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Take You Higher,” one of several of his standards performed during that taping, was a triumph of energy and musicianship.
    Wearing a white hat and boots, a hot-pink, silver-sequined jumpsuit unzipped to the waist, revealing a bare chest except for a Star of David medallion, Sly plays organ, sings, and incites the crowd to sing along as he ventures among the dancers to prance and be adored. On top of all that, Sly’s smile blares like the sun. The female Soul Train dancers giggle girlishly during a Q&A when Fawn Quinones boldly, with a lush gleam in her eye, asks if he’s married. The musical chops and personal charisma that made Sly a transcendent star are incredibly evident in this performance.
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    Sly Stone, the front man of the influential funk and soul group Sly and the Family Stone, pictured here in all his early-seventies finery.
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    The sensual Marvin Gaye made his Soul Train debut in episode #89 in 1974. He was a notoriously reluctant performer and he especially disliked lip-synching. At that time, he was at the height of his erotic powers with his single “Let’s Get It On,” which had gone to No. 1 on the pop charts. During the interview he admitted, “I enjoyed doing the two numbers [“Come Get to This” and “Distant Lover”] previously—I didn’t lip-synch them too well, but . . . ” He then playfully answered questions from Don and the dancers before launching into “Let’s Get It On,” which he sang from the main floor while hugging and being hugged by various adoring women. It wasn’t technically a “live” performance, since a vocal backing track is playing, but Gaye is also singing with some vigor, resulting in as interactive a performance as you’ll ever see between a singer and audience. Whatever Soul Train rules there were about interactions between dancers and stars were wiped away by the sexual chemistry apparent that day. One of Gaye’s most famous later performances on Soul Train had nothing to do with singing at all. Gaye, who was an avid sports fan (Detroit Lion football players Lem Barney and Mel Farr’s voices had been heard on the intro to “What’s Going On”), was one of Don’s hangout buddies. On Soul Train episode #222 in 1977, Don and Gaye played a game of one-on-one with mutual friend and soul legend Smokey Robinson as referee. It was not the most gracefully played game (Gaye was winning three baskets to two when it broke for a commercial), but it was a peek into the Los Angeles black celebrity world.
    Fifteen years before Arsenio Hall debuted his hip, black-oriented talk show, Cornelius’s interactions with White, Gaye, Robinson, and others were a window into black glamour and privilege that was particular to Hollywood. In places like Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts and Sag Harbor in Long Island, black folks with money had been gathering for decades to network and mate. But this was a new world, built on black music, that was also peopled by black movie and TV stars as well as behind-the-scenes players. It was a 1970s phenomenon that Soul Train made visible.
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    Marvin Gaye was both a regular presence on Soul Train and a close personal friend of Don Cornelius.
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    Another of these behind-the-scenes moments was a lovely duet between Aretha Franklin and Smokey Robinson that was recorded for a 1979 episode. The two soul legends were childhood friends from Detroit. Robinson remembers hearing her sing for the first time when she was four years old. Franklin was the daughter of Reverend C. L. Franklin, who in the 1950s was one of the most powerful religious figures in black America, while Smokey was a gifted singer-songwriter who’d eventually be signed by Berry Gordy along with his group, the Miracles. Though both were good friends from the same city, the silky-voiced songwriter and the Queen of Soul had never performed together on record or TV. Sitting