“Hey, shut up all that damn noise! This ain’t Soul Train! And where’s Don Cornelius with his stiff neck?”—John Witherspoon in House Party’s funniest scene

Welcome to the weekly TV thread. There’s no prompt today.

Because today is Juneteenth, I wanted the Original TV Score Selection of the Week to be the Blackest piece of music that was written for TV. Unfortunately, none of Raphael Saadiq’s score cues from Insecure were released, so I searched for an alternative to Saadiq in my list of instrumentals I haven’t chosen yet as the Original TV Score Selection of the Week, and I thought, “There are no themes from Soul Train in my list. Soul Train had a total of nine original opening title themes during its 35 years in first-run syndication. Most of them were fire! Time to spotlight one of them.”

The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is MFSB and the Three Degrees’s “TSOP (The Sound of Philadelphia),” the most famous of Soul Train’s nine original themes and the only theme that qualifies as an instrumental because it has the least amount of vocals (the only lyrics in the TV version of “TSOP” are “Soul Train” and “People all over the world”) and the Original TV Score Selection of the Week is always an instrumental. “TSOP” first appeared on Soul Train in 1973, but it wasn’t released as a single until 1974, when it became the first TV theme to top the Billboard Hot 100. It’s not hard to see why “TSOP” was #1 for two weeks or why George Duke of “Reach for It” fame brought back “TSOP” in the Soul Train opening titles in 1987 and gave it a proto-New Jack Swing update: It slams.

MFSB—the acronym stood for both “Mother, Father, Sister, Brother” and “Motherfuckin’ Son of a Bitch”—was the house band at Sigma Sound Studios, the favorite recording studio of Philly soul producers Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff. Perhaps my favorite Philly soul song MFSB jammed on is Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes’s “Bad Luck,” where MFSB bassist Ronnie Baker’s bass line is my second favorite element after Teddy Pendergrass’s gruff voice as he sympathetically sings to a man who can’t catch a damn break.

Long after MFSB disbanded in 1985, the 1973-75 Soul Train theme remains its most popular instrumental. But it wasn’t MFSB’s only great instrumental. Its cover of the Nite-Liters’s 1971 instrumental “K-Jee” is one of the instrumental highlights of Saturday Night Fever.

“I love looking at photos of MFSB — a whole bunch of middle-aged guys, black [sic] and white, all wearing suits, looking like an uncommonly funky law firm on office-photo day,” wrote Tom Breihan in his 2019 “The Number Ones” piece on “TSOP.” “They were session musicians, a job that’s really closer to office worker than pop star. But like so many other session groups, before and after, they were absolutely essential to the sound of their era.”

“TSOP” was Soul Train’s second theme. The first theme Soul Train host/creator Don Cornelius chose to open and close the show was a gutbucket R&B instrumental from the early ’60s, King Curtis’s “Hot Potato (Piping Hot).” In 1973, Cornelius wanted a new theme that was more representative of R&B in 1973, so he called on Gamble and Huff, who brought an opulent production style to R&B, to compose it.

Soul Train was on its seventh theme when I first encountered it on Saturday mornings. I didn’t watch it regularly. Both Soul Train at 11am on KTVU and American Bandstand at 11:30am on ABC meant that Saturday morning cartoon watching time was over, so I—a Filipino American Warner Bros. animation nerd—kind of resented Soul Train and Bandstand. I also found Soul Train, Bandstand, Dance Party USA, and Club MTV to be boring.

“I don’t wanna watch people dancing. Gimme back my cartoons, man,” thought 11-year-old me.

However, I loved Soul Train’s 2D-animated locomotive mascot. (The first incarnation of the train was animated by legendary Black animators Floyd Norman and Leo D. Sullivan.) Whenever my family’s remote landed on Soul Train transitioning to a commercial break, I stopped to watch the animated train swaying to the Soul Train theme as it chugged through the city.

Bonus track: “TSOP” is great, but it wasn’t my Soul Train theme. The Soul Train theme I associate with my childhood is O’Bryan’s “Soul Train’s a Comin’,” so whenever I run into a GIF of the Soul Train mascot, “Soul Train’s a Comin’,” the 1983-87 Soul Train theme, always plays in my head. The show used two different versions of “Soul Train’s a Comin’”: a more synthy version in 1983 Soul Train episodes, and then that was replaced by the “Party Down” remix, a funkier version that added a bass line performed by Melvin Lee Davis, who co-wrote “Soul Train’s a Comin’.” I prefer the “Party Down” remix. I love it even more than “TSOP.”

Even though I always loved how Spike Lee rolled the Crooklyn closing credits over a montage of ’70s Soul Train clips, I didn’t start to really appreciate Soul Train until clips of its Soul Train Line and other kinds of segments popped up on YouTube. That was where I found out that Soul Train had Asian American dancers like the legendary Cheryl Song and Sally Achenbach and that Rosie Perez was a Soul Train dancer in the mid-to-late ’80s. (Perez’s memories of her Soul Train days are always worth a listen, like when she recalled angrily throwing a piece of Kentucky Fried Chicken at Cornelius or when she said to Variety, “They didn’t pay the dancers. They would give you a piece of chicken in a lunchbox. There was such immense talent on that show — everybody wanted to dance like them — and they should have been compensated properly. The dancers made that show.”)

