As these things always begin: The music industry has lost another super-soul singer and iconic legacy, The Temptations’ own Dennis Edwards.

As these things don’t always begin: The music industry has been losing it’s refined soulful ‘edge’ for a very long time and the loss of Edwards is just another sign that Black music in America is sinking faster than the TITANIC.

Many Black Americans have speculated that the ‘edge’ was lost because today’s youth are simply not hungry anymore. Overbloated, overfed, spoiled, gifted with anything their parents ‘didn’t have’ just because they can afford it now, along with the hunger and mentality of “singing for your supper” went some of the greatest and most inventive and innovative musical practitioners on the planet.

There are so few of them left now, and the unfortunate news is that the youth didn’t get the hint and take the legacy of their pathlayers to heart.

Too busy trying to get famous and rich too fast, the younger generations went for the ‘okeydoke’ with a hit song scattered here and there instead of keeping it rich, soulful, downhome, and layered thick with an inheritance that spoiled their older counterparts – their parents and grandparents and some of their great-grandparents.

Yes, us old folks got spoiled for the finer music in life. But we do need to apologize to the youth for sucking all of the talent out of the ♫ ♪. We left them the musical crumbs and that was pretty much all they had left, because they didn’t try all that hard to build on the lusciousness of the crumbs instead of throwing them away. See, I’m going to “back in the day” it … Berry Gordy of MOTOWN would try out a song with an audience before throwing any old messy noise out there just to get attention.

He brought in an audience from the street into the studio to hear-test the music before it was printed, pressed, copied, and released. Money didn’t go to waste doing tryouts in the public.

There was an A-side and a B-side back then on a plastic disc with grooves called “45s”, and it made all the difference in the world, especially when a B-side of the record actually gained some traction, like “[You Betta] Make A Way for the Young Folks” did with The Jackson Five. It wasn’t supposed to be a ‘true hit,’ but that was a B-side that actually got playtime on the radio because the young folks who flipped it liked it.

Children, we didn’t have your clothes, your nice shoes, your big houses and cars, your did-up hair weave and nine-inch nails, nor your electronic and technical housewares, nor your digital majesty in the classrooms, but we learned with less, had plenty of common sense, and we also had something money cannot buy: LOVE.

Say It Loud I’m Black and I’m Proud LOVE for one another that made the heart and the soul of the music what it was and told the world: “WE ARE PROUD OF WHO WE ARE, OUR HISTORY, OUR LEGACY IN THE WORLD, and WE LOVE EACH OTHER even IF NO ONE ELSE DOES”.

It’s been drowned out in the noise of deceit, lies, selfishness, bureaucratic foolhardiness, and infighting between Black women and Black men that goes BEYOND any fight “Barbara and Shirley” could ever have had, and far worse than anything “The Cleanup Woman” could have dredged out of her family-busting ‘side piece’ soul.

But we were old-school … fight and make up later; not fight to kill out of jealous rages. That happened every now and again, but it wasn’t an everyday epidemic with us. For the most part, our lives and our light were all about LOVE and LIGHT and honor and respect of one another and our Village, our culture, our families, our sensibilities when it came to “keeping it real”.

Ask any still-surviving member of the old Temptations group. Ask Gladys Knight, ask The Miracles, ask Tina Turner if you can find her, ask Diana Ross and whatever is left of The Supremes, ask Berry Gordy … whenever even The Jacksons or Johnny Taylor or Bobby Womack spoke on the vices of Love and Heartache, it was all about overcoming it and moving on, not about how to go out and kill someone else because of it.

Our motto: ‘Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.’

Today’s generation, maybe someone needs to starve you nearly to death and beat your behinds for you to understand how your music needs to come from the heart and soul, and not from some superficial need to get famous and have ‘stuff’ to show off that no one really cares about except you and your materially exhausted blinged out friends.

The fame and money was a BYPRODUCT, not a desperate need, and that made the music a lover and a friend.

Even white-ish Elvis gave away all of his money to the point of near-bankruptcy, because as famous as he was, he would tell people that the money meant nothing. He just loved seeing how happy it made his audience, and sad to say, but Elvis had more swag and deep down ‘Mississippi soul’ than most Black singers and performers of today’s musical world.

It was all about making people happy, and LOVE – even with the bad parts of love, the music healed us … all by itself. And we moved onward and upward, and used it to OVERCOME, not to be outdone.

If you can, young folk, go to the Public Viewing for Dennis Edwards in St. Louis today. Maybe you will learn something from his real audience, other musicians, about the Magic of Black and Soulful Us and why the music itself is more powerful than fame and money can uphold.

Rest in Power, Dennis Edwards.

I’m tired of saying goodbye to Our Musical Love, but you are one of the Last of Your Kindred, and you deserve the honor and respect today that you actually earned … so as you move forward into this next “body-less” journey of our Black existence, Godspeed, Man; and thank you for the REAL music.

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