The get-down funky-soul glory that was ‘Soul Train’

Nah, Youtube videos of people dancing is not nor will ever be a replacement for the peoples’ instinctive travels to ‘Soul Train’ and the paths of rhythm

When the economic crash became evident in 2008, sucking up U.S. banks and businesses alike, with it went an American television genre. It didn’t go out with a whimper; it went out with a shimmy.

“Soul Train,” which billed itself as the longest-running, first-run, nationally-syndicated program in television history,” had quietly shimmied into the sunset.

To be sure, the show had given up the ghost long before that, emaciated by the constantly-fragmenting audiences spawned by the Internet, home video games and pageant-formatted reality television. But the show, along with its progenitor “American Bandstand,” which also featured youths dancing to popular tunes with musical acts interspersed, used to be insanely cool.

But as of September 22, 2008, in the midst of Wall Street’s dive into red ink, “Soul Train” ceased its broadcast, and for the first time since 1952, American television does not have a free-form dance show where the dancers are actually just, well, dancing.

To put it in perspective, the last time Americans didn’t have an unscripted dance program on television to watch and emulate, the U.S. cityscape was dotted with record hops and jukeboxes. The president’s name at the time? Truman.

‘American Bandstand’ was applesauce. We needed maple syrup

It was then that a radio and television personality, Bob Horn (who in four years would later give way to occasional fill-in Dick Clark), started a continually televised boogie that would run uninterrupted for the next 36 years, concluding its last broadcast in 1988.

Although “Soul Train” outlasted “Bandstand” into the 21st century, concluding in 2008, “Train’s” last dance ended two years earlier, when its first-run episodes came to a close.

When the music began, both shows were immediately popular among teens and young adults.

Before “Bandstand” ushered in the rock and roll age, popular dancing was confined to the limitations of big band music, which certainly had that swing, but lacked the uninhibited flair that rock induced.

“[American Bandstand] taught kids how to dance, how to dress, and how to act with their friends,” said Richard Aquila, author of “That Old Time Rock and Roll: A Chronicle of An Era, 1954–63.

“Through television, it brought all the big hits and artists to places across the country that previously had little access,” Aquila said.

While both shows were taped in the Los Angeles area and followed the same format, “Soul Train” offered an unabashed look inside urban culture, while “Bandstand” provided a pulse for the mainstream.

The simultaneous broadcasts meant America could no longer be myopic, not on the dance floor.

While there was a degree of cross-pollination between the two shows, “’Bandstand and Soul Train were two different worlds,” said Tamu’la Walker, who was one of the few African-American dancers on the ‘Bandstand’ set in the 1980s.

“Bandstand was an outlet for ‘eclectic’ African-American kids. Kids such as myself that had a different style and sophistication from the urban kids on ‘Soul Train’. This is not to say that we were better, but the few African-American kids that were on ‘Bandstand’ were those that usually did not quite fit in with the urban crowd,” Walker said.

“During the ‘Bandstand’ days, I would still go up to ‘Soul Train’ and hang out during filming.”

At their height, the shows were studies in performance art.

The adaptation of modern dance spreads across America

“’Soul Train’ and ‘Bandstand’ were very much a part of the LA/Freak Beat dance era,” said Walker, referring to the urban dance craze that swept U.S. neighborhoods in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

The shows also launched a cadre of dance instructors / choreographers, many of whom helped catapult a host of music videos into classic dance clinics. It could be argued that if not for “Bandstand” and “Soul Train,” the highly choreographed music video could not exist.

While TV today has a number of dance-oriented shows, all of them are descendants of the “American Idol”-driven competition platform, rather than free form.

The youthful, spontaneous fervor that was evident on the dance floors of “Bandstand” and “Soul Train” is long gone.

“I do have a VHS tape somewhere of an episode when Dick Clark was talking to me about my jeans, but I have not seen it for years,” Walker said. “Dick Clark was fascinated with why I had jeans on with holes at the knees. If I am not mistaken, I also think we were all on the final episode of ‘Bandstand’ on ABC in 1987.”

“After that final episode, I remember thinking about being a part of history, as many African-American kids only dreamed about going on ‘Bandstand’ ,” she said.

‘Soul Train’ dancers were straight superstars, yo

Not only were the musical guests bonafide superstars by the time their respective shows aired but in many cases the dancers were, too.

For “Soul Train,” the climax of the show was the ever-important soul train line, a culminating celebration of unbridled joy, self-expression — and shaking your groove thang.

Yvette Moss, 49, of Los Angeles, California, said people recognize her today for her dance moves more than 25 years ago on “Bandstand” and “Soul Train.”

