents. The testimonies are remarkably consistent. Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson wrote in his book Soul Train: The Music, Dance, and Style of a Generation that for him “Soul Train was a sibling, a parent, a babysitter, a friend, a textbook, a newscast, a business school, and a church. . . . I was born in 1971, in January, and by 1973 I was already hearing the Soul Train theme, and seeing the Soul Train title moving across the screen.”[1] In his book The Hippest Trip in America, Nelson George remembers that “Saturday mornings in the 1970s, back in the kitchen of my family’s Brooklyn housing project, I’d sit alongside my little sister, eat a bowl of Cap’n Crunch cereal, and watch Soul Train . . . on our rabbit-ear TV.”[2] Ericka Blount Danois, in her book Love, Peace, and Soul, recalls “countless Saturday afternoons in front of our broken-down black-and-white television set . . . watching Soul Train with my sister. In the ’70s, Soul Train was ‘appointment television’—a cultural bonding necessity.”[3]

But the influence of the show spread far and wide beyond its target demographic. I began watching it in my late teens, when I moved to New York City to attend college. My family had emigrated from Belgium when I was a child, and by pure chance we had washed up in a suburban New Jersey town that was at least 98% white. Now, steps away from Harlem, in a city increasingly abandoned by the white middle and working classes, I was powerfully made aware of African-American culture and its enormous importance in the life of the nation. Previously I might have heard Motown on the radio or even seen James Brown on television, but those were treated as mere details in the Caucasian cultural sphere—charming perhaps, but not as serious as white guitar bands, for all that those guitar bands more often than not annexed songs, lyrical references, instrumental passages, vocal styles, performance dynamics, and even entire personae from black American music. Dancing in the white world, meanwhile, followed the American Bandstand template: slow numbers encouraged full-body clinches and anything else occasioned spasmodic flailing. Few dancers, whether at proms, at pool parties, or at discotheques, allowed their bodies to establish deep contact with the music and its multiple layers of rhythm.

New York City in the early ’70s was a world away from the white suburbs. Music was ambient in the streets, pouring out of passing cars, parked cars, pizzerias, barber shops, hardware stores, donut stands, apartment windows, and the portable radios that preceded the mammoth boomboxes of a decade later—and almost all of it, except in Latin neighborhoods, was emitted by WBLS, flagship station of the Mutual Black Network, with Frankie “Hollywood” Crocker at the helm. When a song was hot you could hear it all the way down the street in intermittent and overlapping snatches, relaying from your right ear to your left, and the whole street swung with it. Always informed by the moment’s rhythms were the steps of the pedestrians in their long mustard-colored leather coats, with wide slouch hats and great clouds of Afro, who tapped along in chunky-heeled two-tone brogues or tall patent-leather boots. There weren’t so many cars then that you could possibly miss the music and the rhythms and counter-rhythms of the street. It began to teach you how to dance, if you required the instruction.

And some of us took the lessons back to parties in student apartments, where it gradually became plain that dancing to James Brown required matching each strand of beat to its affiliated body part—bass to the sternum, articulated in the elbows, for example; perhaps high-hat to the hips, kick drum to the knees, or suchlike—except that it didn’t work if you tried to do it systematically. You had to submit to the music and allow it to penetrate. Only once you had achieved a true correspondence between body and sound could you lay your individual expression atop the motion and call it dancing. That realization was quite a step up from our former clenched state, but our groove remained slipshod, graceless, overwrought, overdetermined, overshot, underpowered. A further education was needed, on a floor where people knew their business, although that wasn’t so easy in those days for pink-cheeked rubes. There weren’t any big, polymorphous clubs then, and your party of four couldn’t just stroll into any glorified bar & grill that had installed a disk jockey and paid off the police inspectors, because more than likely it was the preserve of a set who liked to keep it cozy. Things would eventually change, as gay dance culture expanded, in particular, but in the meantime there was one reliable and free educational resource: Soul Train.

It began in Chicago on August 17, 1970 as a live show on WCIU-TV, shot in a tiny studio (“the size of a small dining room”[4]) in the attic of the Board of Trade Building, with little ventilation and no distance between the artists and the dancers. The cameras were enormous antiques, only one equipped with a zoom lens; one of them caught fire during a show. The dancers were recruited from local clubs, specialists in the Monkey and the Funky Broadway. The first episode featured Jerry Butler, the Chi-Lites, and the Emotions, local favorites with significant radio presence. Although it operated on a minuscule budget in black-and-white with ultra-low production values, the show was a tearaway hit. There was vanishingly little black television at the time, and this was a show that spoke directly to its community, representing pride and fun in the same instant. The first show established the rituals that were to continue ever after: an image of a train (filmed footage of an actual train, at first), an announcer dragging out the high-pitched “sooooooul” in the title, Cornelius’s promise that “You can bet your last money, it’s gonna be a stone gas, honey,” and his parting benediction of “Love [blown kiss], peace [V-sign], and soul [power fist]!”

