ONE OF the unintended consequences of the civil rights movement would be, starting in the 1970s, the targeting of black teenagers as a consumer market. White teens were already a significant cultural and consumer force through the rise of rock ’n’ roll in the 1950s, with AM Top 40 radio and American Bandstand as direct beneficiaries. Soft drinks and acne-relief creams like Clearasil filled the coffers of radio stations and the ABC network for decades as each generation moved in and out of that angst-ridden demographic. The white teen idols Clark promoted and, in some cases, controlled also fed an appetite for fanzines like Tiger Beat, which titillated teens with public-relations-created tales of pinup boys and girls.
Black students of the 1960s were identified with sit-ins and protest, with noble struggle and the raised fists. But this visibility also alerted many to the massive buying these ambitious young people represented. Once they could legally sit at lunch counters, black teens became a hot new consumer market. And Soul Train emerged as the perfect venue to exploit this new reality. Soul Train was deeply intertwined with various kinds of marketers, whether advertising agencies or pulp-magazine publishers seizing the new opportunity. UniWorld and Burrell Advertising and Right On! magazine had very different relationships to Soul Train, yet all spoke to ways in which the show expanded the impact of black consumers in general and black youths in particular.
As noted earlier, 1971 was a benchmark year in black entrepreneurship, with Soul Train’s move to LA proving to be one of the most visible events. In that same year, Thomas Burrell and his partner Emmett McBain opened Burrell McBain advertising in Chicago. Burrell, who is now viewed as something of the patron saint of black advertising, was born in Chicago and took a high school aptitude test that suggested he had the right temperament for influencing people.
In 1961, right out of college, he got a job in the mail room of a local ad agency. Within two years, he was writing ad copy. For the rest of the 1960s, Burrell moved in search of opportunity, working for an agency in London for two years, then moving to New York before heading back to Chicago to form his own agency. His guiding philosophy was “Black people are not dark-skinned white people,” meaning that you can’t just use the same techniques to reach black consumers as white. Burrell would sell this difference to clients and build an enduring business.
One of Burrell McBain’s first clients was Johnson Products. George Johnson gave Burrell’s new company a shot, and it would be this agency that created so many of the beloved Afro Sheen commercials that are as much a part of the 1970s Soul Train as Don’s voice. Between 1971 and 1974 Burrell would win accounts from McDonald’s and Coca-Cola, accounts that would then turn into ad buys and commercials on Soul Train. In 1974 McBain left the company, but the renamed Burrell Advertising has continued to roll with mainstream clients to this day. Michelle Garner, a former Burrell executive, said, “These were marketers who had become savvy, and they knew the importance of the African American market, and so they initiated efforts, similar to the music business, where they had black divisions to help market to that particular consumer segment.”
Soul Train was both a catalyst and beneficiary of this new respect for black consumers. It’s certainly an idea Byron Lewis, founder of the UniWorld Group in 1969, agrees with.
“It changed my advertising landscape,” Lewis said of the show. “It’s very difficult for ethnic agencies, particularly African American advertising agencies, because we just don’t have the critical mass; we are basically working on a niche and the idea of credibility, the ability to attract talent, the ability to grow, was really enhanced by Soul Train, because as much as we depended upon black magazines and newspapers . . . the television media reached the most people, and Soul Train gave us an exciting venue to place our commercials and to, frankly, get clients to give us more work to do, which really enhanced our growth.”
With Soul Train as a platform, UniWorld was able to place ads on the show from AT&T, Eastman Kodak, Burger King, Pepsi-Cola, and Colgate. But getting those ad buys approved wasn’t always easy. Lewis recalled that most of these clients initially balked at buying time on Soul Train “because it was difficult for them to conceive of a need to talk to African American consumers on a direct basis. But as the show became more popular, the advertisers were anxious to be on Soul Train . . . Anything you do well in the African American community broadens the reach into the general community, so that the advertisers always felt that doing a very good job in the black community paid double benefits.”
As an architect of commercials that appeared on the show, Lewis strongly believes that they were crucial in reshaping the image of blacks in the American mind.
Lewis: Positive views of black life and experience were almost never seen in the mass media. A great deal of harm had been done to people of color, and the advertising industry had to be forced to bring people into the communication industry . . . The idea of the visual representation of blacks in a positive way was very necessary to move forward in this country. I was bred within the print medium; television was a far more effective medium to present us in a bigger and better way. I think that can also be attributed to Don, to Soul Train, because that’s all there was.