“People used to call me ‘the shimmy girl,’” she said. During the 1980s, Moss said dancers would line up outside the Los Angeles studio where “Soul Train” was filmed and the producers would pick who they wanted to go in.

“They’d go ‘You can go in, you can go in, and you can go in,’” Moss said. The weekly show facilitated good-natured competition among the dancers, Moss said, with being put on the risers [the stage] the prize.

When Don Cornelius laid his eyes on Moss, he was won over by her dance moves, she said.

“I didn’t have any formal training, but I had my own style. I had my own signature dance — this was before Rosie Perez.”

In addition to Perez, many a celebrity got there start on the improvised dance shows.

As for the music, “Bandstand” was clearly the shoulders that rock n’ roll stood on in its early days, according to Aquila, author of “That Old Time Rock and Roll: A Chronicle of An Era, 1954–63.”

“Bandstand made an enormous contribution to rock & roll, particularly in the late ’50s and early ’60s. It broadened the market for the new music during the conservative Cold War Era by demonstrating rock & roll was a safe form of popular music,” Aquila said in an email interview.

“’American Bandstand’ both reflected and helped shape youth culture of the 1950s and ’60s. It helped teenagers think of themselves as a distinct group nationwide.”

In Detroit, ‘The Scene’ emerges; in Atlanta ‘Future Shock’ rocks

While “Soul Train” put Chicago’s youths on the map — and on the dance floor — it’s biggest Midwestern neighbor, Detroit, was struck with the jitter bug as well. In 1976, “The Scene” debuted on Michigan television to much local success.

“The Scene” is in the league with a ‘Soul Train’ and ‘Bandstand’ but it didn’t have the budget,” Natosha Morris, daughter of former show host Nat Morris, said.

The story of “The Scene” was one of happenstance, she said.

“Basically my dad was picked to do that show, along with Ray Henderson, who worked at WGPR. That’s a story in itself and they had a radio station and a television station. And I’m not sure who’s idea it was … my father was a DJ on the station and he was pretty popular, a handsome guy and he was pegged as one of the hosts of the show,” Morris said.

“The Scene played a crucial role in breaking Detroit artists and more importantly, laying the seeds for club adulation of techno music.

“After that, my dad just kind of took over the show and took it to another level,” she said.

When measuring the significance of “Soul Train’s” importance to “The Scene,” Morris said.

“In my opinion, ‘Soul Train’ was of course the standard because it had more money and when you’re doing it out there [n the West Coast] it’s Hollywood,” she said. Morris said the organic dance show was a product of the time and “The Scene” benefitted from that. “I think it was a trend of what was going on in the nation at that time. It [‘The Scene’] started in 1976 and went off in 1987.”

“The Scene” lasted longer than “Future Shock,” a Southern-fried version of “Soul Train” that had the funkiest name in show business as its host: James Brown.

While the show, which was filmed in both Atlanta and Brown’s hometown of Augusta, lasted only three years, one has to attribute a certain amount of couth to Ted Turner, who owned “Future Shock’s” home, WTCG and added the only real threat to “Soul Train” and its star power, albeit only temporarily.

But through it all, America could boogie with abandon. If you wanted to know the freshest style, you turned on one of the dance shows. If you wanted to see the newest dances, hear the newest songs, you turned on the dance shows.

Today nothing of the sort remains. But what really happened to the free-form dance genre?

“The music,” said Angel Goulet of Portland, Oregon, who danced on “Bandstand” from 1980–83. “It became less and less ‘danceable’, in my opinion,” she said.

“But MTV came on the scene also and the ‘clean cut’ look and feel was no longer as desirable to the newest generation of teenagers.”

But in the mid-1980s, MTV actually imitated the free-form dance movement, crafting a show called “Club MTV” hosted by “Downtown” Julie Brown.

Aquila said the demise of the free-form dance show is due primarily to the rise of the Internet.

“Perhaps the biggest change is it’s no longer just television [where kids can see dance programming]” Aquila said. “Kids can learn how to dance through Youtube videos or other on-line sites.

There is a bridge from today though: “So You Think You Can Dance,” is branded by Dick Clark Productions Inc.

The machine that made “Bandstand” has moved on to another dance show. Fox’s “So You Think You Can Dance,” is branded by Dick Clark Productions Inc.

“Soul Train” lives on only on a few grainy clips on Youtube, where users have uploaded grainy recordings that are akin to watching old silent movies put to music.

In 2009 “Soul Train,” had been acquired by three investors with hopes of bringing the kaboose to the digital age: Anthony Maddox, one of the investors, said the show had untapped potential.

A few years later, Viacom’s BET had acquired some distribution of archived “Soul Train” episodes, but no revival seems imminent.

So for now, it seems the “Train” has left the station. But oh the memories — and the music.

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