Cornelius and his implacable will called the show into being and nurtured it through its expansions and pains for thirty-five years. His deep, rumbling baritone had first secured him a job as a newscaster on Chicago black radio in the 1960s. It was a metonymic embodiment of cool, and functioned alongside his saturnine disposition and imperturbable deadpan to steady the course no matter what sort of anarchy was loosed upon the floor. He often wore a three-piece suit—a signifier of uplift in those days—but such was his gravitas that he could seem to be wearing a three-piece suit even when he sported a sleeveless T-shirt and beads, as he sometimes did early on. His affect was paternal, and although he was not a father given to hugs and kisses, let alone unbridled play with his charges, he nevertheless conveyed safety and assurance to his vast extended family onscreen and off. After little more than a year in Chicago, Cornelius, with financial backing from the hair-care firm Johnson Products (makers of Afro-Sheen and Ultra-Sheen and the first black-owned company to be listed on the American Stock Exchange), moved the show to Los Angeles—to color, a sound stage, larger budgets, and national exposure.

The Soul Train set featured an enormous logo in a stylized font vaguely reminiscent of Art Deco, initially backed by a serpentine train track edged in lights. On its side a cluster of city names were mounted, as on a station board—such African-American centers as Birmingham, Chattanooga, and Louisville joining the expected metropolises—and later this was replaced by an abstracted cityscape. There might be several mirrored disco balls suspended above; now and then the show’s logo was replaced by a custom design for particularly important acts. The stage, scallop-edged in gleaming aluminum, was painted in multicolor waves and swirls. Sometimes auxiliary risers, most often circular, would appear to showcase the dancers. The dance floor, originally covered with train-related graphics, eventually gave way to neutral tones less apt to compete with the clothes. The colored lighting varied and shifted, but most often settled on orange, a commandingly optimistic hue that was also a frequent choice for game shows of the era.

On the stage were the performers, two to four of them in every show, many of them lipsynched but some of them live. There aren’t many significant African-American musicians of the period who did not appear on Soul Train, which very quickly became a career essential. Gladys Knight and the Pips, Al Green, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin, James Brown, the Jackson 5, the Staple Singers, Curtis Mayfield, Smokey Robinson, Dionne Warwick, Chaka Khan, the O’Jays, Kool and the Gang, Earth, Wind and Fire, Bobby Womack, Barry White, Isaac Hayes, War, Chic, Prince, Rick James, Run-D.M.C., New Edition, LL Cool J, The Time, Boyz II Men, Mariah Carey, Destiny’s Child, Snoop Dogg, En Vogue, Lil Wayne—but even Johnny Mathis, Chuck Berry, Hank Ballard, Little Milton, veterans of earlier eras. And as the religion of groove spread through the world beginning in the mid-’70s, white acts came on as well, from David Bowie to Teena Marie to the Beastie Boys. But as stellar as those acts were—and as satisfying as the second and third rungs could be as well—the artists only accounted for about half the show’s draw, if that.

Even if the featured attraction was, say, the Captain and Tennille (April 19, 1980), everybody still tuned in anyway, for the dancers. The dancers were stars, virtuosos, athletes, fashion plates, role models—and they were the standing population of the world that was Soul Train. The dancers were you in your dreams, and the show was your dream party. You could pick out your style among the great variety on the dance floor, maybe mix ’n’ match between this one’s moves and that one’s threads, imagining your feet doing that thing and your shoulders that other thing, your looking so fly in that outfit and it never seeming to wilt or sag. You might be watching all of it lying back in your chair and bobbing your head in time, or you could be out on the floor of your room, trying those moves out for real, trying not to skid on a throw rug. Chances are that you lacked a partner, unless it was a sibling, but you could pick out the hottest dancer of your choice and partner them through the screen.

