The Hippest Trip in America by Nelson George Read Free Book Online Page A

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.
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    DANCER PROFILE: Damita Jo and Don Campbell
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    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