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Summer of Soul (… Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) , directed by Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson

2023; University of California Press; Volume: 76; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1525/jams.2023.76.2.556

1547-3848

Mark Burford,

Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism

Combining on-camera interviews, archival research, and a treasure trove of footage that had languished in obscurity for decades, the documentary film Summer of Soul (… Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) resurrects the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival. First-time director Ahmir Thompson, better known by his stage name Questlove, brings his deep connoisseurial knowledge of popular music to a project that seeks to remember the substance and significance of an event that has since become legendary because of its stellar lineup, though also chimerical because of limited access to its documentation, which rendered invisible both the concerts and the experiences of those in the Harlem community who witnessed them. In this sense, and many others, Summer of Soul is an exceptional creative achievement, a film full of stories within its larger parable about history and memory.The Harlem Cultural Festival was a series of free weekend concerts that featured a galaxy of predominantly Black music stars, presented in Mt. Morris Park (now Marcus Garvey Park) by the club singer and irrepressibly ambitious Black impresario Tony Lawrence. The film’s editing somewhat masks the full scope of the endeavor, which over the course of the summer of ’69 offered six themed programs: Broadway in Harlem (June 29), a gospel festival (July 13), a soul festival (July 20), a Caribbean festival (July 27), a blues and jazz festival (August 17), and the Miss Harlem Beauty Pageant and a local talent show that included a seventeen-year-old Luther Vandross (August 24). We get a good sense of Lawrence, the festival’s producer and host, when he is introduced to the crowd and struts onto the stage as the house band lays down the percolating groove of “Knock on Wood.” After loosening his tie showbiz-style to “get comfortable,” Lawrence takes off his suit jacket and flings it blindly over his shoulder. We see it land, and hang perfectly, on top of the piano. Somehow this delicious moment of impossible cool seems less surprising when we learn about the make-it-happen charisma that made Lawrence effective in rallying both musicians and politicians to his cause, including New York City mayor John Lindsay, who made a warmly welcomed cameo and was introduced by Lawrence as “our blue-eyed soul brother.” Above all, Lawrence, leveraging promises to secure commitments, was able to book a stunning and diverse assemblage of Black talent, including Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, B. B. King, Mahalia Jackson, Sly and the Family Stone, Abbey Lincoln, Max Roach, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Mongo Santamaria, the Staple Singers, and noted comedians, among many others (Aretha Franklin was a last-minute no-show). As Lawrence’s assistant Allen Zerkin tells us in the film, “Tony talked a big game, and he delivered.”Attracting a total audience of three hundred thousand, some of them perched in trees, the Harlem Cultural Festival shared the summer with the three-day Woodstock music festival in upstate New York, which kicked off as the Harlem series was wrapping up. Released in 1970, the film Woodstock was a spectacular success and remains a lasting memento of sixties counterculture. The Harlem Cultural Festival was also filmed, but the production team could find no takers for a potential movie, even when it was pitched as “the Black Woodstock.” Over a bed of expectant crowd noise, a series of title cards at the start of the film explain that “after that summer, the footage sat in a basement for 50 years. It has never been seen. Until now.” Presented with the opportunity to direct a long-overdue film about the Harlem Cultural Festival, Questlove immersed himself in the forty hours of footage by watching it on a continuous loop for five months. The musical performances and visual images convinced him that there were the makings of a memorable concert film. Shaping the documentary during the tumultuous pandemic and racial justice summer of 2020 persuaded him that Summer of Soul could and should be much more.1In capturing the nexus of popular music and soul-era cultural style, Summer of Soul can perhaps be understood as part of a trilogy of films that includes two other contemporaneous Black music documentaries: Wattstax (1973), which showed Stax Records’ 1972 benefit concert at the Los Angeles Coliseum, and Amazing Grace, the film record, finally released in 2018, of Aretha Franklin’s live 1972 gospel album of the same name, also made in Los Angeles. Along with Woodstock, these movies belong to a rich cluster of late sixties and early seventies concerts filmed for commercial release, most notably Monterey Pop (1968), Gimme Shelter (1970), Soul to Soul (1971), Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii (1972), and Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (performed in 1973, released in 1979). It is all the more astonishing, then, that the footage we see in Summer of Soul never saw the light of day until 2021, raising the question undoubtedly