John Ellison releases powerful new song on race

You Google the words “Some Kind of Wonderful” and it isn’t until  you’ve flipped through several pages of references to Grand Funk and Joss Stone that you finally see a reference to Soul Brothers Six, the band John Ellison assembled in the 60”s and which first recorded Ellison’s iconic soul tune.  John Ellison has lived in Dundas for years and says the royalties on “Some Kind of Wonderful” will keep coming in for the rest of his life.

But Ellison, who lived in Dundas for several years,  has not been able to completely rid himself of the scars of racism and poverty that marked much of his life. The joyous lyrics of Some Kind of Wonderful—a song about a man who is content with his life because of the love of a women, stand in contrast to the grim life growing up in West Virginia coal country and living in 3rd world poverty with no running water, scarce food  and hand me down clothes.

But in a new song just released by Ellison in the wake of the recent incidents of the George Floyd and other police-involved deaths of Afro-Americans, he reveals a life for which poverty was only a small part of his experience. In “Wake Up Call” Ellison details of unbelievable brutality suffered by himself and generations of his family. The video has caught the attention of Rolling Stone Magazine.