Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)

Musician, DJ, songwriter, and journalist Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson exhumes a treasure trove of long-buried footage from the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival and shapes it into an exciting and insightful documentary. Part concert film, part personal reflections from participants, and part historical exploration of Black history, culture, and politics, Summer of Soul features thrilling performances from gospel, R&B and soul music luminaries. The festival consisted of multiple concerts held in Harlem during the same summer that saw myriad major cultural and political events including the moon landing, the Manson family murders, the Chappaquiddick incident, the Zodiac killings, the founding of the Weather Underground, and, of course, the Woodstock music festival, which occurred just a hundred miles north of where these concerts took place.

For the mainstream media, the summer-long Harlem Cultural Festival was little more than an obscure footnote in pop culture, referred to as “The Black Woodstock” but completely overshadowed by that watershed “3 Days of Peace & Music”.  That the Woodstock festival came to be considered the defining event for the counterculture generation was due, at least in part, to Michael Wadleigh’s seminal documentary. Woodstock (1970) defined and preserved that event for the millions who did not attend and, more significantly, for later generations who still marvel at the happening and experience it vicariously through the film. Summer of Soul acts as a corrective to the omission of the Harlem Cultural Festival from our collective history, restoring its rightful place among the major cultural and political events of 1969.

Summer of Soul will undoubtedly also become as revered, referenced, and crucial to our understanding of the music and politics of the late ‘60s as Wadleigh’s Woodstock, D.A. Pennebaker’s Monterey Pop (1968) and the Maysles Brothers and Charlotte Zwerin’s Gimme Shelter (1970). The film consists of footage shot by television producer Hal Tulchin, who recorded about forty hours of these concerts on videotape but could not interest any television network in producing a special or concert film. For fifty years, this material collected dust in Tulchin’s basement. In 2004, film archivist Joe Lauro learned of the existence of the recordings and contacted Tulchin. Lauro digitized and catalogued all the footage, in the hope of making a film about the event with acclaimed documentarians Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville. The deal for that film apparently broke down due to contractual disagreements with Tulchin. But the failure to get that film made was perhaps fortuitous, as it is difficult to imagine a more timely release for a movie about this event than immediately following the racially and politically charged 2020. It’s also hard to picture a more apt interpreter of this material than Questlove.

In this, his first feature film, Questlove combines his journalistic skills and knowledgable appreciation of all forms of music and movies with his pre-eminent mixing skills. Rather than simply editing together a terrific concert film, he places the events in a contemporary context. In the documentary, he weaves in performers, attendees, and commentators looking back at the footage and discussing the era in which the event took place—the year after Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law—with 2020 as a frame of reference. The year that saw the murder of George Floyd and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement informs both how this film was made and how we watch it.

It is not a perfect blending of music and perspective. The thoughts of some commentators (like Lin-Manuel Miranda) who were not present at the festival seem extraneous. But, for the most part, the film is refreshingly free of the well-credentialed cultural pontificators we might expect, explaining to us why the festival was important. In Summer of Soul, the reactions and reflections of the surviving performers enrich the beautifully restored footage that we (and they) are watching. There are times when we wish we could just sit back and let an entire song play without interruption, but we quickly learn to trust Questlove’s sense of editorial rhythm and appreciate the elucidation of his interview subjects.

Watching Mahalia Jackson and Mavis Staples sing a duet of “Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” is plenty powerful on its own, as it represents a kind of passing of the torch between two generations of gospel royalty. But seeing and hearing Staples account of what was going on for her during that performance adds many layers of weight and power to the sequence. It’s also enlightening listening to Marilyn McCoo, the lead female vocalist of the 5th Dimension—a group often dismissively referred to as "champagne soul”—discuss the positive reception of their set by the Harlem audience.

These present-day interviews with performers and with audience members, many of whom were adolescents at the time, are part of how Questlove emphasizes the importance and influence of Black audiences. All music documentaries provide an appreciation of the artists they feature, but this film is as much an ode to Black fandom as to Black performers. This is not just a film that shines a light on Black music, fashion, and political views while exposing the biases of the White-owned mainstream television companies that didn’t see enough of an African-American market in the early ‘70s to consider doing anything with this amazing footage. Summer of Soul is much more about how we perceive people, places, events, cultural changes, and a whole lot more through art. The recollections of audience members are always affecting, frequently funny, and often quite moving as we get palpably swept up in their excitement at the opportunity to revisit what for them was clearly a formative event. 

At its core, of course, Summer of Soul is a showcase for never-before-seen live performances from the likes of Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, Gladys Knight & the Pips, Blinky Williams, the Chambers Brothers, and Sly and the Family Stone. The sound and picture quality of the video recordings is astounding. We feel like we’re there. We sense the heat of the summer sun. We perceive the tension between audience members and the police, the press, the Black Panthers who provided security for some shows when the NYPD would not, and a host of other peripheral participants. Most of all we feel the energy of the music; not just in and of itself, but the way the performers play off of the crowds.

Coming out when the COVID-19 pandemic was still keeping audiences away from movie theaters meant that most of us (me included) saw this film alone at home. I can only imagine what it would be like to see it in a packed cinema with an enthusiastic crowd. All the more reason to revisit this picture again and again.  After all, as much as Summer of Soul is about music and culture, it also emphasizes the vital importance of audiences. Just as history books tend to focus more on political leaders than the movements they led which actually brought about change, films tend to highlight the most visually exciting, but often more simplistic, representations of events. However, Summer of Soul is put together in a way that skillfully reminds a deeply polarized and locked-down nation about the unifying joy and power found in communal artistic experiences.