A popular ride
‘Soul Train,’ its profound influence on African-americans examined in BET series
LONG ISLAND, N.Y. — By day, Jerome Smith is an elder at the Community Baptist Church.
By nights and weekends, his alter ego emerges. That’s when Jerome “City” Smith and his band, the City Sounds Music Orchestra, come out to play.
Smith, 53, has worked the party circuit on Long Island for 20 years — fundraisers, weddings, bar mitzvahs and such. His music is familiar because his inspiration is: Smith is a walking Wikipedia entry on “Soul Train.”
Growing up in Hempstead in the 1970s, “we gathered around the black-and-white TV with other friends every Saturday morning. If someone had to use the bathroom, my job was to let them know A March 2006 photo of the late “Soul Train” creator Don Cornelius at his office in Los Angeles.
the ‘Soul line’ was coming on. That was the moment that couldn’t be missed.”
He absorbed the show, even the commercials.
“We’d wait for the Afro Sheen Blowout commercial to come on,” recalled Smith, “and one day I went ahead and ordered it. I thought it was some sort of mechanical device you put on your head. I found out it was just a lotion.”
He laughed: “I was very disappointed.”
For Smith and other faithful fans of “Soul Train,” everything and everyone from the show remains familiar — cultural implants that transcend space and time and defy style and trends.
Close your eyes. Summon that opening “Souuuull Train” salvo and that rainbow train chugging along through the rainbow city. Recall Rosie Perez’s defiant dance gestures or Tyrone Proctor’s convulsive “locking” ones. For fans, host Don Cornelius’ emblematic “love, peace and soul” equated to Johnny Carson’s golf swing and Ed Mcmahon’s “Heeeere’s Johnny.”
For millions of white viewers, from its national launch in 1971 to the start of MTV in 1981, “Train” was a vicarious thrill and an incalculably hipper counterpart to “American Bandstand.”
A nation of black viewers saw something else.
As the ninth of nine brothers and sisters living in a Bedford-stuyvesant apartment, Cynthia Walls was “drafted” into watching every Saturday morning by her older siblings.
“If you were able to do a poll of every African-american household in Brooklyn,” she said, “90 percent were tuned” to the show.
For her, “Soul Train” was more than dance lines or fashion, even music. It was this “loving moment of watching AfricanAmericans on TV, and from that I learned that you can become and be anything you want to be.”
Toying with such powerful, formative memories is tricky, not to mention perilous. But tonight, BET will make the attempt with “American Soul,” a 10-part series based on “Soul Train” and the vast cultural legacy it sired, from its earliest days in 1970 as a local Chicago staple to the waning days of 2006, when it finally wrapped, long after music — and most viewers — had shifted to the internet.
In a phone interview, Tony Cornelius, the oldest son of “Train” impresario Don Cornelius — also a co-producer of “American Soul” and himself an in-house expert for all things “Soul Train” — acknowledged that engaging this potent legacy is complicated.
But Cornelius has complicated memories of his own.
On Feb. 1, 2012, he received a desperate call from his father, 75, in declining health and out of the spotlight for more than a decade. He rushed to his father’s home in Sherman Oaks, California, and was the first to find him.
Don Cornelius’ suicide serves as the opening scene of “American Soul.” Cornelius (played by Sinqua Walls) is alone in his study, watching a tape of Gladys Knight (played by Kelly Rowland of Destiny’s Child) on an early episode, then puts a gun to his head.
Tony Cornelius, 60, says he and the series’ cowriter, Devon Greggory, wrestled over whether to open the series this way but ultimately decided that it “would let the audience know where this all came from.”
“It was almost like a flashback moment (one that, Cornelius acknowledged, he hasn’t been able to watch). We see my father end his life in the very beginning and then journey through time.”
“Soul Train” was television’s first truly black show — owned and created by a black man, engineered to celebrate black culture and a direct descendant of the civil-rights struggle. The show swam in a sea of white television created for white viewers and could find a beachhead only among Saturday morning cartoons.
Still, its influence was and is incalculable.
In his 2013 book on the show, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson of the Roots wrote that “Soul Train,” to him, “was a sibling, a parent, a baby sitter, a friend, a textbook, a newscast, a business school and a church.”
Viacom-owned BET bought the “Soul Train” empire, including the eponymous awards, a couple of years ago. Cornelius said the network is exploring a reboot of “Soul Train” itself, along with other related ventures.
First up, though, is “American Soul,” which could either consecrate the legacy or complicate it. The series will blend fact and fiction “in order to move the story along and protect the innocent,” said Cornelius,
adding that his father had long wanted to do a series or film based on “Train.”
“He was very serious about making sure that whoever wrote the story understood the black experience.”
Indeed, the 35-year sprawl of “Soul Train” history covers a considerable span of American music history itself — from R&B, funk and soul up through New Jack Swing, with a smattering of disco and hip-hop in between.
Then there was dance: From waacking to popping, “Train” dancers had their own styles and following.
Dance will likewise be a big part of “American Soul.”
Told of middle-age viewers such as Smith and Walls who revere “Soul Train” to this day and who modeled their lives on it, Cornelius said, “There are people who have told me that a million times.”
A few days earlier, he said, a porter on the “Soul Train” cruise — which Cornelius has hosted for eight years — approached him and said, “You’re not black if you don’t know ‘Soul Train.’
“That was really something,” Cornelius said.
His own memories, beyond that day in 2012, are personal and intimate, perhaps even a salve for his own life.
“My father was an African-american at a time when things were extremely difficult for black men in general,” he said. “He was always fighting to gain his position and trying to figure out a way.
“He was constantly trying to figure out a way.”