voiced by anybody who has seen the film: How on earth was this material kept under wraps for so long?Perhaps the answer is as simple as the explanation offered by Hal Tulchin, who oversaw the videotaping of the festival: “Nobody cared about Harlem.” From the vantage point of a half century later, Questlove has crafted a documentary that is as much a love letter to the late-sixties Harlem community as it is a concert film. Summer of Soul is structured in topical segments anchored by musical performances at the festival. Our introduction to Harlem comes as the Chambers Brothers play “Uptown” (“I’m goin’ uptown to Harlem … 125th Street, here I come”), overlaid with archival footage of the neighborhood and the recollections of festival attendees. “Harlem was heaven to us,” remembered Dorinda Drake, then a nineteen-year-old college student who lived walking distance from Mt. Morris Park. “To us, it was Camelot.” We experience Harlem and the festival through the memories of other interviewees who grew up there, including Barbara Bland-Acosta, Ethel Beatty-Barnes, and Darryl Lewis, all teenagers in 1969. They express fond attachment to a neighborhood that was a “melting pot of Black style,” while also recalling an intensely charged historical moment marked by the trauma of disproportionate African American deaths in Vietnam (including many Harlemites) and a chain of demoralizing assassinations—the Kennedy brothers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. in rapid succession. Outrage in Black communities across the country following King’s murder the previous year had Harlem residents on edge heading into the sweltering summer months, leading Lewis to speculate that “the goal of the festival may very well have been to keep Black people from burning up the city in ’69.”But a core message of the film is that in the summer of 1969 Black Americans were not just bracing for the worst. They were ready for change—the revolution—and they were seeing and hearing it unfold in the world around them and on the festival stage. Questlove made his name as the drummer of the Philadelphia-based hip-hop band the Roots, so it is fitting that the introductory scene features a volcanic drum solo by nineteen-year-old “prophet of soul” Stevie Wonder that serves as the backdrop for voice-overs attesting to changing styles, cultural-historical reevaluation, and “a Black consciousness revolution” that was “creating a new world.” Later in the film, Wonder remembers being “at a crossroad” in 1969, on the cusp of a transition from a successful pop hit–maker to a mature, politically conscious artist “moving into a whole other time and space with music and sound.” Questlove told an interviewer that he deliberately passed on including the chart-toppers that Wonder sang at the festival in favor of his performance of “Shoo-Bee-Doo-Bee-Doo-Da-Day” because “you could clearly see what his future was going to be in the next three to four years just watching that performance.”2In a different way, a group like the 5th Dimension, which has slipped through the cracks of popular music history precisely because of their fusion of the raced styles of pop and R&B, also offered a fresh vision of what Black music could be. “Back then, music was segregated,” recalled the group’s front man Billy Davis Jr., as he watched footage of their festival performance. “Pop groups wasn’t playing Black music and Black groups wasn’t playing pop music. And we were caught in the middle.” In 1969, the 5th Dimension scored a number one hit with their medley of two songs from the rock musical Hair, “Aquarius / Let the Sunshine In,” which they perform in the film. With the 5th Dimension often dismissed as “not Black enough” and as “the Black group with the white sound,” Davis’s bandmate and wife Marilyn McCoo acknowledged that “performing in Harlem was so important to us because we wanted our people to know what we were about.”Aesthetically and narratively, the documentary commemorates the height of the soul era, though festivalgoers experienced in real time the ways in which the meaning of “soul music” was under negotiation. One section of the film juxtaposes performances by ex-Temptation David Ruffin (“My Girl”) and Gladys Knight and the Pips (“I Heard It through the Grapevine”) with Sly and the Family Stone’s “Sing a Simple Song” and “Everyday People” to suggest a shift from Motown’s conscious crossover strategy to what cultural critic Greg Tate describes as the “neo–super Blackness” of “psychedelicized R&B.” Sly and the Family Stone was the only Harlem Cultural Festival act that also played Woodstock; Jimi Hendrix, who wanted to appear in Harlem, perhaps for the same reasons as McCoo, would have been a second, but Lawrence turned him down. Tate’s view that Motown head Berry Gordy endeavored “to make good R&B palatable for Wonder Bread mainstream white America” feels a bit reductive and stale. (Could there be anything more hip and less white bread than the Pips’ electrifying delivery of Cholly Atkins’s choreography?) But Lewis, describing the Harlem Cultural Festival as “a cross section of the music that was happening at the time,” offers compelling personal testimony that after his disorienting festival encounter with the sound and unexpected visuals of Stone’s band—with its white drummer Greg Errico, trumpet player Cynthia Robinson, and funked-up and rocked-out look—he and his Motown-leaning circle of friends “were no longer suit-and-tie