If ever there was a decade I’d enjoy being stuck in forever it’d be the 1970s. Watergate bothered me, of course, and Vietnam, drugs, and civil unrest were bummers, too. Never mind curfews, parental discipline, and hours of bad television. What redeemed the decade for me was the music, which reached its pinnacle in the era bracketed by the break-up of the Beatles and the third effort by the Clash. True, the era witnessed the advent of disco – but the choices on the radio dial were plentiful, rendering disco merely annoying for discerning listeners aware of the plentitude of options.

Radio formats of the 1970s were wide-ranging, bubblegum pop interspersed with everything from early heavy metal to soul, country, psychedelia, rhythm-and-blues and all sorts of hybrids and cross-pollinations right, left, and center of the dial. The exposure to the multi-various genres was certainly there, but what was missing for a kid like me growing up in rural, northern Michigan, was visual context.

The closest televised depictions of black urban culture in those days were Julia, the (original) Bill Cosby Show, Good Times, and Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids. Seldom did you see black youth totally immersed in FUBU culture. True, you could see the Motown acts on Ed Sullivan, and other variety programs, and Sonny and Cher even employed Sly and the Family Stone’s “Everyday People” each week on their program for a series of vignettes, but, in prime time, black music was relegated, as far as I remember, mostly to Ray Charles singing “America the Beautiful” on Independence Day specials.

Even though Dick Clark’s American Bandstand presented black music, it was a half-step in that the kids boogying to the beat were typically white. It wasn’t until Soul Train that television viewers were granted a glimpse into a larger slice of black culture, which included black kids dancing to music written and performed by blacks, commercials geared specifically to black kids, and – hot damn! – a black host exuding cool icier than a Curtis Mayfield guitar solo, Brother Don Cornelius.

To a farm boy growing up in a predominantly all-white area in love with pop, rockabilly, country, and rock’n’roll, the experience was eye-opening – in a good way – and served not only as a primer in music previously underrepresented on the tube, but also provided a heavy dollop of background knowledge for the roots of some of the best white music. Man,  Billy Preston sure brought the funk to the Beatles and, later, the Stones, but his performances of his own material on Soul Train showed him performing pure F*U*N*K with a bit of gospel, jazz, and blues to boot.

To present a list of all the acts I witnessed on Soul Train would be showing off, but – trust me on this – it’s extensive, and even includes Elton John and David Bowie. As I noted above, the 1970s were a wonderful decade for music. Black audiences dug white English dudes playing soulful music, while white audiences learned to dig black music for its own sake, and also to mine for solid-ebony nuggets of amazing musicianship, songwriting, production, and solo and harmony singing.

And now the man who served as the Casey Jones of the Soul Train is dead, perhaps by his own hand, at 75, reputedly beset by physical and legal maladies. You were one helluva conductor, Brother Don. Thanks for the ride, and rest in peace.