By Danny Freedman
For a generation of blacks looking in from the tattered margins of American life, and for a TV network known for buttoned-up fare, the PBS show “SOUL!” shattered the mold and boogied on the broken pieces.
“People found it must-watch TV,” said Gayle Wald, chair of the English Department. The pioneering variety show, launched on New York City’s WNET in 1968 and then syndicated nationally, beamed into living rooms a potent dose of black music, dance, literature and sharp social and political discourse.
It was a chronicler of culture’s cutting-edge and an unabashed salve for turbulent times. “They watched to see what people were wearing, what people sounded like, what things they were saying,” said Dr. Wald. “They were learning about what the possibilities were for ‘being’ in the world.”
But in the passing decades, the show has largely slipped into the cracks between scholarship on more well-known, black-centered commercial TV shows, like “Sanford and Son” and “The Cosby Show.” “SOUL!,” which was produced with a mix of public and private funding, is “virtually not talked about,” said Dr. Wald.
The show and its impact are the subject of her latest book project, which this month got a major boost when Dr. Wald was awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship. She was among 181 scholars, artists and scientists selected from a pool of nearly 3,000 applicants.
“I was kind of bowled over,” she said, especially since the English Department’s Jeffrey Jerome Cohen was among last year’s awardees. “I kind of felt like lightning can’t strike twice,” she said. “Just on that principle alone, it [seemed] impossible.”
The fellowship comes on the heels of a grant awarded to Dr. Wald late last year by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and will allow Dr. Wald a year away from the classroom to focus exclusively on research and writing.
The book, called “’It’s Been Beautiful’: ‘SOUL!’ and Black Power Television,” to be published by Duke University Press, is aiming to be a cultural history of the show.
“I’m trying to understand what work the show was trying to do, what it’s place should be in the story that we tell about the post-World War II black freedom movement, the story we tell about the use of television to raise consciousness and create community,” said Dr. Wald. “Also, what kind of ideas about black identity this show was projecting for its audience.”
But the book will also explore the “public policy scaffolding” that was a critical part in the show’s launch as well as its demise five years later.
Funding for black-centered, public television programming arrived after the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the eruption of riots nationwide, said Dr. Wald.
Unlike commercially sponsored shows of the era, like “Soul Train,” funding for “SOUL!” came from the government and a grant from the Ford Foundation, allowing it greater leeway in content. The stage welcomed established and emerging artists alike, from the worlds of funk, blues, jazz and beyond (like Bill Withers, Stevie Wonder, Rahsaan Roland Kirk); from poets (Toni Morrison) and actors (Sidney Poitier), to icons of social change (Muhammad Ali, Jesse Jackson).
“This was a show that was much more politically dangerous—people talked about politically sensitive issues, and poets read inflammatory poems, and people were outspoken on the show,” said Dr. Wald.
“Since it depended on public funding,” she said, “it had a lot more freedom but it was much more vulnerable.”
Under the presidency of Richard Nixon, which began in 1969, the show found itself under pressure to reel-in its content and, later, to integrate. The show’s producer and frequent host Ellis Haizlip refused, and the show was cancelled in 1973.
It was Mr. Haizlip’s words, written the year before, that led Dr. Wald to “SOUL!” and sparked the new book effort.
While researching the later days of gospel musician Sister Rosetta Tharpe for her well-received 2007 biography, “Shout, Sister, Shout!,” Dr. Wald came across the program for Ms. Tharpe’s last big public appearance: a groundbreaking 1972 celebration of black culture and art at New York City’s Lincoln Center, organized by Mr. Haizlip.
She was struck by his words in the program: "I do hope that we are able to fill some of these dignified and solemn buildings,” he wrote,” “… with vibrations so strong, so mean, that never will another enter without acknowledging our presence here.”
“I thought: Who is this guy?” said Dr. Wald.