I also learned about Soul Train’s importance as a center for Black creativity, whether it was in choreography or fashion.

“Soul Train having a space for African Americans was a form of resistance against the forces that would say, ‘You are still not equal; you are still not valued.’ It was a way to say, ‘Yes, we are indeed,’ ” said Veronica McComb, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Bryant University, to writer Nylah Iqbal Muhammad in Muhammad’s 2024 Vox article “The revolutionary spirit of Soul Train.”

Questlove is the most passionate Soul Train nerd I’ve seen. I like how he knows the names of all the dancers as if they’re players from a kid’s favorite baseball team. Cornelius, a former Chicago cop, was famously cold towards rappers. His respectability politics oozed out when he reluctantly interacted with groups like Public Enemy, and he probably would have scoffed at Method Man hosting with TCM host Jacqueline Stewart a TCM Classic Film Festival screening of one of Meth’s favorite films, Sunset Boulevard, an event I didn’t have on my 2025 bingo card. But the Roots frontman hasn’t let Cornelius’s disdain for hip-hop get in the way of his admiration for Soul Train. He wrote the 2013 book Soul Train: The Music, Dance, and Style of a Generation.

Several of my favorite parts of Questlove’s quarantine DJ sets were when he would play full episodes of Soul Train and basically do audio commentaries for them. One of those episodes was the 1986 episode where Song and Achenbach were among the dancers in a Soul Train Line to “Love of a Lifetime,” an underrated Chaka Khan jam that sounds so much like a Scritti Politti jam. That’s because it was written and co-produced by Scritti Politti members Green Gartside and David Gamson.

Questlove would point out how terrible Khan was at lip-syncing. The one thing about Soul Train that hasn’t aged well is Cornelius’s insistence on lip-synced performances by his musical guests to keep the show from going over budget. It’s why Earth, Wind & Fire never graced the Soul Train stage. Maurice White was, like Bruce Springsteen, against lip-syncing.

When the Beastie Boys hopped aboard Soul Train in 1990, they wanted to perform “Shadrach” live. But Cornelius didn’t allow it, so as a prank, they re-recorded “Shadrach” before their guest appearance and added the bars “C’mon, everybody, c’mon, everybody, can you feel us?/C’mon, everybody, c’mon, everybody, do the Don Cornelius” to trick him into thinking they weren’t lip-syncing.

Another bonus track: I wonder what Questlove’s favorite Soul Train theme is. Meanwhile, my third favorite Soul Train theme after “Soul Train’s a Comin’” and “TSOP” is “Up on Soul Train” by the Whispers. Soul Train opened with it from 1980 to 1983, and it’s another Soul Train theme with a killer bass line.

These Soul Train themes are making me want to rewatch the two-season wonder Sherman’s Showcase, stars/creators Bashir Salahuddin and Diallo Riddle’s hilarious Soul Train parody, as well as the sketch comedy show that brought us Ne-Yo’s “Time Loop,” a catchy parody of Midnight Star’s “Midas Touch” from the minds of Riddle and Phonte Coleman, Sherman’s Showcase’s equivalent of “Weird Al” Yankovic.

“You think there’s three dimensions when there’s really four/But time travel’s no joke, I once took a friend/We disrupted his past and he came back as twins,” crooned Ne-Yo.

Sherman’s Showcase is the best Soul Train parody I’ve seen. Meanwhile, my least favorite Soul Train parody is “American Band Standoff or The Godfather of Soooul Train or Get on Your Goodfellas,” a 2014 Black Dynamite episode that featured Kevin Michael Richardson as the voice of Cornelius and Filipino Canadian voice acting genius Eric Bauza as the voices of Donny Osmond and a homicidal Dick Clark. “American Band Standoff” did something Sherman’s Showcase never did: It punched down when it made fun of Soul Train’s most famous Asian American dancer and got MADtv alum Debra Wilson to speak in a stereotypical Asian accent as Song, which was just mean and racist. Song doesn’t have an accent.

I don’t feel like rewatching “American Band Standoff,” while there are a bunch of full episodes of Soul Train I want to watch for the first time. I just found out that there are full episodes of Soul Train on Internet Archive, so now I’m going to have a hard time squeezing them into a month-long Insecure marathon. I have to finish watching Insecure’s last three seasons for the first time on Netflix before Insecure’s departure from Netflix in July.

I’m probably going to skip some musical guest segments. I hate watching great live performers try to lip-sync. A lot of them suck at doing it. However, Cornelius occasionally relaxed his rule about lip-syncing and allowed a legendary musical guest to sing live, which leads me to the perfect way to conclude this post.

One last bonus track: When he was on Soul Train in 1973, Stevie Wonder lip-synced “Superstition,” but then Cornelius asked Wonder to improvise a song about Soul Train. The result was one of the most magical TV moments ever and a warm tribute to Soul Train’s form of resistance against the forces that would say, “You are still not equal; you are still not valued.”