It was an unmistakable velvety baritone, but his dulcet tone is only one of many things for which we shall remember Don Cornelius. As many readers know, the legendary founder of the Soul Train music program took his own life earlier this week. He was 75.
We know he was in ill health and had been depressed. According to a CBS interview with his son, Tony Cornelius, “My father was extremely private and unfortunately, when you’re a private person, you keep things inside…You know, it’s hard to imagine that you would — how you feel. You have to be in a person’s shoes really to understand. Obviously, me being extremely close to him, I could tell that he was uncomfortable. But our family could never know — how uncomfortable he really was.”
It would be easy enough to focus on the sad end, some distant legal problems and the speculated early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. It would be easy, but inappropriate. It would betray the man and his cultural impact.
At moments like these, Marc Antony’s funeral oration in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar comes to mind… almost. Diverting from the staid lines we might know, “Friends, Romans, countrymen…” the more apt version comes from hipster comic Lord Buckley, “The bad jazz that a cat blows, wails long after he’s cut out. The groovy is often stashed with their frames.”
We hope that is not the case with Cornelius. He was a complex man with a unique vision and impeccable timing. After graduating from DuSable High School in 1954, Cornelius joined the Marines and served 18 months in Korea. Upon his return, he sold insurance, cars and tires for a time.
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Chris Lehman, an associate professor at Minnesota’s St. Cloud State University, who wrote the book A Critical History of Soul Train on Television, Cornelius “was working as a police officer and pulls somebody over who remarks about his voice, that he ought to go into radio.” With only a few hundred dollars saved, he quit the Chicago police and enrolled in broadcasting school. Cornelius successfully pitched the idea for Soul Train to WCIU-TV-owner Howard Shapiro and George O’Hare, the ad manager at Sears, which sponsored the program. O’Hare knew it was a hit after just a few broadcasts, when he and Cornelius stopped at a bar.
“As soon as they walked in the door,” O’Hare recalled, “[The crowd called out] SOULLLL TRAINNNN” — the show’s signature slogan.
Soul Train showed America black music, fashion and dance. In that light, it did ferry the culture to a place it had not gone before. It was the funky counterpoint to Dick Clark’s sanitized and suburban American Bandstand. If the Soul Train was the conveyance, its founder was the trestle upon which the train rode.
Cornelius brought acts, both famous and unknown, into the fore of American pop culture. What started as a shoestring production in 1970 had become nationally syndicated only a year and a half later. The show featured the likes of Gladys Knight and the Pips, Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye, James Brown, Barry White, the Jackson 5, Curtis Mayfield, Ike and Tina Turner and Stevie Wonder. Long before the term “cross-over” came into industry parlance, Soul Train had hosted white artists including David Bowie, Elton John and Gino Vannelli.
In his signature sign-off Cornelius always wished viewers, “Love, peace and soul.”
Cornelius was surely loved by the fans. He personified all that is soul. We hope he now has peace.