We erase history for different reasons. Sometimes—as in the rush to deny and “move on” from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the United States Capitol by a MAGA mob—it’s to hide something shameful. At other times, it’s done to obscure something beautiful, simply because it doesn’t fit the agenda of the powers that be.
The latter is what happened in the case of the Harlem Cultural Festival of 1969, a series of concerts featuring giants of blues, gospel, jazz, pop, R&B, and soul. We’re talking Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, Sly and the Family Stone, Gladys Knight & the Pips, Mahalia Jackson, B.B. King, The 5th Dimension, Pops Staples and the Staples Singers, and more. Unlike Woodstock, which took place the same summer, the festival received little media attention. Extensive footage of the performances sat unseen for some 50 years.
That’s when musician Questlove—Ahmir Khalib Thompson—took the footage and compiled it for his directorial debut, the celebratory documentary Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised). It’s an embarrassment of previously unheralded riches. Just when the chills start subsiding from one of the performances—I defy you to be unmoved as Mahalia Jackson invites a young Mavis Staples to share the microphone on “Take My Hand, Precious Lord”—you get walloped by the next one. At the end of a set that also includes “Backlash Blues” and “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black,” Nina Simone musically riffs on a poem by David Nelson, demanding from the audience, “Are you ready, Black people? … Are you ready to do what is necessary?” It’s a galvanizing, mesmerizing exhortation—a call to take history into one’s own hands.
It’s not just the historical footage that makes the documentary special, however; it’s also what Questlove and his filmmaking team do with it. Along with editor Joshua L. Pearson, he superimposes certain images over each other—Stevie Wonder’s foot on the pedal merging with his fingers on the keyboard, for instance—evoking the out-of-body experience of witnessing live music. Overall, Summer of Soul is structured and arranged like a symphony with separate movements. As The 5th Dimension perform their hit “Aquarius (Let the Sunshine In),” we learn of the band’s struggle to be accepted as a Black band performing psychedelic pop. Singer Marilyn McCoo, watching the footage while being interviewed by Questlove today, is overcome remembering how nervous they were to play the fest. “We were hoping they would receive us,” she says of Harlem’s residents. Other movements provide larger historical context; especially enlightening is the section that intercuts The Staples Singers’ “It’s Been a Change” with news footage of the moon landing, which occurred while the festival was underway. As part of the montage, we get newsreel interviews with festival attendees expressing skepticism over the resources the government put toward the moonshot when folks in Harlem couldn’t afford food.
Aside from contemporary interviews with some of the artists who performed, Questlove also found a handful of people who attended the festival in their youth, all of whom offer eloquent reminiscences of their experiences. “We needed that music,” one of them sighs, recounting the trauma of the 1960s, particularly for Americans of color.
We still do.