When model Beverly Johnson appeared in an Afro Sheen commercial, she was a beneficiary of this new world of black TV advertising.
Johnson: That’s where as a model you made money in advertising. So being in an Afro Sheen ad was a big payday and made me popular in the community. It was a product that actually addressed the Afro, to make sure our Afros were shining and gleaming and beautiful. It was really important that Madison Avenue finally got that they had to start doing marketing particularly for the African American community. And that’s why that product was the all-time most successful African American beauty product ever.
The Roots’ Ahmir Thompson, a longtime user of Afro Sheen, says his favorite of the product’s ads featured abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass. “This young student is imagining he’s having a conversation with Frederick Douglass,” he said. “And the ghost of Frederick Douglass is sort of looking at him with that stern look. Basically he tells the student his ’fro is not tight, and that if he used Afro Sheen, he’d be tighter. So, of course, the guy applies it to his hair, it does a fade-out, and comes back with his quall perfect. And then Frederick Douglass, poof, disappears. Education and entertainment and business savvy in one fell swoop.”
In September 1965, the Laufer brothers, Chuck and Ira, founded a teen-appeal magazine called Tiger Beat. Its first issue featured the white soul singers the Righteous Brothers, British invasion band Herman’s Hermits, and TV music show host Lloyd Thaxton, along with a laundry list of mid-sixties pop stars, some we remember (the Beatles, the Beach Boys) and many we don’t (Freddy and the Dreamers, Derek Taylor, Jan and Dean). There is a strong Anglophile bias to the names on the list, with young British bands then the hottest craze in pop.
Six years later, in 1971—that busy year of black media expansion—the owners of Tiger Beat started a new magazine they titled Right On!, the two words being the official phrase of affirmation for early-1970s black youth. The big reason Right On! was created was the Jackson Five, who had begun their career with four No. 1 singles. There had never been a run like that by a teen-appeal black group. Moreover, here were five handsome, big-Afroed boys, beautifully styled by Motown, to appeal to young women and be admired by young men. In the 1960s, Motown had called itself the Sound of Young America. With the Jackson Five, the label was providing the look of young America as well.
Although a few groups, white and black, tried to imitate the Jackson Five’s youthful appeal (the Osmond Brothers, the Five Stairsteps, the Sylvers), the dancers of Soul Train were the next-biggest beneficiary of Right On!’s existence. “The reason we featured so many of the dancers in the magazine was because fan magazines are always using mail as a barometer as to what they should cover,” said Cynthia Horner, a Californian who joined the magazine working in the mail room and quickly rose to be its editor. “The Soul Train dancers started getting fan letters.”
Lloyd Boston, the twenty-first-century style guru with four best-selling books to his credit and innumerable TV appearances, was a regular purchaser of Right On! while he was growing up in New Jersey. “It wasn’t beautifully produced, but you didn’t know that when you were eleven or twelve,” he recalled. “All you know is you saw big full-page photos of your heartthrobs, and you saw the celebrities that you knew and loved in pull-out posters in the middle . . . You would learn more about the people you watched on mute, basically, because they never really spoke. They just moved and expressed themselves with their moves and their clothes. [Right On!] was almost like our own little portable Soul Train.”
To emphasize this connection between the show and the magazine, dancers would often be hired to write for Right On! For a time in the 1970s, popular dancer Little Joe Chism wrote a column called “And That’s the Tea,” “tea” being LA slang at the time for gossip, which mostly related happenings at Hollywood parties.
Horner developed an up-close and personal relationship with the dancers that would continue for several decades. “We would hang out a lot in Hollywood,” Horner said. “Go to the beach sometimes. The parks. I just wanted to find out more about them because I was so fascinated with all these people that had such good heads on their shoulders and had such a sense of style. Back in those days, we didn’t have fashion stylists or wardrobe coordinators. So these dancers would just figure out on their own what looked good on them, what would attract the most attention on camera.”
Right On! was there from the beginning with Soul Train and would play a crucial role in the elevation of several later Soul Train dancers from TV stars to recording stars. But Horner’s comments lead us to look at the third pillar of Soul Train’s early appeal.