Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) (Web Exclusive)
Reviewed by Mary F. Corey

Produced by Jody Allen, David Barse, Rocky Collins, David Dinerstein, Robert Fyvolent, Jannat Gargi, Bryan Greene, Joseph Patel, and Gregory A. Thompson; directed by Questlove (Ahmir Thompson); cinematography by Shawn Peter; edited by Joshua L. Pearson; music supervision by Randall Poster; starring Chris Rock, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, B. B. King, Moms Mabley, Mahalia Jackson, Jesse Jackson, David Ruffin, Mavis Staples, Sly and the Family Stone, The 5th Dimension, Gladys Knight and the Pips, The Chambers Brothers, Max Roach, Abbey Lincoln, John V. Lindsay, Ray Baretto, Cal Tjader, Hugh Masakela, and Greg Tate. Color, 120 min., 2021. A Fox Searchlight release.

In the summer of 1969, during which 400,00 mostly white Americans made the pilgrimage to Woodstock, 300,00 mostly Black Americans attended a six-weekend music festival in Harlem that brought together such luminaries from across the Black musical spectrum as Mahalia Jackson, Nina Simone, Gladys Knight and the Pips, The Staples Singers, B. B. King, Stevie Wonder, Sly and the Family Stone, and even The 5th Dimension. Summer of Soul is a film of that festival and the historical context in which it was produced.

For years Robert Fyvolent, one of Summer of Soul’s eventual producers, had heard about the existence of a movie shot at the Harlem Cultural Festival. He contacted Hal Tulchin, the film’s director, and they became friends. Some years later, Fyvolent shared the footage with producer David Dinerstein and, right before he died in 2017, Tulchin signed the rights to the footage over to Fyvolent and Dinerstein hoping that the resurrected film would be his legacy. It is. The original film shot on two-inch videotape using four cameras, was a marvel in itself, offering intimate onstage moments as well as uncannily immersive experiences with the audience. Tulchin’s fortuitous decision to use videotape, far less frangible than film, meant that the footage had remained remarkably intact and the mono sound surprisingly vivid.

While Summer of Soul contains documentary clips and current interviews, this film is primarily a reclamation of Tulchin’s original footage, which had been sitting in a basement for fifty years. Consequently, Summer of Soul is revelatory in the way of an archeological dig. Something precious and long lost has been excavated and brought into the light. In this sense the film shares some DNA with Alan Eliot’s Amazing Grace (2018)—a brilliant resurrection of footage shot during a two-day gospel concert Aretha gave in 1972—or The Black Power Mixtape (2011), the historically fascinating repurposing of the naive and fresh footage about Black lives in the United States, filmed in the Sixties and Seventies by a Swedish film crew.

By unearthing this buried treasure, and restoring and contextualizing it, the multitalented first-time director, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson has created a spectacle that is part visual mixtape and part musical séance. Summer of Soul allows us to communicate directly with the past. Like Steve McQueen’s Lovers Rock, it offers a privileged port of entry into a whole layered world of sounds, smells, fashion, beats, and basic assumptions. One concertgoer interviewed said the festival “smelled like Afro-Sheen and chicken.” Another described it as the “ultimate Black Bar B Que.” Summer of Soul takes us there.

But the film is also revelatory in some less celebratory ways. Because it has taken fifty years for its moment to come, its very presence this summer in theaters and streaming platforms asks the question: What took so long? The history of this festival and of this long-neglected footage illuminate the larger story of the erasure of Black culture and history—an erasure that is the product of racist capitalist practices. The United States has made it a habit to obstruct, ignore, or destroy Black enterprise. Consider, if you will the Tulsa Massacre (so powerfully chronicled in Stanley Nelson’s recent documentary Tulsa Burning: The 1921 Race Massacre). This cultural and historical annihilation is a form of intellectual genocide and is so widespread that it even has a fancy academic name: epistemicide.

Indeed, the fact that this concert even happened is a revelation to many of the older reasonably woke white people who wear their weekend at Woodstock as a badge of honor. With its subtle, observational historicism, Summer of Soul expresses some hard truths about American Apartheid within a celebratory context of dance, joyous musicality, and humor. Summer of Soul may take us to church but it never takes us to school.

The creative team behind Summer of Soul has succeeded in making something far richer than a filmed concert. They have created a syncopated panorama of Black lives in 1969. Participants interviewed remember the joy they felt at seeing their community gathered in celebration that summer. Watching the film, Musa Jackson, who was brought to the festival as a child, begins to weep. “Now I know I’m not crazy. It really happened.” Unsurprisingly, Questlove and his gifted editor Joshua Pearson have given the film a percussive cadence, a visual backbeat that drives its forward momentum. With the help of music supervisor Randall Poster and Pearson’s brilliant editing, Questlove, both a musician and a master storyteller, has reassembled and augmented the pieces of Tulchin’s original film so that they deliver a bundle of parallel narratives about Black lives and Black artistry.

For example, the film successfully reveals the connective tissue between musical forms that early twentieth century record company executives had torn asunder. In a voice-over gospel great Mavis Staples says she once told her father, “Papa, you’re playing the blues. And he just laughed and said: ‘That’s just how I learned.’” It was only in the recording studios of the North that Black artists, with repertoires that included minstrel songs, blues, gospel, hokum, ragtime, and ballads, became “blues” singers, just as many white performers who played a similar mix of genres were labeled “country” or “Old Time” artists. Summer of Soul brings it all back home.

