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The Train Is Coming Home: The Soul Train Awards Return to Chicago

The Soul Train Awards tape November 5 at Chicago's Harris Theater — Anthony Anderson hosting, Chaka Khan honored, fans voting. The train was born here.

CultureTechLens · October 25, 2026

Fifty-six years ago, in a little studio inside the Chicago Board of Trade building, a former police officer turned WVON newsman named Don Cornelius pointed a black-and-white camera at Jerry Butler, the Chi-Lites, and the Emotions, and started the hippest trip in America. The budget was famously small — Cornelius reportedly put up $400 of his own money, Sears sponsored, and a local dancer named Clinton Ghent helped him run the floor. The show was called Soul Train, after the record hops Cornelius had been emceeing in Chicago high schools. It premiered on WCIU on August 17, 1970.

Next month, the train pulls back into the station. On Thursday, November 5, the Soul Train Awards 2026 tape at the Harris Theater in Millennium Park — 1,525 seats, in the middle of the Loop, ten minutes from where Cornelius grew up in Bronzeville — and on Friday, November 27, at 8 p.m. ET, the show airs on BET with a first-ever simulcast on CBS, plus BET Her, VH1, MTV2, and LOGO. After three years in the yard, the Soul Train Awards are back. And they are back here. Where they were always from.

Hold on to that word — back. The last Soul Train Awards were in 2023, Keke Palmer hosting, SZA sweeping. Then BET's then-CEO Scott Mills suspended the show in 2025 — the Soul Train Awards and the Hip Hop Awards both — to "reimagine them for this changing media landscape," which is executive language for the cable business shrinking under everybody's feet. Mills departed at the end of 2025. The man running BET now is Louis Carr — a Chicago native — and on September 3 he announced the return with this sentence: "As a Chicago native, I'm proud to bring the Soul Train Awards back to the city where it all originated." The network's own social post said it shorter: "We are bringing Love, Peace and Soul back where it all started, Chicago!"

The conductor

Your host is Anthony Anderson, and the pick is not nostalgia casting — it is a homecoming inside a homecoming. Anderson hosted the Soul Train Awards back in 2013; he has since hosted the BET Awards, nine NAACP Image Awards ceremonies, and the 75th Emmys, and he comes into this with the exact résumé the night needs: a comedian who treats the music like scripture. Listen to his announcement quote, because it is the thesis of the whole show: "Soul Train is more than a television show or an awards franchise; it's a piece of our cultural history. Don Cornelius created a platform that gave Black artists a place to shine, and generations later, that spirit is still alive." BET's Connie Orlando, who runs the night as executive producer, put the booking plainly: "Anthony brings an incredible combination of comedic instinct, musical knowledge, and genuine love for this culture."

The new rules: fewer trophies, bigger thrones

Here is what makes 2026 different from every Soul Train Awards before it, and read carefully, because half the internet is already publishing "full nominee lists" that are not. Orlando reimagined the format: a tight two hours honoring four to five musical icons, with marquee performances — and exactly two competitive categories, both of them voted on by the fans for the first time in the franchise's history. There is no Album of the Year list. There is no twenty-category slate. Any "full list" you have seen is two categories wearing a trench coat.

The two that exist are good ones:

R&B/Soul Song of the Year — ten nominees, voted at BET.com until October 16: Brent Faiyaz's "Butterflies," Bruno Mars's "I Just Might," Chris Brown and Bryson Tiller's "It Depends," Daniel Caesar's "Who Knows," Justin Bieber's "Yukon," Kehlani's "Folded," Mariah the Scientist and Kali Uchis's "Is It a Crime," Olivia Dean's "Man I Need," Tems's "What You Need," and Tyla's "Chanel." That is a genuinely global, genuinely current ballot — the sound of R&B in 2026 arguing with itself in ten accents.

Spotify's RNB X International Artist — seven nominees voted inside the Spotify app: Cleo Sol, FLO, kwn, Odeal, PARTYNEXTDOOR, Tems, and Tiana Major9.

And the name that appears on both ballots — the only artist who pulled it off — is Tems, whose "What You Need" was already a top-five hit on Billboard's Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs when the nominations dropped. If the 2026 show has an early storyline, it is the Nigerian star standing at the exact intersection the new format was built to celebrate: R&B's past honored on the throne, R&B's global future voted in by the fans. "We're thrilled to put the vote in the fans' hands for the first time," Orlando said. "From the biggest songs of the year to the artists taking R&B global, these categories show how far the genre reaches right now."

