Chapter 2
Love, Peace, and Soul
ON AUGUST 11, 1965, Marquette Frye, a young black man in his twenties, was pulled over in the Watts section of Los Angeles by a California Highway Patrolman on suspicion of driving drunk. Marquette told the officer he wasn’t intoxicated, and an argument began. Marquette’s brother Ronald, who’d been in the car, ran to get his mother from their nearby home. The patrolman called for backup. As the Frye family argued with police, a growing crowd of the family’s predominantly black neighbors gathered to protest what they deemed police harassment. Locals tossed bottles at the police. The entire Frye family was arrested. More police arrived on the scene. So did more angry Watts residents.
Years of tension between the police and the black population came to a head that August night in 1965. Led by Chief of Police William Parker, the LAPD had recruited southern-born whites and developed a militarized, confrontational philosophy toward young black men that was a motorized version of the twenty-first century’s stop-and-frisk. Parker encouraged police authorities in Los Angeles, whether the LAPD, the CHP (California Highway Patrol), or members of the sheriff’s department, to err on the side of suspicion and intimidation in any interaction with young black males.
Though segregation was not officially on the books in LA, the city’s residency laws were full of “covenants” that restricted sales of homes in desirable areas to blacks, Hispanics, or Asians, forcing them to live primarily in East LA, Compton, South LA, and Watts. This is the backdrop for six days of fighting, shooting, and burning that would result in thirty-four deaths, the deployment of 3,900 national guardsmen, and $40 million in property damage. The 1960s would see race riots break out in many big cities around the United States, most triggered by a similarly combustible mix of aggressive policing and black resentment. But few were as brutal as the Watts riots in Los Angeles in 1965.
Many of the thousands who participated in the Watts rebellion shouted “Burn, baby, burn!”—a slogan used by local DJ the Magnificent Montague to hype a hot record he was spinning and, like much soul radio slang, also a sexual double entendre. However, in the riot’s wake, Montague was accused by LA mayor Sam Yorty of inciting local blacks to riot with his phrase “Burn, baby, burn!” In the sixties there were many urban riots and many serious-minded official reports issued in their aftermath. Watts was no exception. A former CIA director was called in and would issue a report outlining all of the racial and institutional reasons for the riots. But as was typical of the time, the report’s recommendations for change were resoundingly ignored by LA’s city fathers: issues with the police were brushed aside (later igniting the 1992 riots), and restrictive real estate policies took decades to loosen. However, a few positive things came out of the immediate official reaction. Just two years after the Watts riots, Alain Leroy Locke High School, named after the Harlem Renaissance poet, was opened at 325 East 111th Street in Watts. The school was clearly a peace offering to a community that was overpoliced and underserved. While the school did not make the neighborhood any safer or the policing any less intrusive, it did become a magnet for talented young people seeking a career in music. Locke High School would go on to nurture several generations of top musicians, including smooth jazz saxophonist Gerald Albright, drummer Leon “Ndugu” Chancler (who’d play on Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean”), vocalist-actor Tyrese Gibson (a staple of the Fast & Furious franchise), and pianist-vocalist Patrice Rushen.
Patrice Rushen danced on the show as a teen and returned years later as a performer.
Rushen was a petite, precocious talent who’d become one of Locke’s most beloved musicians, evolving from a teenage keyboard prodigy into a singer and recording artist with the signature eighties hits “Remind Me” and “Forget Me Nots” (both of which would be widely sampled on rap records in the nineties). It was during her tenure at Locke that she became part of the first class of Soul Train dancers.
Rushen: The community that surrounded Locke was right in the thick of where the riots had been, and there was a concerted effort to build that community back. It had always been close-knit, and the riots blew it apart. So in bringing it back together, the music department kept the kids busy and involving us in activities that would allow us to see beyond just where we lived. I think it was very important. So being a member of the largest gang going, when you’re in the band, there’s 250 of you. Carrying an instrument case was a big deal. People didn’t mess with us. They really were proud of the fact that we worked hard and we learned a lot, and between Locke’s band and the drill team, we became nationally known.
In 1971 Don Cornelius came over to Locke and visited the school’s summer program to talk about “this special show that they were gonna start, and it was a dance show, and it was going to feature R&B artists primarily,” Rushen said. “They wanted kids from the community to participate, to come out. Sounded good to me. I was already into music, very, very heavily, music of all kinds, and an opportunity to be on television was right up my alley, and so I decided to tell a few friends and said, Let’s go down there. They brought a bus. We loaded into a bus and they took us over to KTTV and we went into the studio and we said, ‘Well, what do we do?’ He said, ‘Just enjoy yourselves. Dance to the music and have a great time.’ And that’s what we did.” Rushen and her friends participated in the recording of eight Soul Trains that first year in LA.
