I originally posted this last year. Just read an announcement that Don Cornelius passed away today.

Its been a hectic few weeks starting the new year, so I spent last weekend relaxing and uploading all my cds to my I-pod. One of the cds I'd collected over the years was “Give it Up: The Best of Curtis Mayfield”. I gave it a listen as I was ripping the cd onto the old hard-disk. Track 2 is “Move on Up” and it sounded as fresh and innovative on a chilly January afternoon in 2011 as it did when I first heard it in 1971 on the Bonnie Prince Charlie show at WTTM Trenton, 920 on your AM dial.

I was 6 years old. A white working-class kid and a confirmed soulie from that moment on. Or maybe it was earlier. My Uncle Jimmy was into James Brown, and I can remember falling asleep with “Night Train” playing in the background while we all sat on the porch at their house on S. Olden on hot August nights. “Move on Up” was something else. It has an energy that is both earthy and uplifting, an urban groove and evangelical soul. It grabbed me, shook me upside down, put me back on my feet again and set a smile on my face and I wanted more. I was hooked on Bonnie Prince Charlie and over the years got to know the voices of Brahin Ahmaddiya whose name still fascinates me, Butterball, and all the late night djs at WDAS when I was 12 and had a stereo and figured out out that FM really had “no static at all”.

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When I was growing up, there was a tv show called “Soul Train”, hosted by the incomparable Don Cornelius. It was the soul version American Bandstand and my little brother and I thought it was the coolest thing going. We were already hip to the likes Sly Stone, War, Isaac Hayes, Marvin Gaye, the Isley Brothers, the O'jays, the Stylistics and Billy Paul while our friends were just waking up to the Jackson Five. I used TSOP as my screen name for years on one of the old-style message boards.

Many years later, I got married, moved to the Netherlands and discovered that my Mediterranean heritage made me “not quite as white as the Dutch”. I was told at a party that I don't “dance like a white girl”. Well, duh. I learned to dance watching the Soul Train line.