Everybody knows Soul Train. The Afros, the hip dance moves, the funky-fresh outfits—on Saturday afternoons in households across the country peace, love and soul reigned supreme for a generation. As the longest continuously-running syndicated program in television history, Don Cornelius’s soul music variety show had a profound influence on popular culture that spanned three decades. But as soul music waned from the chart-topping days of Marvin Gaye and Tina Turner, the once-mighty cultural force once seemed destined to fade into memory. Kenard Gibbs, Co-founder and Principal of MadVision Entertainment Group, is betting he can get it back on track.

“I’m a Soul Train baby,” Gibbs recalls of the show that debuted on Chicago’s WCIU TV in August 1970. “I grew up in Chicago and we used to dance to it back in the local access days. I remember growing a big ‘fro. We would mimic the fashion sensibility. Everybody did.”

When Gibbs founded the company MadVision in 2006 with colleagues Peter Griffith and Anthony Maddox, their goal was to be a new kind of entertainment entity for a new age. They wanted to distribute urban entertainment content across as many established and emerging platforms as possible. With their collective media experience—Gibbs was a publisher at VIBE magazine, Maddox a producer at Bad Boy films and Griffith an entrepreneur turned consultant—they concluded that the smart bet was to acquire a pre-existing critical mass of content to form the cornerstone of their new empire. It didn’t take long to realize what that content should be.

“We understood what Soul Train meant and wanted to be a part of reviving it in some way,” Gibbs says. “It was a dream, to be honest. In terms of a library of music content, there really was no contest.”

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