Questlove's love letter to Earth, Wind & Fire airs on HBO Max

To understand what my favorite band of all time meant to me, read my high school yearbook quote.

- By MARK WINSTON GRIFFITH

When I needed to make sense of that time in my life, when I needed to invoke scriptures that stirred something inside me, I turned to the words of the holy Earth, Wind, and Fire (EWF), the Book of ‘‘Shining Star’’:

Born a manchild of the sun
Saw my work had just begun
Saw I had to stand alone
Bless it now I've got my own.

As I grew into an adult, I watched EWF's impact and legacy fade. Many of our greatest pop icons — Michael, Beyonce, the Beatles, Elvis, Bob Marley, etc. — live large in documentaries, ‘‘Behind the Music’’-like treatments, and endless tributes, but EWF has received an insufficient amount of that love.

At least until now. The beauty of Ahmir ‘‘Questlove’’ Thompson is that he takes artists who often get reduced by white tastemakers to a Black music subcategory, and restores them to their rightful place at the foundational center of American music craft and culture. Thompson's Academy Award-winning ‘‘Summer of Soul’’; his ‘‘Sly Lives,’’ which profiled Sly Stone; and now his latest, ‘‘Earth, Wind & Fire: To Be Celestial vs. That’s the Weight of the World,’’ all take on the grinding task of naming a new American songbook for the second half of the 20th century. While the film shows that the magic of EWF has always been a product of collaboration, Thompson dramatizes the extent to which its founder and leader, the late Maurice White, is the axis about which EWF rotated.