Cornelius: I was just looking for people who look well. Who look good on camera and who could dance well. That’s all I was looking for, and once we got out here we realized that the LA youth, the Los Angeles population, was much more than that. They were exciting to look at. Just plain exciting to look at . . . They had the bodies, the facial features, the hair, the movement. They had stuff you just didn’t find much. Where I came from, people who looked that good, they didn’t want to be on TV. It was people who probably shouldn’t be on TV wanted to be on TV, but when we hit LA it was all those people that should be on TV, had wanted to be on TV. There was just so much glamour. So much invention, so much creativity.
What’s interesting about this effusive praise for California dancers is that this is very much hindsight talking. As we’ll see, Don’s initial feelings about dancing out West were very different.
Locke High would be one of the three local institutions that would feed dancers to Soul Train in the key first two seasons after the show had relocated to Los Angeles. The other two were Denker Park in South Central and Maverick’s Flat nightclub on Crenshaw Boulevard were also crucial, playing different, though parallel, roles. Locke brought Don into contact with a new important educational institution and blossoming talent like Rushen, who would not only dance on early shows but would come back years later to perform on it. The future hit maker has strong memories of the fifth Soul Train episode, during which she was able to ask questions of singer-songwriters Bill Withers and Al Green. Reflecting on her career, Rushen thinks that early music-business exposure definitely “filtered into my musicianship.”
Rushen: Because we were taping the shows, there were stops and starts, and for me that was golden time, because during the stops is when I could really keep my eyes on the artists, and, you know, go up to them. There were no barriers. Nobody would say, Don’t speak to them, don’t do this, don’t do that. We were all there together taping. So you could actually talk to people, and you would get some good feedback sometimes. And bits and pieces of information that as a musician—even though I was on the show dancing—as a musician were very helpful, and then watching people perform. Watching that moment that happens when they’re not on, and that split second of immediate change that comes together when then they’re on. That was like a golden opportunity for me to be up close and see that.
The next venue for recruitment was the Denker Recreation Center, located at 1550 West Thirty-fifth Place between two major avenues, Western and Normandie. It was a multipurpose facility with a baseball field and an indoor gym, but Denker’s biggest asset wasn’t the facility itself—it was city recreation director Pam Brown, who’d been with the city since 1964 and had shifted to Denker in ’69. Brown had a previous brush with show business when she helped recruit kids for a taping of Ralph Edwards’s popular This Is Your Life TV series. It was through this connection that she met Don Cornelius.
“When I first met Don and he came to one of the parks where the young people were to audition, he said, ‘California kids. These LA kids don’t know how to dance.’ He was real cool with it, and I said, ‘Well, you don’t know. You’ve got something in store when you watch them dance, because they can be very creative.’ ” That audition, actually held at nearby Queens Park, attracted about seventy-five kids. “Don said, ‘Okay. They’re all right.’ It was hard to get something constructive out of Don. You always had to work a little harder.”
Brown traveled to predominantly black schools all over LA, including Locke, Dorsey, Freemont, and Bret Harte Junior High. Another audition at Denker was incredibly well attended, drawing more than four hundred wannabes. “There wasn’t any room in the gymnasium because so many had come. Don says ‘Okay, we’re on it now. We’re on it.’ ” Still, the initial taping of Soul Train, headlined by Gladys Knight & the Pips and ex-Temptation Eddie Kendricks, had, by Brown’s account, only about thirty dancers.
The third and, ultimately, most important feeder of dancers to the show was Maverick’s Flat, located at 4225 Crenshaw Boulevard, which was the alpha and omega of the city’s black entertainment world. Owned by local businessman, musician, and actor John Daniels, Maverick’s Flat opened in 1966, in the wake of the Watts riots, with the purpose of providing an entertainment center for folks who didn’t want to travel up to Hollywood for fun. The club, just down the hill from middle- and upper-class black home owners in Baldwin Hills, View Park, and Ladera Heights, was by 1971 billing itself as “the Apollo Theater of Los Angeles,” and for a long time it lived up to that billing, attracting everyone who was anyone in the world of R&B/funk, black comedy, and movies. Testament to its popularity is that the Temptations’ Psychedelic Shack LP cover was influenced by the Playboy Club by way of the drug-den decor of Maverick’s Flat. Daniels was quite a flamboyant character, a muscular, big-Afroed man who starred in Black Shampoo, a bad 1976 remake of the critically acclaimed Warren Beatty vehicle about a sex-machine LA hairdresser.
