Summer of Soul (When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) (2021)

Maybe you’ve already heard or read some of the many accolades being heaped on Summer of Soul by movie critics, music commentators and just about anyone else who has seen it. They are all true. What we have here is a documentary of a 1969 music festival in Harlem featuring some of the best known and most talented artists of the day. This is an instant classic, folks. It is a picture that I enthusiastically recommend to anyone who came of age (give or take) in the 1960s; to anyone that has an interest in modern American cultural history, Black history and/or Harlem; and of course to anyone who enjoys what goes under the broad rubric of Black music: sixties Motown and soul music, gospel and spirituals, jazz, blues, funk, Afro-Cuban, fusion, and such like. Summer of Soul is an entertaining experience that is at once toe-tappingly exciting, spiritually hopeful, and quite moving. At the same time, the movie is fascinating from a cultural and social-history perspective, with a tone that ranges from celebratory to nostalgic and even a bit regretful - in that so many hopes and aspirations that were in the air back in the day have yet to be realized fifty years on. 

One of the amazing things about Summer of Soul  is the film’s backstory. Although the entire concert was filmed, no one was willing to produce a movie about it. Unlike, say, the Woodstock Art and Music Fair held that same summer, for which a documentary film [Woodstock (1970)] was rushed into release the following Spring, becoming a box office smash. Instead, the footage of what eventually became Summer of Soul lay unwatched in a church basement for fifty years before Questlove [Ahmir Thompson, front man of the terrific band, The Roots) was asked to try his hand at editing the more than fifty hours of material into a movie.  He has producing a brilliant documentary gem. 

“A song isn’t just a song. It can capture a moment in time. It will tell you a story, if you look close enough. The story of Summer of Soul is my voice.” – Questlove

1969: a time when everything was changing. The counterculture was surging. The Vietnam war was raging with no end in sight and anti-war protest was flourishing. The Civil Rights movement had been under way for more than a decade, and while some things had changed a lot (at least in the law), for a long list of other stuff – such as deeply entrenched racial attitudes, structural segregation and Black poverty – not so much.  Dr King and Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated just a year earlier evoking community-wide grief and anger, with King’s murder also triggering widespread rioting in Black communities nationwide. Then in November 1968 Richard Nixon was elected president by the so-called “moral [read “White”) majority”. On the other hand, that same November, Shirley Chisholm was elected to the US Congress - the first Black woman ever - to represent New York City’s Bedford-Stuyvesant district (Brooklyn).  

The movie transports us back to the little remembered Harlem Cultural Festival at Mt Morris Park (now, “Marcus Garvey Park”) in 1969 Harlem, which ran over six Sunday afternoons that hot summer – between June 29 and August 24, drawing over 300,000 people. The music is great, and I’ll talk about that in a moment. One of the many other good things about Summer of Soul  are its many images of this happy, enthusiastic crowd.  Because this was a local event and free, the audience consisted almost entirely of people from the neighborhood, which is to say Black and Brown people, but mostly Black – young folks and old, smiling, playing with their kids on the grass, bobbing and dancing to the music.  

And then there were the outfits and styles, both on-stage and off. From a twenty-first century perspective, one of the more noticeable features of the costumery on-stage was fringe – long fringe and short fringe, fringe on sleeves, on hems, on pants, you name it. And bright colors: yellow, orange, pink, purple.  Matching outfits for singing groups. And nearly everyone, both onstage and offstage, is sporting natural hair, i.e. afros - some close-cropped, but most bigger than that. 

The festival looks and feels like a coming out party. A celebration of the community and its music – of Blackness.  James Brown’s mega-hit, Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud came out the previous summer. In January 1969, Loraine Hansberry’s play To Be Young, Gifted and Black premiered at a Manhattan off-Broadway theater. As an uncredited voice comments during the film, 1969 was “the pivotal year when the Negro died, and Black was born.”  Anyway, it’s hard to say who was having a better time, the audience or the performers! Only the few white cops in attendance seem bored (which is perplexing really, because white people at that time (as now) mostly really liked “Black music”). There were food vendors portraying standard fare and ethnic favorites, balloons, picnic baskets. It was like the ultimate Black barbecue, someone says. 

So, what about the music?  Well, it’s very eclectic and very, very good - sometimes simply great.  The performances we see are culled from all six shows in no particular order – perhaps just the best of the lot; but they are arranged in a way that builds our appreciation and enjoyment as the movie moves forward. Amazingly under the circumstances, the sound quality is superb and the photography is sharp, sophisticated and professional.

The roster of performers is like a who’s who of Black musical artists of the day.  There’s David Ruffin (lead singer of Motown’s Temptations) singing My Girl; 43-year-old BB King, with a lively version of Why I Sing the Blues; the Bay Area’s Edwin Hawkins Singers, all dressed in day-glow lime, leading off the gospel section with a lovely, smile-inducing rendition of their hit Oh Happy Day; followed first by Pops Staples and the Staples Singers, then by the incomparable Mahalia Jackson. It’s at this point that we see young, handsome Jesse Jackson, looking like a rock star, who introduces what he describes as MLK’s favorite song, Precious Lord Take My Hand, sung as a duet by Mahalia and Mavis Staples. Oh my! The crowd is visibly delighted, moved by this gospel sound, thrilled by this pairing of two generations of great gospel singers, swaying with the rhythm, waving, dancing. Hell, it felt so good, I wanted to jump up and shout myself! 

But there is much more, like percussionist Mongo Santamaria, followed by drummer extraordinaire Ray Barreto who, introducing his song “Together”, came up with one of my favorite quotes in the film (about his mixed heritage): “I got Black and White, Red, Puerto Rican, Indian; I’m all messed up!” There is the Fifth Dimension with a spirited and (to my surprise) stirring rendition of their hit Aquarius/Let the Sun Shine In, with a tearful reminiscence by one of lead singers, Marilyn McCoo, who had never before seen this seminal performance. Another of my favorite moments came with the appearance of Gladys Knight and the Pips doing I Heard It Through the Grapevine, a great song and one of her biggest hits. She was terrific, but man oh man – the Pips!! Their coolness, their moves, their syncopation were awesome and mesmerizing! Another special performer was Stevie Wonder – at the stage in his career between his early hits as “Little Stevie Wonder” and his later success with Talking Book, Songs In the Key of Life and several other classic albums.  He is seen doing three numbers here, the first of which opens the movie and features Stevie wailing away with abandon on the drums! The drums!! Later on, in the midst of Shoo-Bee-Doo-Bee Doo-Da-Day he thrilled me with a long snazzy keyboard solo. 

The biggest stars of the show, however, are probably Sly and the Family Stone and Nina Simone. Regal and stylish, in a bright yellow polka-dotted sarong-like gown with her hair a mass of tight braids swirling back in a conical shape resembling an African queen, Simone captured the moment with two rousingly political songs: Backlash and To Be Young Gifted and Black, introducing them with this question “Are you ready, Black people?”   Sly and his gang appear in the movie twice, first doing the funky Sing a Simple Song and Everyday People; then bringing down the house at the end of the movie with I Want to Take You Higher. 

Summer of Soul is fabulous music and so much more – a time capsule of a mood, style, and political feeling at a very happy moment in a very tumultuous time. It may thrill you and it may move you. If you can see it on the big screen or on a home set-up with hi-fi sound all the better; but see it!

1 hour 58 minutes PG-13

Grade:  A

In general release in theaters nationwide; and streaming exclusively on Hulu.