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6,941 words · no email, no account
No. 025 · Technology & Money · Media Business
The Encino Hills
a biography of Donald Cortez Cornelius
What the book is
On a Saturday morning in 1971, a former Chicago insurance salesman with a baritone voice and a borrowed camera crew launched a dance show that would outlast the network executives who almost killed it in its cradle. For the next thirty-five years, Soul Train was the longest-running first-run nationally syndicated program in American television history — and the man behind it, Don Cornelius, remained its sole proprietor, host, and gatekeeper.
Sterling Aldridge traces the arc of a self-made impresario who refused to let Black music and Black bodies be filtered through anyone else's lens. From the South Side studios where the show was first taped on a shoestring, to the Hollywood years when James Brown, Aretha Franklin, and a generation of new artists came through its doors, Cornelius built something the industry had insisted could not be built, and then guarded it with a discipline that bordered on austerity.
Drawing on interviews with dancers, musicians, family, and former staff, Aldridge follows Cornelius across the decades that followed — the contract disputes, the health struggles, the slow loosening of his grip on a culture he had helped invent, and the private weather of a man who gave the country a weekly ride and kept very little of the journey for himself.
What emerges is the portrait of a builder, and of the cost of building.</br>
At a glance
- Subject
- Donald Cortez Cornelius
- Shelf
- Technology & Money · Media Business
- Written by
- Sterling Aldridge
- Chapters
- 19 across 208 pages
- Narrated by
- Eric Whitfield
- Editions
- Paperback · Hardcover · EPUB · Audiobook
- Authorisation
- Unauthorised — no subject, estate or label had approval over the text.
Contents · 19 chapters
- 01South Side SonRead free
- 02The Hustler's Education5,089 words
- 03Get on Board5,174 words
- 04The Hippest Trip in America4,257 words
- 05The Line2,850 words
- 06The Sound of the City2,955 words
- 07The Business of Soul3,516 words
- 08Disco Inferno2,635 words
- 09The Private Man2,431 words
- 10The Revolution Will Be Televised2,744 words
- 11The Awards2,816 words
- 12Behind the Curtain2,699 words
- 13The Second Marriage2,893 words
- 14Black on Television2,368 words
- 15The Long Goodbye2,938 words
- 16February First2,900 words
- 17The Legacy Train2,783 words
- 18Love, Peace, and Soul2,629 words
- 19The Hall of Fame1,841 words
The opening chapter is published in full — read it here.
Editions
- Paperback · $19.99
- 6 × 9 in · 208 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback
- Hardcover · $24.99
- 6 × 9 in · 208 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · case laminate on the same text block
- EPUB · $3.99
- EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books
ISBN 979-8-90470-021-8 - Audiobook · $5.99
- Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Eric Whitfield
ISBN 979-8-90623-004-1
The printed edition has no ISBN registered yet. It affects library and retail listing, not your order.
Questions
01Who is The Encino Hills about?
Donald Cortez Cornelius. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Encino Hills — and the name goes on the line underneath.
02Is this an authorised biography?
No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented.
03Can I read some of it before buying?
Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 6,941 words of the book.
04How long is it?
About 63,000 words, 19 chapters, 208 pages in the paperback.
05What is the printed book like?
6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf.
