Some sounds from childhood never fade away. For the generations raised on television, especially, the familiar strains of “Scooby Dooby Doo” or the “Pink Panther” theme evoke wonderful memories, and jingles and catchphrases hearken back to a special place.
One sound from TV’s bygone era stands out from the rest, calling viewers to take a ride through Black pop culture, fashion and music. “Sooooul Train,” bellowed out from TV sets coast to coast for decades, is an instantly recognizable phrase with Arkansas roots.
The popular music show debuted on Chicago’s WCIU-TV and ran locally for a year before becoming nationally syndicated. Produced by entertainer Don Cornelius, who doubled as emcee, the show ran from 1970 to 2006, making it one of the longest running shows in history.
Cornelius worked in radio in the Windy City before making the jump to TV, bringing along some of his on-air co-workers when he made the transition, including Arkansas native Joe Cobb. Cobb was an emerging star in the Chicago radio scene in his own right when Cornelius heard then-22-year-old perform his high-pitched scream as a joke. The producer liked it so much he decided to use it on the intro of his new show.
The rest is history — unless you ask Cobb. Now 80 years old, Cobb is currently fighting a legal battle with Paramount Global, CBS Home Entertainment and Black Entertainment Television, which own the rights to the classic TV program. He is seeking back royalty payments that he said have not been made since 2008. Initially seeking at least $75,000, he said he expects the suit to be settled by the end of the year because the media triumvirate has “admitted their mistake” and agreed to pay him the years of back royalties they owe.
While many of the show’s fans are unaware of the origin of the voice in the intro, Cobb was well known in the radio business, where his career spanned more than 30 years in Chicago. He has also been successful in several other business ventures since recording the hallmark line. The Natural State native is quick to point to the roots of his success in life.
“It all started here in Arkansas,” he said.
Cobb grew up in Camden until age 14, when, in 1957, his family moved to Little Rock. He said the small south Arkansas town had everything one needed at the time: sawmills, lumber mills, car dealerships, three theaters, two supermarkets and mens stores. He said he was raised by the community, a theme that would carry on throughout his upbringing by his close-knit family and the Arkansas communities where he grew up.
“We lived on the north side of the city,” Cobb said. “You could be even on the south side, and people would stop and correct kids who were acting up.”
He recalled visiting his mother’s family in Ozan about 75 miles from Camden and traveling one asphalt highway connecting a few dirt roads. Cobb said the population of Ozan back then was just 95, and the nearest stores were in Hope or Nashville, Arkansas.
“I believe half of that [population] was livestock,” Cobb said. “It was all the way country, but it, too, was a learning experience, being young.”
His family in Ozan had a potbelly stove on the floor for warmth and a well outside for water. Back home in Camden, Cobb enjoyed the luxury of city water, although the line was run outside his home and only supplied cold water.
“Ozan, as well as Camden, let me know that when I grow up, I want something better than what I had,” Cobb said. “I didn’t think we were poor, but we were poor. It didn’t faze me one way or the other.”
While Ozan gave him a chance to get outdoors and to “romp and roam,” it also fostered a love for radio that would one day take him places he had only dreamed of as a boy. He loved listening to radio plays of the day, especially westerns and cowboy shows like “Sky King,” “The Roy Rogers Show,” “The Lone Ranger” and “The Shadow.”
“It’d be just as exciting as watching TV,” Cobb said. “Like, we could visualize it, and everyone wanted cowboy hats and Davy Crockett caps and all those kinds of things.”
His desire to become a cowboy was made more real by his Ozan relatives, who owned horses, which gave Cobb the chance to saddle up and ride one day. While holding the reins, he pulled back and caused the horse to rear up. Cobb slid off along with the saddle, but luckily, his uncle was holding onto the horse. Unaware, he screamed and cried for someone to get the horse off of him. He never rode another one again.
“The saddle actually fell on top of me,” Cobb said. “I thought that was the horse on top of me.”