The fans get one more toy, and it is a deep one: a 64-song pool from which the public is ranking the 20 Greatest R&B Songs of the 2020s — one vote every 24 hours — with the countdown revealed during "Back on Track," the red-carpet show streaming on YouTube and Facebook on November 27. And because no Soul Train night is complete without the Line, BET opened the "Soul Train Line: You're Up!" contest on October 20: film your own 30-second strut down the line to Marvin Gaye's "Got to Give It Up," post it with #BETSoulTrainLine, enter by November 5 — the grand prize is $5,000 and your video in the broadcast, with nine finalists taking $500 each. The hippest trip is, officially, boarding passengers.

The first throne: Chaka Khan, and it isn't close

On October 22, BET announced the first of the night's icon honors, and if you were going to bring this show home to Chicago, there was exactly one correct first name. Chaka Khan will receive the Classic Soul Honor, which BET describes as celebrating "a legacy artist whose influence and decades of excellence have shaped the sound and soul of R&B."

Start with the geography, because the geography is the poem. She was born Yvette Marie Stevens on March 23, 1953, in Chicago, raised in Hyde Park — "an island in the middle of the madness," she has called it — educated at St. Thomas the Apostle and Calumet and Kenwood, singing in a girl group called the Crystalettes at eleven, and, at thirteen, given the name Chaka in a Yoruba naming ceremony; as a teenager she befriended Fred Hampton and joined the Black Panther Party. Then Chicago gave her a band: Rufus, the city's own funk machine, and Stevie Wonder gave the band a song — "Tell Me Something Good" — and the rest is the record books: "Sweet Thing," "Ain't Nobody," the solo arrival of "I'm Every Woman," Prince's "I Feel for You" turned into her signature, eight No. 1 hits on Billboard's Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart, and a 2023 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction.

And she is arriving at the Harris Theater in the middle of an honors season that looks staged. In January she took the Resonator Award; in February, the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award; in June, the Vanguard Award at the Black Women in Music Dinner. In September she released her thirteenth studio album, CHAKZILLA — Sia, Snoop Dogg, and Lenny Kravitz aboard, Greg Kurstin producing — and explained the title to People with the most Chaka Khan sentence imaginable: "When I was a kid, I really liked the Godzilla movies." One programming note on her Grammy count, in the open, the way this institution does it: BET and People say 11; older biographies say 10 competitive wins. Both can be honored — the 2026 Lifetime Achievement reconciles the arithmetic — and we print BET's 11 with the note attached rather than choosing quietly.

Louis Carr's words on the honor deserve the full quote: "Chaka Khan is the embodiment of soul music… Honoring Chaka is a celebration of the music and cultural legacy that Soul Train has always embodied." Orlando added that Khan's "influence can be heard across generations." Four or five icons are promised in the new format. One throne is filled. It is filled by a Hyde Park girl, in Chicago, on the show a Bronzeville man built. You could not script this without being accused of laying it on thick.

Photo: The Staple Singers on Soul Train, trade-press photograph, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Photo: CultureTechLens.

Why this city, why this year — the roots under the show

It is worth saying plainly what the return is standing on, because the numbers still stagger. Cornelius's little WCIU experiment went national on October 2, 1971, with Johnson Products behind it, and ran — syndicated, first-run, unstoppable — for 35 years and 1,117 episodes, holding the record as the longest-running first-run nationally syndicated program in American television until Entertainment Tonight passed it in 2016. He created these very awards in 1987 (first hosts: Dionne Warwick and Luther Vandross — let that pairing breathe for a second). BET acquired the Soul Train brand in 2016. And one small correction this editorial is delighted to print, because BET's own boilerplate keeps getting it wrong: the franchise loves to say Soul Train "launched in 1971." That is the national launch. Chicago's premiere was 1970. The train is a year older than its own press releases say, and the extra year belongs to us.

So understand what November 5 actually is. It is not a tape date. It is the franchise coming back to the city that invented it, in the care of a network president from that city, honoring a daughter of that city, hosted by a man who closes his announcement by invoking Cornelius by name — with Cornelius's own closing blessing as the whole show's north star: love, peace and soul.

What we don't know yet (and won't pretend to)

An honest preview names its gaps. As of this writing, performers and presenters are not announced — BET's release index through October 24 carries the Chaka honor and the fan contest, and nothing more; the remaining three or four icon honorees are likewise still to come. No public ticket information for the Harris Theater taping has been published anywhere we could find; treat access as industry-only unless BET says otherwise, and check BET.com and the Harris Theater as the date nears. The fan votes closed October 16, so the two competitive winners already exist in a spreadsheet somewhere in the BET offices — the rest of us find out November 27, on CBS, which still sounds slightly unreal to type.

