Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Summer of Soul’ on Hulu, A Musical And Cultural Doc About A Pivotal 1969 Concert Series

Subtitled (…or, When the Revolution Could Not be Televised), Summer of Soul (Hulu) won the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival, and marks the first foray into film for Roots drummer and creative polymath Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson. And why wasn’t Summer of Soul televised? Because the footage Thompson built his film around sat on a shelf in a basement for 50 years, its vibrancy unrevealed, until now…

SUMMER OF SOUL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: From June 29 to August 24, 1969, Sundays in Harlem’s Mount Morris Park were having a moment. The Harlem Cultural Festival, brainchild of New York club promoter and all-around go-getter Tony Lawrence, presented a live music series that celebrated the spectrum of African-American music, from soul and blues to gospel and jazz, incorporating the hybrids in between those genres and uplifting the larger cultural moment of the Black experience during a pivotal year in 20th century American history. The talent on hand for the festival was phenomenal. Stevie Wonder, just 19 and already a musical titan. B.B. King, the king of the blues, ripping solos on a cherry red Gibson in an immaculate blue-on-blue suit. Herbie Mann featuring Roy Ayers, Pops Staples and the Staples Singers, and The 5th Dimension, bringing it with their elegiac Summer of ‘69 Billboard #1, a take on “Aquarius” blended with “Let the Sun Shine In.” Mahalia Jackson, David Ruffin, Gladys Knight & the Pips, Max Roach, Hugh Masekela; Sly & the Family Stone. The Harlem Cultural Festival brought the neighborhood out for a party every Sunday, and delivered from the stage with music and message.

It’s that exuberance Questlove captures in Summer of Soul, with each performer clearly feeding off the energy of the crowd, which typically ran toward 40-50,000 spectators. Stevie taking to the kit for a furious drum solo, or Pops and the Staples Singers grooving on a mantra-like “Help Me Jesus.” In contemporary interviews, Gladys Knight as well as Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis, Jr. speak to the remarkable vibe that emanated through the crowd and transmitted its energy to the stage to further inspire their performances. Festival attendees are also interviewed, regular folks who were nineteen or twenty-year-old kids in 1969, making excuses to their parents so they could make the scene at Mount Morris Park. But for as much as it is a document of a terrific musical moment, Summer of Soul expands to encompass 1969 as a cultural epoch for the African-American experience. Music was evolving, certainly. But so was fashion, and hair, and other forms of personal expression — Black pride was bursting forth, and demanding to be seen and heard. In the absence of powerful voices for change — Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, John F. Kennedy — a new message was being communicated, and the speaker was often doing it with song.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? In August 1969, Woodstock was happening not 100 miles from the Harlem Cultural Festival, and the enduring resonance of that concert, highlighted by the Woodstock music documentary, illustrates how unfair it is that this footage of the HCF went unused for five decades. D.A. Pennebaker’s Monterey Pop (1968) comes to mind, too, with its sense of documenting a cultural moment, something perhaps most illuminated in Jimi Hendrix’s ceremonial, sacrificial offering of his immolated electric guitar.

Performance Worth Watching: Writer Greg Tate delivers an expert contextualization of how the performances on stage at the HCF so often communicated common themes back to the audience. He speaks of how gospel, represented well in the festival lineup, channeled the cathartic emotional core of Black people. And in that particular Summer of that particular year, “the audience was radicalized,” and primed for “psychedelicized R&B.”

Memorable Dialogue: “We got to do it all together if we’re gonna live,” Ray Barretto implores the audience during his band’s incendiary, percussive set of boogaloo rhythms. “Not on the moon, but right here on earth, baby. We got to do it all together, before it’s too goddamn late!” Summer of Soul cuts then to footage from Apollo 11, which made its moon landing during the Harlem Cultural Festival. In an archival interview, a man wishes the astronauts well, but says he could care less about their mission. “The cash they wasted getting to the moon could’ve been used to feed Black people right here in Harlem.”

Sex and Skin: Nothing here but the glorious sweat and heat of a huge crowd enjoying Summer in the city. There’s no question that the backs of their necks were getting dirty and gritty.

Our Take: Summer of Soul is enveloped in memory, performance, and meaning. The raw footage of the music, unearthed in all its colorful glory, gives weight to the singular remembrances of the attendees interviewed, all of whom understood on an intrinsic level how powerful the Harlem Cultural Festival was, how its very existence legitimized the larger voices of Black expression, even if at the time they were there for the same reason anyone would attend such an event — as fans of live music, as fans of dancing, meeting people, and hanging out on a hot Summer day. Tony Lawrence secured Maxwell House Coffee as a corporate sponsor for his concert series, and further solidified it with an endorsement from New York City mayor John Lindsay (“Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome our blue-eyed soul brother!” Lawrence says during Lindsay’s appearance onstage). But while funding for a full camera setup and professional event recording was secured, the footage never went anywhere. The gatekeepers of culture and media weren’t interested. It was just a Black thing.

Questlove destroys that ignorance with Summer of Soul, which would be robust as a cultural document if it just featured the musical performances on their own. Sly and the Family Stone are tuning up loosely, just noodling disjointedly in the sweltering heat, when suddenly they fairly KICK into “Sing a Simple Song,” saxophone and trumpet blaring over the steady-on funk pocket beat, Sly’s keys rumbling, and an electric guitar finding the precipice in a flurry of celebratory trills. It’s spine-tingling. (Greg Tate calls Sly “the proto-Prince.”) And what about Stevie Wonder, who after his initial appearance bookends Soul with more footage from his explosive HCF performance. “What the moon shot proves again is that what America hasn’t got is soul” — and BOOM! Stevie is there, accompanying his ebullient vocals with a raw, funky, and furious clavinet solo, his patent leather kicks laying on the Cry Baby Wah pedal. “We were moving into a whole ‘nother time and space with music and the sound,” Wonder says in a contemporary interview, completely nailing it. Summer of Soul is full of moments like this, when the sounds coming from the stage are as invigorating as any on one of the myriad music festival lineups that were part and parcel of Summer pre-COVID and are still finding their way back after it.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Summer of Soul is a transfixing music documentary. It unearths a ton of explosive live footage, uniting it with a powerful message of cultural expression and the sacred act of personal memory.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges

Watch Summer of Soul on Hulu