(New York Newsday) This news just out now: Don Cornelius is dead of an apparent suicide, TMZ and The Associated Press are reporting.
Cornelius was the creator of “Soul Train,” which had a vast and lasting influence on pop culture, and seeded — or at least seeded the idea — of MTV. (There were many MTV fathers, certainly, but he was one of ’em.)
He was a tastemaker who tasted everything, from Motown to R&B, and taught generations of kids to dance, or try to dance, or try to move. “Soul Train” ran for decades, and thus, influenced not just one of those generations, but a couple. It aired from ’71 to the mid-2000s (and may still be going on in some iteration for all I know; the Soul Train Awards are of course ongoing.) This was the urban “American Bandstand,” and Don, the urban – and more urbane – Dick Clark, to whom he was so often compared.
