When the Music Stopped for the founder of Soul Train Don Cornelius

Story by New York Times
Written by Jennifer Medina

DON CORNELIUS had many stories, and he liked to keep most of them to himself. But there was one that he recited many times, never concealing his pride in the retelling.

It was 1972, and James Brown was making his first appearance on “Soul Train,” the television show Mr. Cornelius had created two years before. As Mr. Brown looked around at the set, with its gyrating bell-bottom-clad dancers, he turned to Mr. Cornelius and asked plainly, “Who is backing you on this, man?”

“It’s just me, James,” Mr. Cornelius said he replied.

Mr. Brown thought perhaps his host hadn’t understood the question. He asked again, and again. Both times, Mr. Cornelius replied with the same four words.

“It’s just me, James.”

It was a sentiment that reverberated throughout Mr. Cornelius’s life, which ended at age 75 with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head in his Sherman Oaks, Calif., home on Feb. 1. The creator, owner, producer and host of “Soul Train,” which showcased a number of black musicians and dancers in a partylike atmosphere to millions of homes around the country, was himself a loner who never thought he got the credit or support that was his due.

“You could fit all of Don’s friends in a phone booth and still have room,” said Clarence Avant, the music producer and one of those few friends, who lunched with him days before his death. Mr. Cornelius was often called “the black Dick Clark,” a nickname first bestowed on him in the early 1970s by The Chicago Defender, though he never achieved the same kind of fame or fortune.

With his sharp suits, sky-high platform shoes, exuberant Afro and too-cool-for-school demeanor, he was revered by generations of Americans, black and white, their appointments with his Saturday show as regular as church. At his funeral at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Los Angeles, the Rev. Jesse Jackson spoke with pride about the number of white viewers who had told him about surreptitiously watching the show in suburban basements, fearing their parents’ disapproval. “He’s right up there with any civil rights leader of our generation,” Mr. Jackson said. “He gave people a chance to feel good about themselves.”

“Soul Train” was durable enough in pop-culture memory to be parodied on “In Living Color” as “Old Train,” and a Don Cornelius action figure was once a plot point on “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.” But Mr. Cornelius’s closest friends and supporters, including Mr. Jackson, lament how little serious recognition and respect he got when he was alive.

“You pick the 20 most important people in the 20th century, and Don would be in the top 10,” Mr. Avant said over breakfast recently, his eyes welling up. “But he never got on the cover of Ebony magazine or Black Enterprise. I’ll never understand that.”

DON CORNELIUS’S last years were not his best. He had gone through a bitter divorce with his second wife, Viktoria Chapman-Cornelius, a Russian model he married in 2001. He was struggling in recent years with his health, experiencing intense headaches, occasional seizures and social anxiety.

“Don was an extremely private person,” Mr. Avant said. “He didn’t want to share something unless he had to, or unless he thought it would make you happy or think about something.”

Despite his isolation, Mr. Cornelius inspired outpourings of grief after his death. Scores of singers, dancers and superstars said they owed their careers to him. At the funeral, Smokey Robinson and Stevie Wonder spoke about their record sales exploding after appearances on “Soul Train.”

After growing up on Chicago’s South Side, the son of a postal worker and a homemaker, Mr. Cornelius enlisted in the Marines, serving for a year and a half in South Korea. When he returned to Chicago, he worked as a salesman and a police officer, marrying his high-school sweetheart, Delores Harrison.

The couple had two sons, Anthony and Raymond, but later divorced, and Mr. Cornelius left both jobs to start a broadcasting class, finding work in 1966 as a disc jockey and news reporter on a Chicago radio show. A year later, he was sports broadcaster on a television show, “A Black’s View of the News.”

He covered civil rights protests and, like many in his generation, was moved by talk of black pride and was eager to find ways to improve life for young blacks.

Mr. Jackson, who met Mr. Cornelius when the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was visiting Chicago, recalled the future host energetically describing how young blacks could appear on TV not in handcuffs or fighting.

“He had this idea that what we had was not a talent deficit, but an opportunity deficit,” Mr. Jackson said. As Mr. Cornelius would say in a 2010 documentary about his show, “I had a burning desire to see black people depicted on television in a positive light.”

Modeled after Mr. Clark’s “American Bandstand,” but promoting artists whom that show generally neglected, including Mr. Brown, the Jackson Five, Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin, Mr. Wonder and Mr. Robinson, “Soul Train,” quickly became a local phenomenon.

In 1971, Mr. Cornelius moved the show to Los Angeles. Danny Bakewell, a civil rights activist and business leader there, remembers him discussing the importance of keeping ownership of “Soul Train” among blacks. “He knew about the importance of doing things for ourselves so that nobody could ever take it away from us,” Mr. Bakewell said.

Mr. Cornelius would also talk about the difficulty of securing advertisers. “It never reached a point where it wasn’t a challenge,” Mr. Bakewell said. “That always infuriated Don. It infuriated all of us.”

“Soul Train” began national syndication in 1971 and would continue for another 35 years. (It holds the record as the longest-running nationally syndicated TV show.) Many artists got their big break there, including the O’Jays and Destiny’s Child.

