A myth that needs correcting up front: Soul Train was filmed in Hollywood. The studio was on Sunset, near KCET. The cameras were Don Cornelius's. The format was Don Cornelius's. The empire was Don Cornelius's. None of those facts are in dispute.
What is also a fact, and what was true for the entire 22-year run of the original Los Angeles tapings: most of the dancers on the line came from Compton, Watts, Inglewood, and the southwest corner of Los Angeles County. The styles you saw on the screen — the locking, the popping, the boogaloo, the wave — were styles that had been invented at Compton house parties, on the lawn of Compton High, and in the back rooms of the Latin clubs that lined Long Beach Boulevard in the early 1970s. The show went out to the country. The country saw Compton. The country did not always know that's what they were seeing.
This exhibit gathers the things that traveled both ways. A Locking style guide drawn by hand by a Compton dancer in 1973 — a booklet of seventeen poses that ended up, almost unedited, on the floor of Soul Train two months later. Three Polaroids from a 1978 audition shot in a Compton living room. A pair of platform shoes donated by a former dancer who took the bus to the Sunset studio every Saturday for six years. A typed-and-Xeroxed list of 142 names, donated by a Compton hair salon, of the dancers from this neighborhood who appeared on the show between 1971 and 1990.
The show is gone. The dancers are not. The styles are still here. They are taught, every Saturday afternoon, in a studio four blocks from where this exhibit is hanging, by a former Soul Train dancer who came back home in 2002 and never left again. The line did not end in 1993. The line just walked back to the block it came from.
Curator's Note
“Soul Train wasn't filmed in Compton. But it was made of Compton — its dancers, its hairstylists, its barbers, its block.”