The dancers grooved on the latest numbers, played by the d.j., and they grooved while the stars performed—none of this standing around gaping like hayseeds at a rock concert. Naturally, as in any crowd or on any floor, a few of them stood out, actively performing, vying for the camera’s attention from the front or the back of the set, while most danced peacefully in their spots. But even some of those less demonstrative would get a chance to shine in the most keenly anticipated segment of the show, the Soul Train line. About midway through the broadcast, the dancers would form two parallel rows—a gantlet—running down toward the camera, facing each other. Then, to the very strongest groove of the day, one couple after another danced their way down the path, as the watchers bobbed and clapped. The couples matched or contrasted, in outfits and moves, some of them almost twinned and some as if they’d been hitched at random, except that they were both honoring the same beat and were thus conjoined by it no matter what they did. They might windmill and kick in tandem, and strut and sashay and twirl, or she might shimmy while he shook, or she might punch her way fiercely through the bass line while he strolled in slo-mo with exaggerated articulation, or she might swan forward while he zigzagged laterally three feet behind, or she might highstep down the line while he somersaulted, and that might be his one trick.

The line was the showcase, the parade, the wedding march, the triumphal procession, the platonic form of any entrance into any party—already underway but just waiting for you to arrive, the couples naturally stepping aside to let you pass and forming into an admiring column to witness your moves. The line was an instructional vehicle, with every turn of wrist and ankle, every shake of head and booty, every lock and release of knees and elbows clearly delineated for students to copy all across the land. The line was Young Black America on the move, boogalooing its way into the future, its hard-won self-confidence borrowed from or boosted by the music, showing the entire world that effective forward motion did not entail jackboot monotony but allowed for and even required a back step and a side-to-side and a dip and a roll and a drop on the one. In the future we would be one nation under a groove, with a few more colors in the stars and stripes and a national anthem that set fire to your feet, with liberty and justice and representation and equality for all. Or at least that’s the way it might have seemed then, at least before Reagan was elected president.

The line officially premiered on the fifth broadcast, October 30, 1971, although it had featured in every episode of the local show in Chicago, where it must have been a feat to carve out sufficient space on the floor. Don Cornelius imported the line himself, since lines were a common feature at parties he attended in Chicago in the 1960s. But it suggests much older antecedents. The syncopated parade was firmly established in American culture by the cakewalk, “a great exhibition dance,” which “in the declining days of minstrelsy . . . was incorporated in finale ‘walk-arounds.’”[5] The cakewalk, which incorporated syncopation and polyrhythms into the standard European march, developed from the competitive “prize-walks” that were a feature of social events on Sundays at Southern plantations in slavery days. And although Caucasian writers tended to attribute the origin of the form to slaves imitating the dances of their masters—the minuet, for example—line dances have long existed in Africa. Among the Peul Bororo people of southern Niger, for instance, there is a linear dance called the yaké, performed with bent knees, one foot over the other, while clapping hands. “In the first stage the [male] dancers face each other, and in the second they make a quarter turn with the body and step to the side. . . . The young girls . . . encircle the group. They clap their hands and make their metal ornaments tinkle. At the end of the yaké one or two of the girls move forward to pick out those whom they consider to be the most handsome. Those who have been chosen leave the line.”[6] The analogy may be imperfect, but the outline is there.

The dances performed on Soul Train were many and varied. Some were age-old, or variations on the age-old, some were nonces that would evaporate in a month, and some were truly revolutionary and would set dance floors alight—or at least inform what was done there—for decades. Popular dances are a great deal like slang terms: they arise somewhere in the mists, often developing in localized affinity groups years before gaining the attention of a broader public, and then they spread, first slowly then quickly, perhaps gaining or losing or altering special attributes along the line, and after gaining national or international attention they either fade away or are invisibly absorbed into the language. Since Soul Train began at the top of the ’70s, many of the early dances had their roots in the ’60s, which often means they germinated in the ’50s. That was when dances in significant numbers began requiring that the partners face one another, mirroring or conversing, but generally not touching.

The Twist, the first of those to sweep the globe, was popularized by Chubby Checker in 1960 and within a couple of years was directing the hips of movie stars and socialites in Mayfair and Cap d’Antibes and Central Park South—but it had been launched by Hank Ballard for an African-American audience in 1959. There soon followed the Jerk, the Frug, the Swim, the Skate, the Pony, the Popeye, the Watusi, the Monkey, the Boston Monkey, the Philly Dog, the Hitch Hike, the Hully Gully, the Boogaloo, the Boney Maroney, the Mashed Potato, the Uncle Willie, the Funky Broadway, the Locomotion, the Shingaling. Some of them are barely distinguishable from one another. Some were evanescent novelties and some were essential building blocks. Each of them contributed some element—shuffle step or hand jive or knee bend or bunny hop—to the vocabulary of the teenagers on the floor, who might begin with measured steps and graduate to freestyling as the temperature spiked.

