BET is bringing the Soul Train Awards back. The show airs Friday, November 27, at 8 p.m. ET and PT, taped in Chicago — the city where Don Cornelius put Soul Train on WCIU in 1971 before it went into syndication. BET remains the home. CBS will simulcast it for the first time. BET HER, VH1, MTV2, and Logo are on the same feed. Spotify and Toyota are presenting. Host, honorees, and performers have not been named.
The last ceremony was 2023 in Los Angeles, with Keke Palmer hosting. Coco Jones took Best New Artist. Janelle Monáe got the Spirit of Soul. Usher was Best R&B/Soul Male Artist. SZA’s SOS was album of the year. Then the lights stayed down. In August 2025, then-CEO Scott Mills told Billboard the network had suspended Soul Train and the Hip-Hop Awards to “reimagine them for this changing media landscape.” “They aren’t gone,” he said. Three years is a long pause for a show that used to be how a living room learned a line dance.
Chicago is the point
“As a Chicago native, I’m proud to bring the Soul Train Awards back to the city where it all originated,” BET president Louis Carr said. The awards had not been held there. Los Angeles had them for two decades. Atlanta, Las Vegas, the Apollo, then L.A. again. Going home is not a venue change. It is a claim: the train started in a city, not on a red carpet.
Connie Orlando, BET’s executive vice president of specials and music programming, said the night will have “a bold new format” and stay “the home for R&B and soul.” Jesse Collins Entertainment is back producing — Jesse Collins, Dionne Harmon, Jeannae Rouzan-Clay. The broadcast will not be live. That is a production choice. It is also a tell. A live Soul Train night used to risk the dancer, the missed step, the record that ran long. A tape can still land. It will not be the same temperature.
What the CBS box changes
CBS on the simulcast is the part that reaches past the people who already had BET. Texas living rooms that kept Soul Train on Saturday already know the sign-off: love, peace, and soul. The question is whether a network that did not carry the dance will treat the awards like a special or like furniture. Spotify’s Joe Hadley called the return “a significant moment for R&B and soul” and said the company wants to “show up where culture is.” That is a sponsor sentence. The test is whether the night still feels like a room, or like a branded hour.
Coco Jones has already been through an Austin room this desk filed — Emo’s, no band, that voice. Usher is on the Texas calendar this month. The awards do not need those names to matter here. They need a night that still treats R&B as a body of work, not a category to fill. November 27. Chicago on the tape. BET and CBS on the box. The host comes later. The city already has the history.
