Selects: The Soul Train Episode

**Chuck Bryant** (0:00)
Hey, everybody, it's Chuck here. It's April 21st, 2020 on our COVID timeline here for the Saturday trip down memory lane. This is a really fun episode, so I am very excited to recommend this ep from April 21st, the Soul Train Episode, where we take a fun look back at the great, great TV show that was Sooooooooul Train.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:28)
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

**Josh Clark** (0:37)
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant over there. And this is Stuff You Should Know.

**Chuck Bryant** (0:47)
Not bad.

**Josh Clark** (0:49)
Let's hear yours. I know you can do it.

**Chuck Bryant** (0:51)
The Soul Train. It's so much higher than that.

**Josh Clark** (0:55)
That was good, though. But you dropped it down into your range, and it still was, you made it your own, I think, is what I'm trying to say. And I like it.

**Chuck Bryant** (1:03)
Which is old white guy version.

**Josh Clark** (1:06)
So, you're not old, you're just middle-aged now.

**Chuck Bryant** (1:10)
Okay, sure.

**Josh Clark** (1:11)
Well, let me ask you this, Chuck. Were you aware of Soul Train while it was on?

**Chuck Bryant** (1:15)
Oh, yeah.

**Josh Clark** (1:16)
Okay, then you're super old.

**Chuck Bryant** (1:18)
I love Soul Train.

**Josh Clark** (1:20)
Sure. So, I was a Solid Gold man myself.
But I can get on some Soul Train for sure, especially like vintage stuff these days.

**Chuck Bryant** (1:28)
Yeah, I mean, I've watched Solid Gold, to be sure, an American band stand. But I was just a rabid consumer of popular culture and television and music growing up. So, before MTV came along and completely changed my life, because that's all I watched, was shows like Soul Train were where I could, because, you know, often I couldn't stay up to watch late night talk shows where you see performances. Like, this is where I got to see live music before I could start go sing live music.

**Josh Clark** (2:04)
Right. Oh, yeah. That was a huge draw of it, for sure. Like, the idea of just being able to tune in on Saturday at 11 a.m., depending on where you were, and seeing somebody like Marvin Gaye or Stevie Wonder perform. Absolutely. That was a big deal, especially, like you were saying, if you were too young and fell asleep too early to go to a proper show. That's right.
But even more than that, and like that was a huge mark that Soul Train left was just presenting that. But that had been done before. There was American Bandstand. There were all sorts of like kind of dance party TV shows. So it didn't exactly pioneer in that sense. But what it did pioneer in is that the people that was presenting, African Americans, teenagers who were hip, and their own people, and part of black culture, and presenting it in a way that like was an apologetic, that wasn't critical, that didn't portray it in some sort of negative light, or in a way that, you know, was trying to get white people to understand it, just presenting it as it was and celebrating it, that's where Soul Train like really broke through. And it's very, very difficult to overstate how revolutionary and groundbreaking Soul Train was, especially for how simple this show format was, basically.

**Chuck Bryant** (3:26)
Yeah, I mean, like you said, Bandstand had been around since 1952, and this, you know, kind of was known as the Black American Bandstand. And it followed that format. It was, you know, people, a live music performance, a host interviewing and talking to these people, these musicians afterward, briefly.
And then, beyond that, just awesome music spinning on the turntable and amazing dancing, amazing outfits, amazing hairstyles, and just a celebration of Black culture. It was really, really cool. And the point is made in this article that they put together for us, but it was definitely by Black people and for Black people, but it was an introduction to Black culture to white kids like me, little eight-year-old Chuck in Stone Mountain, Georgia, sitting around watching the Soul Train dance line.

**Josh Clark** (4:25)
Yeah, I can imagine it was mind-blowing, Chuck. Like, I think it wasn't just, you know, it wasn't like you were necessarily sheltered where you were growing up, whether you were or not, it kind of doesn't matter. It was that there was no place for you to be exposed to this prior to Soul Train, that if you saw a black guy on TV, it was, say, on the news and he was being arrested for something, or, you know, he was involved in a protest, and the protest was kind of presented in a particularly negative, agitated light, or he was a sidekick on TV, or a servant, or in some kind of goofy comedy or something like that. Like, and Soul Train didn't do that.