The Don

© 5 February 2012, the Griot Poet

He was “The Don”…Cornelius, who actually got along with “the blacks” since he was one!

“Diamond in the back, sunroof top, digging the scene with a gangster lean…”

And we like Sly and the Family Stone “Thanked him for letting us be ourselves” again and again as we ran downstairs, to neighbors’ homes with rabbit ear antennas for the best reception (back when we had three dial channels, UHF and LOW DEF snow)…

James Brown was our “Pappa who didn’t take no mess” as we formed our own Soul Train lines, we “said it loud, we were black…and proud.” Like Niecy, “we just wanted to be free” like “black butterflies” high in the sky of our cultural contentment.

Barry White maestro was responsible for more babies delivered than any singer in history (said it himself), and Marvin could have us sexing, rocking and thinking in one performance set.

“The Don” was photographed with Martin Luther King, but did his thing as the antithesis of American Bandstand,  we danced and sweated, learning the latest steps from TSOP – the sounds of Philly, suitable situated in the city of brotherly love…we’d lost our Medgar, Malcolm and King.

So we needed music and movement that reaffirmed our black selves in a harsh world that defined us well in step-in-fetch tragi-comedic caricatures of the kings and queens he treated us as. The Harlem Renaissance was as distant a cultural memory as New York from North Carolina, or Chi Town from California.

Yet, we were one culture every Saturday, “One Nation under a Groove” coast-to-coast, one language, one tribe before Babel, before network cable business suits confounded our language with market-based bywords and epithets.

We were afros and bell bottoms, cornrows and dashikis, hot pants and tied off and/or tube tops: we strutted like we were stars on red carpets after Sidney Poitier and before Denzel (Washington), Holly (Berry) and Jamie (Foxx)…

The Don “was a bad mother…shut yo mouth!”

I’m just talking about Don Cornelius,

Who on his passing I can only wish him finally:

“Come on and get with us next week on this same station, and you can bet your last money, it’s all going to be a stone gas, honey.”

In (sadly) parting, I wish you, Don “love, peace…and SOUL!”

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