“Soul Train” creator Don Cornelius commits suicide
Sad news from Lauren Keiper, Jill Serjeant, and Piya Sinha-Roy of Reuters:
Don Cornelius, creator of the iconic TV music and dance show “Soul Train” that helped introduce Americans to black pop culture, died on Wednesday after shooting himself in the head, Los Angeles officials said.
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Cornelius was born in 1936 in Chicago and as an adult, became a journalist who was active in the civil rights movement. For a time, he worked at local radio station WVON, and by the late 1960s he had dreamed up the idea of a TV show dedicated to the soulful sounds of African-American music.
“Soul Train” was born with the deep-voiced Cornelius as the host who gave hip kids of the ’70s what “American Bandstand” creator Dick Clark offered TV viewers in the early days of rock ‘n’ roll — a show mixing youth, music, fashion and pop culture.
Soul Train was an amazingly important show in the ’70s and ’80s. Did you know it ran until 2006? It did!