guys. The change was in effect.”Notwithstanding the film’s story about the social meanings of music in flux, its centerpiece, in terms of placement, length (twenty-one minutes), and hermeneutic emphasis, is the section that professes the singular and enduring cultural-political salience of Black gospel. Here we see excerpts of performances from the day of the festival dedicated to gospel music accompanied by interpretive commentary, some of it tinged with culturally meaningful mythos. The Edwin Hawkins Singers, with Shirley Miller on lead, sing their phenomenally popular crossover hit “Oh, Happy Day” as Hawkins explains how the song is but the latest example of gospel’s message being replenished and updated by “contemporary sounds, new beats, new rhythms.” Initially mystified by comparisons of her family group with the blues, Mavis Staples watches the Staple Singers perform “Lord, Help Me” while recounting her father Pops Staples’s insistence that their gospel songs encompass the entire spectrum of Black vernacular music. Tate explains how the ecstatic holy dance of Herman Stevens and the Voices of Faith (and some in the audience) during the song “Heaven Is Mine” is “channeling the emotional core of Black people” through rituals derived from “spirit possession that comes from Africa.” As we watch the all-women gospel group Clara Walker and the Gospel Redeemers perform “Wrapped, Tied, and Tangled,” Rev. Al Sharpton describes gospel as “therapy for the stress and pressure of being Black in America.” Mahalia Jackson sings “Lord, Search My Heart” as pioneering Black journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault tells us that “gospel is part of our DNA.”The segment featuring the fifty-seven-year-old Jackson, who died of heart failure just two and a half years later, feels like an emotional climax that brings together memory of recent tragedy and a moment of intergenerational connection through an iconic song. In an extended reflection upon King’s life and death, Rev. Jessie Jackson appears on stage with Ben Branch’s Operation Breadbasket Orchestra and, “as our prayer today,” calls for Thomas A. Dorsey’s “Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” the late civil rights leader’s favorite song. This ends up being a cathartic duet by Jackson, a close friend of King, and her adoring protégée and fellow Chicagoan Mavis Staples, for whom sharing the mic with her “idol” felt like a profound moment of validation and “is still my biggest honor.” But as the film lingers on the singing of “Precious Lord” and on Rev. Jackson’s recollection of King’s final moments on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, the scene also feels like a meditative harbor of collective mourning that consecrates the festival grounds as Black space.In 1969, Musa Jackson, known today in the neighborhood as “the Harlem Ambassador,” was “a little kid” attending the festival with his family, including his mother, who set up a grill with food for sale. “As far as I could see, it was just Black people. This was the first time I’d ever seen so many of us. It was incredible!” he remembered. “Beautiful women. Beautiful men. It was like seeing royalty.” Musa Jackson’s indelible memory of the liberating sense of unapologetic Blackness at a festival that “smelled like Afro-Sheen and chicken” is reinforced repeatedly throughout Summer of Soul by musicians and attendees who were staggered and affirmed by “a sea of Black people.” Among the most striking and moving features of the film are the glorious crowd shots, which reveal the vastness, joy, and depth of that Black sea, as well as, through close-ups, the individuality of the faces within it. “Totally taken aback, because I didn’t expect a crowd like that,” twenty-five-year-old Gladys Knight “knew something very, very important was happening in Harlem that day.”Sharpton called 1969 “the pivotal year where the Negro died and Black was born,” while also noting an emerging post-King political divide between “the nonviolent crowd” and Black revolutionaries. With the eventually acquitted “Panther 21” awaiting trial in New York and amid uncertainty over whether and how official law enforcement would police the event, Lawrence enlisted the Black Panthers to provide security. Nina Simone, one of the biggest stars at the festival, is shown at the piano singing and playing “Backlash Blues” and “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black,” both socially conscious songs. But Simone’s recitation of the poem “Are You Ready?” by David Nelson, an original member of the Last Poets, with its call “to smash white things” and “kill if necessary,” reveals Black radicalism to have been one of the many currents of political energy that coursed through the Harlem Cultural Festival.Even if, as Lawrence continually reminds us, the festival took place “in the heart of Harlem,” it was a convening of multi-sited Black people. There are conspicuous shout-outs to the Chambers Brothers from Mississippi, the 5th Dimension from St. Louis, the Staple Singers from Chicago, Ben Branch from Memphis, and the Edwin Hawkins Singers from the San Francisco Bay Area. Highlighting the vogue for the dashiki alongside Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach’s performance of “Africa” and appearances by South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela and Dinizulu’s African Dancers and Drummers, the film registers the widespread influence