The show featured dances that would be imitated by teenagers across the country, including the crazy penguin, the robot and what ultimately became known as the moonwalk.

Mr. Cornelius regularly discussed politics on air, lamenting black-on-black crime with Mr. Brown in a 1974 episode that also included an interview with Al Sharpton, then 19, who called Mr. Brown’s hit “Payback” the “theme song of young black America.”

Even the commercial breaks were something of a statement, with much of the sponsorship from Afro Sheen and other black-focused products.

“Most of what we get credit for is people saying, ‘I learned how to dance from watching ‘Soul Train’ back in the day,’ ” Mr. Cornelius told Vibe magazine in 2006. “But what I take credit for is that there were no black television commercials to speak of before ‘Soul Train.’ There were few black faces in those ads before Soul Train.’ ”

But even as the show gained popularity, Mr. Cornelius found it impossible to find a network sponsor. Many households across the nation watched it through syndication, but the show was on at different times in each media market, which irked Mr. Cornelius for decades. “There was this disconnect — every artist wanted to come on his show, but the networks wouldn’t take him,” Mr. Avant said. “It didn’t make any sense to him or to any of us. Was it racism? Well, you could call it something else, but what was it?”

Mr. Cornelius financed the entire show himself, and while the production quality was good, he lamented that it didn’t have color cameras for some time.

The comparisons between “American Bandstand” and “Soul Train” continued, with one critic in The New York Times writing in 1973, “ ‘Soul Train’ is to the old ‘American Bandstand’ what champagne is to seltzer.”

As the show’s popularity grew and “American Bandstand” began to lose its black audience, Mr. Clark tried to create a similar program, called “Soul Unlimited,” hosted by a Los Angeles D.J.

Mr. Cornelius and his strongest supporters were outraged, with Mr. Jackson writing an angry letter to Mr. Clark and his producers demanding that they back off. Mr. Cornelius himself told Rolling Stone that “American Bandstand” had become obsolete because the most popular black artists were not interested in appearing there. “Soul Unlimited” went off the air within the year. A spokesman for Mr. Clark declined to comment.

The music industry changed quickly in the 1980s, with the advent of MTV and BET, two cable channels that benefitted from Mr. Cornelius’s past but eroded his audience. No longer was there a weekly appointment to see the hottest musicians or latest dance moves, but a constant onslaught.

While Mr. Cornelius had somewhat reluctantly but warmly embraced disco on his show, he had more misgivings about the advent of hip-hop and rap, which he thought were degrading. “I could do it. I could be like ‘yowassup!’ But I’d look stupid,” he once told an interviewer.

In 1982, he had an extensive operation to fix malformed blood vessels in his brain.

And nearly 15 years after he stepped down from hosting, Mr. Cornelius began to look to sell “Soul Train,” a brand he had fiercely protected for decades. His son Anthony said his father was frustrated but recognized that the music industry had evolved considerably.

“Why would he want to made no sense to me,” Mr. Avant said of that decision. “That was really his life. But once he made up his mind, there was no talking him out of it. The thing he kept saying is: ‘I want to make sure my legacy is protected.’ ”

Kenard Gibbs, a former executive at Vibe, and his two partners, who had each grown up watching the show, thought buying the rights to the “Soul Train” name and more than 1,100 hours of footage would give them a chance to create new material, as well as find ways to repackage what they already had.

“You watched that show so that you knew what to wear, you knew how to dance and you knew which songs were cool,” Mr. Gibbs said. “It was a lifestyle brand before anyone called it that.”

Mr. Gibbs said that Mr. Cornelius’s death has prompted a new round of talks about making a movie based on the show or some other kind of revival: the sorts of projects that Mr. Cornelius was fond of talking about but that never got off the ground.

Mr. Cornelius’s personal problems had also begun to spill into public view in 2008, when he was arrested for domestic violence against his then-wife. He said in court that she had instigated the confrontation by shouting insults and profanities “very close to my face,” and that the episode involved “mutual acts of aggression.”

In 2009, he pleaded no contest to one count of domestic violence and was placed on a 36-month probation. In divorce papers in 2009, Mr. Cornelius wrote: “I am 72 years old. I have significant health issues. I want to finalize this divorce before I die.”

Last year, BET asked Mr. Cornelius if it could honor him with a lifetime achievement on the Soul Train Awards show, which they had begun to show each year. He demurred.

“He said it was too early, and he did not want to do it yet,” said Debra L. Lee, the network’s president.

In recent years, as his health began to decline further, Mr. Cornelius allowed his son to make more and more business decisions. And he would discuss “not really being around much longer.”

“I never knew what that meant,” Anthony Cornelius said. “I think in a way I didn’t want to know.”

After a call from his father in the middle of the night on Feb. 1, he drove to his father’s house just a few minutes away, finding him on the floor. There was no note.

Don Cornelius was taken to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead just before 5 a.m.

This was 10 days before Whitney Houston was found in a hotel bathroom the night before the Grammy Awards. The show included a tribute to Ms. Houston, but Mr. Cornelius’s name wasn’t listed in a montage of people who had died in the last year.

“How could that possibly be for a man of his stature?” Mr. Bakewell said, not masking his anger. “It’s inconceivable that they would ever do that to Dick Clark.”