The near-impossibility of precisely dating popular dances can be illustrated variously. The first widely-disseminated dance of the 1970s, for example, might be the Funky Chicken, which arrived in a package with Rufus Thomas’s hit song of the same name, released in November 1969 and atop the R&B charts by February 1970. But its signature elements can be traced back at least to 1960 and a dance called the Chicken, which in turn may have been inspired by Rosco Gordon’s “The Chicken,” which came out in 1957.[7] Similarly, the Worm, less a dance than a stunt carried out mostly by boys, rhythmically challenged and otherwise, at parties from the ’70s to the ’90s, probably owes its origin to Lou Donaldson’s “The Caterpillar,” 1967. And then there is the Camel Walk, still seen on dance floors in the 1980s, which seems to date back to James Brown’s song “There Was a Time,” from 1967, the lyrics of which suggest that the dance had taken Augusta, Georgia by storm at some undefined point in the remote past—and indeed, it—a strut in which each foot skips forward a few times before alternating legs—strongly resembles a dance of that name from the 1910s, contemporaneous with the Grizzly Bear and the Turkey Trot.

Dances of the early 1970s included the Pump, the Bus Stop, the Penguin, the Football, the Sprinkler, the Lawnmower, the Breakdown, the Rock Steady, the Roller Coaster, the James Cagney, the Hot Chocolate, the Mother Popcorn, the Cha-Cha-Cha. There were the disco mainstays: the Bump, the Double Bump, the Hustle, the Latin Hustle. There was the Errol Flynn, at first a proprietary dance closely guarded by a Chicago gang, the Errol Flynns—just as a decade later the Crip Walk was a territory-defining move by the Crips, a gang initially based in Los Angeles. And then there was the Robot, the proximate origin of which lies, like so many other dances, in the late 1960s, although its deeper roots in mime go back decades further. But Soul Train made it into a national phenomenon—Charles “Robot” Washington and a certain Robot Dave were particularly identified with it—and gradually it was absorbed into a complex of robotic moves that became the show’s signal contribution to vernacular dance.

This began with Locking, which unlike most dances can be attributed to one dancer, Don Campbell, who became known as Campbellock. The story goes that a young and awkward Campbell, being instructed in the Funky Chicken by a friend, kept locking his joints rather than allowing them to move fluidly. Impressed by what he saw, the friend urged Campbell to make his mistakes on purpose. Soon, Campbell had developed Locking into a full routine, which highlighted the rapid freezing and locking of individual body parts—movements that generally held to right angles, hence robotic. Very soon Campbell had assembled a troupe, the Lockers, who dressed in applejack hats, split-tail coats, oversize bow ties, plus-fours, and striped stockings, and by then Locking also involved hat-tosses, knee drops, splits, somersaults, leapfrogs, and a move in which the knees kicked up sideways, alternating left and right, while the hips appeared to detach from the stationary upper body. Performances by the group, often involving two dancers at a time facing off, resembled some ancient form of combat dancing, a kind of duel in which the dancers take turns upping the ante. As an ensemble they tended to shape themselves into a flying wedge, like an electrocharged version of the June Taylor Dancers.

The other original Lockers were Leo “Fluky Luke” Williamson, Adolfo “Shabba Doo” Quinones, Greg “Campbellock Jr.” Pope, Bill “Slim the Robot” Williams, Fred “Rerun” Perry, and the veteran of the group, Antonia Christina Basilotta, better known as Toni Basil, who had been dancing professionally since childhood, had danced in and choreographed for the television variety show Shindig!, and whose electrifying performance was the subject of Bruce Conner’s short film Breakaway (1966), the platonic ancestor of the music-video genre. The Lockers were so novel, so accomplished, and so spectacular that Soul Train could not contain them for long; soon they were touring the nation, opening for Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin—no kidding—among others.

Not to be confused with Locking was Popping, which is a form in which individual muscles are quickly contracted and then relaxed in time to the beat, often involving a technique called “dime-stopping,” which means that movement fleetingly freezes just before the pop. Body parts—arms, legs, chest, neck—can be popped individually or in concert, with the major effects derived from simultaneous pops of multiple regions. It does not call for the strenuous acrobatics of Locking, but is nearly always performed standing. It is rigorously and intentionally spasmodic and, needless to say, highly robotic. Popping seems to have originated in Fresno, and it was brought to the show by Sam Solomon, who had started his own troupe in Long Beach, the Electric Boogaloos. Like the Lockers, they wore brightly-colored outfits that alluded to the zoot-suit era; unlike them they performed on the street.

