Summer of Soul

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

I grew up know­ing of and lis­ten­ing to the music from Woodstock. I have seen the film numer­ous times and lis­tened to the album of the same name. The music and sig­nif­i­cance are
etched in my mind. 

But some­thing else hap­pened dur­ing the sum­mer of 1969: the Harlem Cultural Festival, of which I was unaware until recent­ly. On six con­sec­u­tive week­ends, orga­niz­ers held con­certs in Mount Morris (now Marcus Garvey) Park in Harlem — with an esti­mat­ed 300,000 peo­ple attend­ing. These con­certs were record­ed on film, but after­wards TV pro­duc­er Hal Tulchin could find nobody inter­est­ed in turn­ing the film footage into a larg­er project, part­ly due to the pop­u­lar­i­ty of Woodstock. So the films sat in a base­ment for 50 years.

They were even­tu­al­ly redis­cov­ered, and Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson made it his project to pro­duce a doc­u­men­tary film from the 40+ hours of record­ed footage. The award-win­ning doc­u­men­tary was released in 2021. The music includes blues, gospel, R&B, and funk with per­for­mances by Stevie Wonder, Mahalia Jackson, The Staple Singers, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Sly and the Family Stone, Nina Simone, and many others. 

The film fea­tures stun­ning visu­als reveal­ing vibrant fash­ion, the enor­mi­ty of the audi­ence, close-up footage of the per­form­ers, and the joy of the per­form­ers and atten­dees. It’s a vibrant cel­e­bra­tion of Black Pride against the back­drop of the moon land­ing, the Vietnam War, the Nixon White House, and the assas­si­na­tions of MLK and RFK the pre­vi­ous year.

I saw the movie at the Kentucky Theatre on Saturday, where it is show­ing once dai­ly through
Thursday, April 14. My take­away from this remark­able film is the sto­ry of these con­certs and
the inte­gral role music played in a rev­o­lu­tion­ary movement. 

I was deeply moved by the film and dis­ap­point­ed that this recent his­to­ry was not known by most folks like me for all these years. I high­ly rec­om­mend it — both to enjoy its music and acquaint your­self with his­to­ry from a Black perspective. 

If you can not get to the Kentucky Theater before the last show­ing on Thursday, you can stream the film free on Hulu (a free tri­al is avail­able) or Disney+. It can be rent­ed for $5.99 on Amazon Prime. It is well worth your time.