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DON CORNELIUS had many stories, and he liked to keep most of them to himself. But there was one that he recited many times, never concealing his pride in the retelling.

It was 1972, and James Brown was making his first appearance on “Soul Train,” the television show Mr. Cornelius had created two years before. As Mr. Brown looked around at the set, with its gyrating bell-bottom-clad dancers, he turned to Mr. Cornelius and asked plainly, “Who is backing you on this, man?”

“It’s just me, James,” Mr. Cornelius said he replied.

Mr. Brown thought perhaps his host hadn’t understood the question. He asked again, and again. Both times, Mr. Cornelius replied with the same four words.

“It’s just me, James.”

It was a sentiment that reverberated throughout Mr. Cornelius’s life, which ended at age 75 with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head in his Sherman Oaks, Calif., home on Feb. 1. The creator, owner, producer and host of “Soul Train,” which showcased a number of black musicians and dancers in a partylike atmosphere to millions of homes around the country, was himself a loner who never thought he got the credit or support that was his due.

“You could fit all of Don’s friends in a phone booth and still have room,” said Clarence Avant, the music producer and one of those few friends, who lunched with him days before his death. Mr. Cornelius was often called “the black Dick Clark,” a nickname first bestowed on him in the early 1970s by The Chicago Defender, though he never achieved the same kind of fame or fortune.

With his sharp suits, sky-high platform shoes, exuberant Afro and too-cool-for-school demeanor, he was revered by generations of Americans, black and white, their appointments with his Saturday show as regular as church. At his funeral at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Los Angeles, the Rev. Jesse Jackson spoke with pride about the number of white viewers who had told him about surreptitiously watching the show in suburban basements, fearing...