Earth, Wind & Fire, the Commodores, the Whispers, and Lakeside were among the bands to perform there regularly. Howard Hewett, future lead singer of Shalamar, was in Maverick’s Flat’s house band. Richard Pryor often worked out his routines there, and all of black Hollywood’s newly minted movie stars (Jim Brown, Pam Grier, Fred Williamson) came through. Its slogan “Where it’s at? Maverick’s Flat” was LA seventies slang for the club being an in-crowd destination.
Almost every one of the Los Angeles–based dancers who starred on Soul Train in its 1970s peak went there to dance. Dancer-performer Jeffrey Daniel recalls his early trips to Maverick’s Flat. “You have to understand,” he said, “as great as the show was and as great as the dancing was, what you see on Soul Train is about a quarter of what they do if you see them in clubs. Soul Train is very controlled. It’s like, ‘Okay, sit down. Okay, now dance.’ . . . When you’re in the club, it’s freestyle.”
So as Don settled into LA, seeing teenagers from Locke and Denker and older movers from Maverick’s Flat, he had to adjust his taste in dancing.
Cornelius: When I first saw how the kids in LA danced, it was a little wild and crazy for me because I was from the cool school in Chicago. The kids in LA were like throwing it at you . . . When I got here, I couldn’t feel it. I couldn’t feel it. I couldn’t handle it. It was only after the show became successful that I realized what a great thing these kids brought to television. If you had given me a choice, I would have said to all of them, Please don’t dance like that. It’s nasty, okay? It’s not cool. That’s what I would have said. But the television audience disagreed.
During Soul Train’s first season in LA, only twenty-eight shows were taped (as opposed to thirty-nine and thirty-seven in the following seasons). The show had to prove itself—to TV stations, major acts, and the record industry. The dancing would be essential because a look at the talent during that 1971–72 season shows an overabundance of acts from Chicago. Ten of that season’s shows featured Chicago-based or -born talent, with singer Lou Rawls appearing twice. Clearly Don was leaning on his hometown contacts.
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.”
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 Joe 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.)
After Campbell’s inauspicious start on Soul Train, he became an influential figure via the broadcast. “For me, Don Campbell was the reason I wanted to be on that show,” said Jeffrey Daniel, who was then living (and watching TV) in Grand Rapids, Michigan. “One Saturday afternoon, I saw the other dancers dancing, but this guy didn’t dance. He walked down the aisle to the beat of the music, stopped, stuck out his hand, gave himself five, hunched his shoulders, and pointed. I was like, Oh my God. That just totally changed everything I knew about dance.”
Daniel, who is really a scholar of popular dance’s evolution, says Campbell “broke all the rules . . . when you’re looking at dancing from the sixties up until that point.” The twist, the monkey, and other popular dances were full-body movements with isolated movements of specific body parts, while locking “started a whole new level of body isolations from your hips to your head movements,” Daniel said.
Don Campbell and the Lockers brought innovative dance moves from LA clubs to Soul Train.
Campbell’s impact on the show was magnified by the fact that he arrived on Soul Train “posse deep” with his Maverick’s Flat dancing buddies, including his then girlfriend Toni Basil, Adolfo “Shaba-Doo” Quinones, and Fred “Rerun” Berry, infiltrating Don’s dance floor. Not only were they bringing new moves to the nation, they introduced a flamboyant style of dress that mixed a taste of 1940s zoot-suit flair with vibrant 1970s colors. “They’re wearing these knickerbocker pants with the striped socks, marshmallow shoes, applejack hats that would twist on their head while they were dancing, sometimes with suspenders,” Daniel recalls gleefully.
The Lockers were definitely a collection of stars. Toni Basil, born as Antonia Christina Basilotta in Philadelphia, was already a show-business veteran when she hooked up with the Lockers. Back in 1964 she was an assistant choreographer on the legendary concert film The T.A.M.I. Show, which featured classic performances by James Brown, the Rolling Stones, and others. Throughout the 1960s, she made a few poorly received records while her dance career, both as a performer and choreographer, continued to prosper before she became part of the Maverick’s Flat scene.