One of the troupe’s members, Creepin’ Sid, is given credit for bringing to a mass audience the move called the Backslide—or, after Michael Jackson appropriated it, the Moonwalk. In that move, the dancer steps emphatically backward and then glides the foot forward, giving the appearance of walking against a strong wind, or shimmering in place, or being carried backward by a moving sidewalk. It actually has a lengthy antecedence in the history of novelty dancing—there is footage of it being performed, with variations, by Bill Bailey, Buck and Bubbles, Cab Calloway, Eleanor Powell, Fred Astaire, and many others—although Jackson came to own it, seemingly for all time.

The other dance that Soul Train introduced to a waiting world was Waacking, brought to the show by Tyrone Proctor from the gay clubs of Los Angeles, where it was originally called Punking. Waacking is a highly theatrical style in which, very often, one part of the body performs in isolation, for example a flurry of rapid elbow-driven arm movements around the head while the rest of the body stands stock-still, or a storm of footwork with no movement above the belt. Or it could take the form of freeze-frame Hollywood glamour postures for which the music might be as much backdrop as pulse. Waacking has many points of similarity to Vogueing, although it came fifteen or twenty years earlier and from the opposite coast; it may be that they each developed separately from similar roots, for example the performances at drag balls. In any case Waacking, like Locking and Popping, remained a singular novelty only for so long on Soul Train before its components were absorbed into the prevailing eclectic dance language employed by all.

Damita Jo Freeman was the first Soul Train dancer to detach herself from the floor and become a name, recognized by kids on the street. She took skills drawn from her years of ballet training and applied them to a wide range of styles, notably dancing onstage alongside James Brown and Joe Tex despite Cornelius’s dictate that the crowd should not mix with the talent. Jeffrey Daniel and Jody Watley were the dream couple, both of them tall and long-limbed and moving with easy assurance, perfectly in synch with one another, reaching for all kinds of entertainment, to the point of bringing in props and even once staging a mock-fight on the line sufficiently realistic that other dancers leaped in to break it up. They were such unquestionable stars that in 1977 Cornelius conscripted them to become two-thirds of the musical group Shalamar; “Make That Move” is the song that sticks in my mind. Rosie Perez was an East Coast import who initially upset Cornelius’s puritanical disposition with her unapologetically booty-driven fierceness. But she withstood and prevailed, and among other things scored what might have been the single biggest dance platform of the ’90s: her solo to the Isley Brothers’ “Fight the Power” accompanying the credits of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. And so many others: Louie “Ski” Carr, Pat Davis, Mr. X, Crystal McCarey, Little Joe Chism, Marco de Santiago, Thelma Davis, Cheryl Song, Otis Medley, Nieci Payne, Crescendo Ward. . . .

They danced through the ’80s. They danced through hip-hop, which Cornelius openly failed to dig. They danced the Cabbage Patch, the Body Talk, the Prime Time, the Medfly, the Reebok, the Pacman, the Running Man, the Wop, the Raj, the Roger Rabbit, the Robocop, the Snake, the Dolphin, the Smurf, the Pee Wee Herman. They danced through the ’90s and into the ’00s doing the Shizz, the Wobble, the Dougie, the Cat Daddy, the John Wall. They Fluked and Yoked and Krumped and Flexed and Jooked. Time marched on, counted in Soul Trains—as Snoop Dogg explained, “A lot of my homies, when we go to jail, we measure our time by how many Soul Trains you got left”[8]—and Soul Train was a reliable constant in many lives wanting in constancy and reliability. Cornelius retired from hosting and was replaced by a succession of fill-ins and prospects, famous or obscure, good or indifferent. And then the show ascended into the heavens with two seasons of Best Ofs.

Now all of it is Old School, just as all of us who watched it regularly or routinely or religiously when it was on the air are perforce Old School. But it has left a deep legacy of YouTube clips, some with millions of views, and remixes and compilations and GIFs, and so its mission of solidarity and instruction and insta-party continues unabated, with new classes graduating all the time. It can definitely be said that every one of us who stepped out in the last three decades of the twentieth century were formed at least in part by the show. We learned specific moves or entire ways of being, lessons about race and humanity and attitude and swagger, ways of connecting the body and the mind and how to stride through any situation as if you owned it, and none of it cost us a dime.