CultureTechLens will be covering the homecoming the way we cover everything: with the receipts out. Our press-page and credential work for this show is already built — this editorial is the public face of a file that includes the Chicago roots piece on Cornelius, WVON, and WCIU that we are publishing ahead of the taping. And because every CTL article carries its companion: a Young Readers edition of this piece ships with it, same facts, same joy, plainer language.

The last word belongs to the conductor of 1970, and it doubles as a review of the whole enterprise. Don Cornelius ended every broadcast wishing his viewers "love, peace and soul." Fifty-six years later, his train is rolling into Millennium Park with a Chicago president at the network, a Chicago queen on the first throne, and the whole country invited to vote. Love, peace, and soul indeed — see you at the Harris.

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For Young Readers

A long time ago, a man named Don Cornelius started a TV dance show in Chicago. It was called Soul Train. The first show was on August 17, 1970. Great singers performed, and young dancers showed the newest moves and styles. Soul Train ran for 35 years — longer than almost any show of its kind.

The Soul Train Awards give prizes to the best R&B and soul music. The awards stopped for three years. Now they are back — and they are coming home to Chicago!

The show will be recorded on November 5, 2026, at the Harris Theater in Chicago. You can watch it on TV on November 27 on BET and CBS. The host is Anthony Anderson, a funny actor who loves this music. He hosted the same show back in 2013.

This year, fans got to vote for two prizes for the first time. One artist named Tems is a finalist for both prizes. Fans are also picking the 20 greatest R&B songs of the 2020s — and anyone can enter a dance contest by filming their own Soul Train Line dance.

The biggest honor announced so far goes to Chaka Khan. She is a famous singer who was born in Chicago. She sang "I'm Every Woman" and "I Feel for You." This year she also released a new album called CHAKZILLA — because she liked Godzilla movies when she was a kid!

Don Cornelius ended every show with the same words: "Love, peace and soul." This November, his train comes home.

Source: CultureTechLens

Visual register — every visual in this editorial, with its citation

1. Photo: The Staple Singers on Soul Train with Don Cornelius — trade-press photograph (Billboard), public domain, via Wikimedia Commons — photos/staple-singers-soul-train.jpg. Photo: CultureTechLens.
2. Photo: Don Cornelius with the 5th Dimension on Soul Train — public domain, via Wikimedia Commons — photos/cornelius-5th-dimension.jpg. Photo: CultureTechLens.
3. Photo: Chaka Khan — The Heart Truth, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons — photos/chaka-khan.jpg. Photo: CultureTechLens.
4. Photo: Anthony Anderson, 2016 — Peabody Awards, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons — photos/anthony-anderson.jpg. Photo: CultureTechLens.
5. Verdict card: The Train Is Coming Home card (04-verdict-card.png). Graphic: CultureTechLens.

Sources (selected)

BET releases via Paramount Press Express: host announcement (Oct 1, 2026) · return announcement (Sep 3, 2026) · fan-voted nominees (Oct 5, 2026) · "Soul Train Line: You're Up!" (Oct 20, 2026) · Chaka Khan Classic Soul Honor (Oct 22, 2026) · People, "Chaka Khan to Receive the Classic Soul Honor" (Oct 2026) · The TRiiBE, "The Soul Train Awards are coming to Chicago" (Oct 2026) · Wikipedia, "Soul Train Awards 2026" and "Soul Train" (episode and run records) · Encyclopedia.com, "Cornelius, Don 1936–" · Billboard via KISS FM Detroit (nominee coverage, Oct 9, 2026). Full claim-by-claim sourcing: research-facts.md in this package. Note on conflicts: Grammy count (11 per BET/People vs 10 competitive in older bios) and Anderson's NAACP hosting span (nine ceremonies per Billboard-derived copy, "eight years" per Memorable TV) are both flagged in the research file and handled in-text.

Citation formats

Chicago: CultureTechLens. "The Train Is Coming Home: Soul Train Awards 2026." CultureTechLens, October 25, 2026. APA: CultureTechLens. (2026). The train is coming home: Soul Train Awards 2026. MLA: CultureTechLens. "The Train Is Coming Home: Soul Train Awards 2026." CultureTechLens, 25 Oct. 2026.

Source: CultureTechLens

Cite as: CultureTechLens, "The Train Is Coming Home: Soul Train Awards 2026," October 25, 2026. Source: CultureTechLens.