Matching a nationwide trend of urbanization during the time, Cobb’s parents moved to the capital city for more work and a better economic situation. Ricks National Guard Armory, which opened in 1958, presented many Black families with jobs that paid about $3 to $4 per hour, he said.
Living through some of the city’s most defining moments, Cobb has seen quite a bit of change over the years. Everything from skyscrapers to desegregation, he lived through it all.
His parents stayed in Camden long enough for him to finish seventh grade and for his older sister to complete 10th grade. The family first relocated to 33rd Street between what’s now Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive and Arch Street. MLK Drive was called High Street in those days.
The family’s first Little Rock home was two blocks West of the Boys Club, where Cobb spent much of his time. They later purchased a home directly across the street from the Boys Club on the corner of 33rd and State streets. He said as youngsters, they would often walk or, for longer distances, take the bus.
While it was an exciting time for young Cobb, it also shaped the entrepreneurial spirit that would stick with him the rest of his life.
“I saw opportunities,” he said.
He reluctantly took his first job throwing newspapers — The Southern Mediator Journal — at his mom’s command at 14.
“I didn’t want to take that, and my mom said, ‘Boy, you go on down there. You ain’t got nothing else to do,’” he said. “That’s what started me working.”
Cobb was not the only one working hard in the city, and he recalled a “booming” Ninth Street once known as Little Rock’s Black Main Street. He remembers newspaper shops, shoe shops, doctors’ offices, salons, barber shops, clubs and more on the strip that extended from Chester Street toward the western reaches of the city.
“You name it, it was on Ninth Street,” he said.
While large sections of the road do not exist anymore because the city made way for Interstate 630, he said he is not sad about the loss.
His first school year in Little Rock, he and his sister attended St. Bartholomew’s Catholic School. With his sister preparing to graduate the following year, the two asked their parents if they could return to Camden for school. They spent that year, Cobb’s freshman year, in Camden so his sister could graduate with her former classmates. Cobb was then set to return to St. Bartholomew’s for his 10th grade year, but history got in the way.
In light of the desegregation movement nationwide, then-Gov. Orval Faubus took emergency measures on Sept. 12, 1958, to close all four public high schools in Little Rock, later holding a special election to gauge public support for the measures. The Sept. 27 vote showed an overwhelming support for the closure to avoid integrating, and the schools remained closed for the entire 1958-1959 academic year, which came to be known as “the lost year.”
All told, more than 3,650 white and Black students were left without access to public education.
To avoid losing a year of school, Cobb enrolled in Wrightsville High School, where he was bussed by a private bus company for 50 cents per trip. He recalled a notice about the service being sent out on a local TV channel, which was still in its infancy at the time.
During the 1957 crisis at Central High School in Little Rock, he remembers the state’s first VHF television stations coming online — KARK Channel 4 in April 1954 and its competitor KTHV the following year in November on Channel 11.
“I thought, ‘Little Rock’s coming up, got a TV station,’” he said.
The bus to Wrightsville’s route was published in the local newspapers for a small percentage of students from Little Rock addresses who were as fortunate as Cobb to be accepted to the district. Of the 750 Black students displaced by the decision, only 37 percent found public schools within the state to attend compared to 93 percent of white students who found alternative schooling.
After his sophomore year, he transferred to Horace Mann High School at Little Rock, now an arts and sciences magnet middle school in the Little Rock school district. The school had just been constructed when Cobb moved to town and opened in 1955.
Until Horace Mann was built, Dunbar High School near Philander Smith University in Little Rock was the only Black high school in the city. Cobb did not attend the already dilapidated Dunbar and graduated instead from Horace Mann at age 17 in 1961.
From there, Cobb moved on to Arkansas Agricultural, Mechanical & Normal College in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, now known as the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff. Cobb said the school did not offer as wide of a range of programs as it does today, but he chose the school because his sister was already a senior there. After sticking around for the summer after graduating, she headed for a job in the Windy City.
