Don Cornelius ' Soul Train ' 75 dies in likely suicide

Don Cornelius, the architect and host of "Soul Train," the television appearance that brought R&B music and the moves of adolescent atramentous dancers to a U.S. audience, has died in an credible suicide. He was 75.

Officers responding to a address of a cutting begin him at his Mulholland Drive home at about 4 a.m., Los Angeles badge told the Associated Press. He was arresting asleep of a self- inflicted gunshot anguish at 4:56 a.m. at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles County Assistant Chief Coroner Ed Winter told AP. The amateur was afresh divorced, the Los Angeles Times said.

Cornelius was a part-time account anchorperson on AM radio in Chicago if he larboard to actualize "Soul Train" in 1970. From its bounded alpha on Chicago's WCIU-TV, the appearance generated a civic adaptation based in Los Angeles that grew through alliance to added than 130 stations in 1989, according to the Chicago Tribune.

Like its pop music counterpart, Dick Clark's "American Bandstand," Cornelius's "Soul Train" became a accoutrement of Saturday-morning television.

"'Soul Train' was a new idea," Cornelius told United Press International in 1984. "It was special-market television in a accepted admirers average afore cable came along. It was actual difficult to attempt and survive out there. We took the 'Bandstand' architecture and gave it addition look, created addition character. We accept white viewers, of course, but it wasn't applied to advertise the appearance in areas of low atramentous population. Some of our sponsors were absolutely searching for the atramentous audience."

Franklin, Jackson, Wonder

Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, Luther Vandross, James Brown, Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson were a part of the atramentous artists who appeared on "Soul Train." In 1974, Elton John became the aboriginal white artisan to arise on the show, according to Rickey Vincent's 1996 book, "Funk: The Music, the People and the Rhythm of the One."

"Dance shows aren't new, of course," the radio host and analyst Clayton Riley wrote in the New York Times in 1973. "But if you're into comparisons, 'Soul Train' is to the old 'American Bandstand' what albino is to seltzer water."

Vincent alleged "Soul Train" the "most undiluted advertise of atramentous female in the country" and "a cultural mecca for the absolute decade of the 70s."

Expanding his franchise, Cornelius created the anniversary Soul Train Music Awards in 1987.