Basil would become one of the first white faces on Soul Train, which doesn’t seem as though it was a big deal for her or the other dancers. In almost all the interviews about whether whites danced on Soul Train, folks don’t reference her, perhaps because Basil was part of an otherwise all-black crew. Throughout the 1970s, she had a varied post–Soul Train career, working with dance-oriented rock groups (codirecting and choreographing two Talking Heads videos), in movies (George Lucas’s American Graffiti), and in television (mashing up ballet’s Swan Lake and street dance on Saturday Night Live). Her big pop moment came with the 1982 video-driven hit “Mickey,” and she’s rolled on ever since, including organizing a TV Land Soul Train tribute in 2005.
Fred “Rerun” Berry’s light didn’t shine as long as Basil’s, but it was blindingly bright at its peak. On Soul Train, Berry stood out by having the biggest body in a crowd of skinny Californians and by developing his own unique take on locking. His move came to be known as the Slo-Mo, in which he broke down the locking moves to their essence, using his large limbs with remarkable grace. It didn’t hurt that Berry had a great smile and a knack for including humor in his dance.
So Berry was well positioned in the mid-1970s when the black-cast sitcom became a TV trend. The ribald chitlin circuit comic Redd Foxx broke through with a smash NBC sitcom called Sanford and Son in early 1972. On the same network as Julia, Foxx’s show, while not as raw as his legendarily raunchy stage show, was built around sexual innuendo and impeccable delivery and brought a colloquial urban attitude to American TV, the same way Al Benson had on R&B radio. Throughout the rest of the decade, black folks and laugh tracks were staples on prime-time TV with Good Times, That’s My Mama (both debuting in 1974), The Jeffersons (1975), What’s Happening!! (1976), Diff’rent Strokes (1978), and Benson (1979), all having their share of success.
As Fred “Rerun” Stubbs, Berry was the comic heart of What’s Happening!!, a show that ran for three seasons on ABC. Created by Eric Monte, the black writer behind the beloved film comedy Cooley High, this sitcom was set in South Central LA and looked, not very deeply, at the lives of three black male teens. In every episode Berry wore a red beret and suspenders, echoes of his Lockers wardrobe, which became both his trademark and his curse. Though he was reportedly a millionaire by age twenty-nine, his “Rerun” persona and his weight made it hard for him to find acting gigs for the rest of his life.
The résumé for the rest of Berry’s life was dotted with appearances built around his locking and those two red garments. An episode of the 2000s NBC series Scrubs was typical, with Berry in a dance sequence in his beret and suspenders and other cast members, in full comedy mode, dressed and dancing in his style. He died in 2003 of natural causes at fifty-two years old.
Despite the early prominence of the Lockers, Soul Train wasn’t always smooth. Basil, who had more showbiz experience than her Locker peers, felt the dancers should be compensated for their contribution to the show’s success. According to dance historian Naomi Bragin and Soul Train dancer Tyrone Proctor, Basil went to Don asking that Campbell be paid because of his popularity on the show. Not only was Basil turned down, but for a time Campbell and the Lockers were banned from the show. In fact, even locking was forbidden for a while. This conflict was short-lived, but it set a tone for the relationship between star dancers and Soul Train—these performers would be granted amazing exposure by the broadcast, but they’d have to make their money elsewhere. For example, aside from dancing with the Lockers, Campbell would make cash as a Chippendales dancer using the charming name King Dingaling.
Campbell and the Lockers would have a profound impact on an embryonic scene developing across the country, including in the most impoverished sections of New York City. A prime example of Soul Train’s impact on the emerging hip-hop scene is provided by Curtis Walker, one day to be known as rapper Kurtis Blow, who was a regular Soul Train viewer as a child in Harlem. “You’re nine years old,” said Walker, “and here comes this guy Don Campbellock [one of Campbell’s nicknames, as well as the title of a 1972 single on Stanson Records] and the Campbellock Dancers, and they’re dressed all wild with vibrant colors almost like clowns. They would do routines incredible to see.”
Years before he’d rock microphones with hits like the gold twelve-inch “The Breaks,” Walker was part of the city’s break-dance scene. While the head spins and floor moves of hip-hop dancing were New York creations, the upper-body isolation moves of the Lockers were incorporated into what would become known as breakin’.
Walker: We owe a lot to those Lockers and we owe a lot to Soul Train . . . They actually contributed to hip-hop and the formatting of break-dance routines. The Campbellock dancers would all come out and all do a routine, and when the routine was done, they would go out and do solos. Each member would get a chance to do a solo for ten or fifteen seconds. That format served as the basis of break-dance routines all the way here in New York. It was incredible to see how the connection and the vibe was there. Those dancers set the trend for the hip-hop dancers to come.