“I wound up in Chicago because my sister was there,” he said. “If she had been in Oklahoma, I probably would have been there.”
Cobb did not graduate from the college, choosing to pursue his big city dreams instead and dropping out his sophomore year.
“I was chasing radio,” Cobb said, having fallen in love with the medium during his time in Pine Bluff. It was just one of his life’s milestones that played out in the city. Another was getting his first car, a 1960 Ford Fairlane he bought for $700.
He remembers the town revolving around the campus community and that the institution was still segregated. At the close-knit school, he said instructors were “like your parents” and they all wanted to see the student body do well.
“There was a strong push for education back then, I’m sure for everyone, all races I’m sure, but for Blacks in particular, really pushing to get an education, get an education,” he said.
Although he met a number of supportive people who poured into his life, the young Cobb was itching to show the world what he was made of, and by the end of his sophomore year, he was gone for Chicago, even though he still did not have his driver’s license. He brought reel-to-reel tapes from his Pine Bluff radio shows for station managers to listen to while he went cold-calling, finally getting an interview after a year of searching at age 19.
“I was good for Pine Bluff,” Cobb said. “I knew that.”
A daytime station, WBEE 1570 AM, offered him $75 per week, which he jumped at, having made $30 per week in Pine Bluff. The station was owned by Rollins, which owns Orkin and a host of other pest control companies. Rollins started operations in 1948 with the purchase of a radio station in Virginia before acquiring the Orkin brand in 1964.
Common at the time, Cobb ran his own soundboard during broadcasts. While he was unaware how his numbers were doing, his popularity really “bloomed in the Chicago market” at WBEE, and after only two weeks at the small station, he was offered a job at the competing WMPP 1470 AM under the tagline “working more for peoples’ progress.”
Coming on the air right as Cobb was fresh in town in August 1963, the station also aired an R&B format and was operating as WCFJ, “Winning Chicagoland for Jesus,” when it went defunct in 2015. That station offered him $375 a week with insurance and other benefits.
Cobb stayed at WMPP for eight months before being offered a spot at WVON 1450 AM. WVON, billed as “the voice of the Negro,” hired him, as he later found out, because he was beating them in the ratings. When WVON “raised the ante” and offered him nearly $600 per week, he took the job and never looked back, replacing Franklin “Sugar Daddy” McCarthy as the morning host.
In those days, everyone had a moniker, and Cobb’s was “Youngblood.” He worked alongside an assortment of nicknames, including “Nassau Daddy,” “The Mad Lad,” “The Kool Gent,” “The Blues Man” and “Butterball,” to name a few. The group of disc jockeys collectively came to be known as “The Good Guys.” As Cobb grew older, people mostly dropped the DJ nicknames, including Cobb.
Cobb stayed with WVON for over 30 years through a few different formats, including R&B and talk. He said he never thought about whether he was ready for Chicago — he just loved radio — but he said if he had never found work in radio, he would have found something else. He said his parents and the Arkansas community raised him to believe that he could accomplish whatever he set his mind to do, although he is excited and glad that he was listened to and is recognized today as a radio legend.
When Cobb retired from WVON, he and his wife, Helen, a native Chicagoan, moved to Pulaski County just outside of Little Rock. There, the two have enjoyed success in their business endeavors and family life. As one of the first and only Black business owners on Bathhouse Row in Hot Springs, they’ve operated Ginger’s Popcorn for 25 years. Joe also started the first bus touring company of Little Rock and was a producer for local PBS station AETN. Over the years, he also worked in financial planning, managing millions of dollars in accounts for individuals and municipal agencies, and hosted a radio show called “Smart Money” on Chicago’s WGCI 107.5 FM.
Looking back on a life of success, Cobb said he is thankful for his humble beginnings in Arkansas and looks forward to more victories in the coming years.
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