of Afrocentric attitudes on late-sixties Black identity. In a neighborhood like Harlem, soul force pitched a big tent. Questlove devotes a segment to the Spanish Caribbean presence in East Harlem, in which Lin-Manuel Miranda, his father Luis, and activist Denise Oliver-Velez describe how “Black and brown communities” built interethnic solidarity by “speaking the language of the drum.” On stage we see Cuban Mongo Santamaria playing his biggest hit “Watermelon Man” and Nuyorican Ray Barretto, “the man who put the soul in Latin music,” performing “Abidjan” and “Together” as percussionist Sheila E. offers illuminating analysis of the contrasting styles of these two celebrated congueros.For Musa Jackson, the sight and sound of the festival was transformative: “Before that, the world was like black and white. The concert took my life into color.” And what colors. As we move from scene to scene, we hear one wish-I’d-been-there performance after another in counterpoint with kaleidoscopic visual splendor: the 5th Dimension’s matching yellow shirts and tasseled orange-Creamsicle vests, Mahalia Jackson’s bright fuchsia gown, the Edwin Hawkins Singers’ neon green choir robes, Sly’s sister Rose Stone’s platinum wig, every outfit, it seems, Tony Lawrence sported on stage. But this is the footage that the fortunate filmmakers were presented with. There are many wonderful moments in Summer of Soul that showcase the rhetorical skill and sharp wit of Questlove the director. Despite the clarity of the film’s structural units, Questlove seems to draw on his experience at the turntable, elegantly spinning these set pieces with a DJ’s touch, hiding the seams through transitional comments by interviewees or well-chosen archival nuggets. In the section explaining how the improbable festival actually came to be, Lawrence credits corporate sponsor “Maxwell House soul coffee” for their support. With tongue in cheek, Questlove cleverly inserts an exoticizing seventies Maxwell House television ad in which a resonant Black male voice, speaking as a hand drum plays in the background, describes gathering the “little brown bean” from “the human highlands of Kenya and in the misty plateaus of Abyssinia.”We encounter the most brilliant and eye-opening weave of Harlem Cultural Festival footage and archival material in the section of the film that addresses the Apollo 11 lunar landing on July 20, 1969, the day of the festival devoted to soul music. Backed by the Staple Singers’ performance of “It’s Been a Change,” responses to this giant leap become a study in Black and white. With deft timing, Questlove and his editors fold a sequence of person-on-the-street interview snippets by awestruck white observers into the Staples’ swamp boogie groove, like stop-time fills: “It’s a great thing for this country” … “I can’t believe that that just happened” … “It’s a great technological achievement” … “I felt the world got closer today.” CBS News sent a reporter to Mt. Morris Park to see what Black folks at the Harlem Cultural Festival thought about “man on the moon,” as a giddy Walter Cronkite proclaimed to his viewers. The music stayed the same, but it was a different tune: “I think it’s a waste of money” … “Let’s do something about poverty now” … “What’s up there on the moon? Nothing” … “It’s groovy for certain people, but not for the Black man in America.” For someone like myself, who grew up with the unquestioned common sense of the world-historical accomplishment of flying to the moon and back, the scene was a reeducation. “As far as science goes and everybody involved in the moon landing and astronauts, it’s beautiful. Like me, I couldn’t care less,” said one Harlemite given space to stretch out his solo. “So never mind the moon. Let’s get some of that cash in Harlem.” What is most remarkable is that these interviews with festival attendees never aired. When Questlove requested the video of the CBS Evening News broadcast as part of his research, he was accidentally sent the disappeared footage of Black perspectives on Apollo 11. Like the images of the festival itself, the report sat in CBS archives for fifty years and was never seen. Until now.3This serendipitous discovery of censorship, and what it reveals about the way such silencing warps our understanding of history, underscores what may be the most pressing moral of Summer of Soul ’s story. The film eloquently highlights the glories of Black music and musicians; the texture of a multiethnic Black community at a moment of crisis and transition; important contours of sixties Black political thought; and the critical sustaining power of Black life and love beyond the white gaze. Yet despite ending with the uplifting call-and-response of Sly and the Family Stone’s “Higher” and, as the credits roll, the Chambers Brothers’ “Have a Little Faith in the One You Love,” it is also a story about the persistence of Black erasure. “Even though the shows happened all summer,” Lewis reflects in the film’s coda, “it was like it happened and then they threw it away.” As we currently witness opportunistic “anti-woke” bans on Black intellectual production and determined efforts to constrict the teaching of African American history, Summer of Soul is an inspiring though stark reminder that the fight to ensure that Black life, Black thought, and the country’s racial past matter is real, long-standing, and ongoing. And in our desperate struggle to save our souls, soul might not save us.