[nickcarraway]

Richard Harris and Donna Summers both did MacArthur Park

The song was written by Jimmy Webb, who is white. I never liked the song, until I read about what inspired it. Webb was dating a girl (Linda Ronstadt's sister Susan) and would meet her every day for lunch at the park.

Webb wrote another song, By the Time I Get to Phoenix, which Isaac Hayes did a cover of, even mentioning Webb by name in the song. Hayes, though a successful songwriter himself, often did covers of songs, many written by white songwriters.

I'm not sure it matters so much, but Steve Cropper was a guitarist who cowrote many soul classics, especially on the Stax/Volt labels.

Stax/Volt was founded by a white brother and sister, but it released music mostly by black artists, but gave them more of a free reign. It was eventually bought by Al Bell, who was black.

The musicians didn't segregate themselves, even if radio stations and record stores did.

[Dr. Sivana]

The musicians didn't segregate themselves, even if radio stations and record stores did.

The musicians NEVER did. Some other good eggs, too. Ollie McLaughlin was a black Michigan DJ who got Del Shannon noticed by the record labels.

Frankly, it was all working out nicely, until Buddy Holly died, and the British invasion hit. Black people weren't so much in the Beatlefication of everything, and went into soul, funk etc. while the white kids went for psychedelia, hard rock, metal, and later punk and new wave. Disco was an attempt to bring it back together again, at least in the mainstream, but that ultimately failed. Blacks went into rap and hiphop, and the divergence was pretty much complete. Too bad.