It is also an essay on the significance of style. I once joked about the film I Am Love that I would have watched it just for Tilda Swinton’s shoes and purses. While music is, of course, the star of Summer of Soul, its scene-stealing sidekick is fashion. Against a backdrop that seemed lifted from the set of TV’s Laugh-In, there are gospel singers in lime green suits and white lace minis, Sly in purple satin with an enormous gold choke chain, Mahalia Jackson in hot pink, Ray Baretto in ruffly polka dots, The Chambers Brothers rocking giant sombreros, and Sly’s drummer in faux fur leopard. Jesse Jackson, long a suit and tie guy, shows up in a tight striped T-shirt and suede hippy vest. There is the sublime awfulness of The 5th Dimension’s creamsicle orange fringed pants suits over yellow blouses. Tony Lawrence, the Festival’s MC and driving force, changed outfits more often than J.Lo on a world tour but particularly dazzled in a fuchsia calypso blouse. There were dashikis and Kufis and headwraps. And that was just on stage. The audience, too, came dressed for a party in a sea of hot colors and Kente cloth. Like a Vogue Ball, this stylistic spectacle was a declaration of Black pride, endurance, and possibility.  

The film also brilliantly addresses the unbreachable reality gap between white and Black America. On the weekend of July 20th, 1969, I was in downtown Manhattan in what was not yet Soho watching the moon landing on TV. Uptown at the Festival, Moms Mabley was onstage saying, “They say they got a man on the moon.” The audience booed. Mabley shot back, “I been done goin’ to the moon, but I got as far as Baltimore and got off.” The crowd cheered. A white reporter with long sideburns and a mic snaked his way through the festival crowd asking people what they thought of the moon landing and was met with unanimous scorn. Discouraged after ten people blew him off saying stuff like, “I could care less…waste of cash…what about feeding people here in Harlem?…What’s up on the moon? Nothing!” the reporter finally happens upon Redd Foxx in the audience. Foxx waggles his eyebrows, raises a joint to the camera and says, “The Black man wants to go to Africa, the white man wants to go to the moon. I want to stay right here in Harlem with the Puerto Ricans and have me some fun.” This sequence is only a few minutes long, yet it lays bare the vastness of the racial divide.

Another narrative thread addresses the religious spirit that drives Black music. Gospel artists are privileged here both as the moral center of the film and as the foundation of Black survival. Explaining the conjoined nature of Black worship and Black music, writer Greg Tate says that church rituals “channel the emotional core of Black people,” that Black music is built out of “rage and trauma” which can erupt into “a kind of spirit possession.”

Jesse Jackson gives life to this argument when he takes the stage to give a sorrowful but swinging eulogy for Martin Luther King, who had died only a year earlier. Jackson describes King’s final moments, his sermon frequently punctuated by musical riffs. “He asked to hear his favorite hymn, “O Precious Lord”…He didn’t die crying and afraid. He died asking the Lord to take his hand, to help us, lead us, all of us.” And then, in a transcendent moment in a film filled with them, Mavis Staples steps forward and sings, “When my way groweth drear/Precious Lord, linger near. Hear my call/Hold my hand lest I fall/Take my hand/ Precious Lord/Lead me on.” Soon, an ailing Mahalia Jackson finds the strength to join her and together they forge a breathtaking paean to Black pain and survival that is the best duet I have ever heard. There will be tears.

Questlove weaves two other thematic threads into the film—one musical, the other political—that follow the transformation from the church-based respectability of the early Civil Rights Movement to the clenched fist of Black Power, a transformation that was nearing completion in 1969. The musical shift is presaged by Stevie Wonder’s astonishing opening drum solo (who knew?). He is a Motown artist in transition, still in a mod velvet suit but ready to bust some new moves. There is David Ruffin, recently split from the Temptations, whose rendition of “My Girl” seems a bit anachronistic until he breaks into a falsetto so furious it feels like a call to arms. The 5th Dimension show up in great voice and countercultural drag and somehow manage to kill with the hippie anthem “Aquarius (Let the Sun Shine In),” seducing an almost all-Black audience who had generally dissed them for being too white. And then it all comes together with Sly and the Family Stone, arriving like zeitgeist transmitters from a sister planet and articulating what Greg Tate calls “neo-super Blackness.” Fusing pop, gospel, jazz, and psychedelia, with white guys on drums and sax and…OMG!, women playing instruments, they seem to point the way to Prince and some Edenic Afro-Hippie future.

Questlove successfully weaves the massive shift in Black political consciousness into the film by peppering the concert footage with images and voice-overs addressing the multiple crises besetting Black lives in 1969—assassinated leaders, a heroin epidemic, overrepresentation on the front lines in Vietnam, inner cities burning, and the collapse of hope. We see the sure hand of an astute curator here as Questlove leads us past the apolitical “My Girl” into more and more militant territory.

With the Black Panthers in attendance to provide security, Jesse Jackson raises his fist in a Black Power salute and asks the cheering crowd to pray for the Panther 21 who are incarcerated on Riker’s Island awaiting trial. The Nuyorican drummer Ray Baretto, following his jubilant set, pleads for Black/brown unity, “We’ve got to do it together before it’s too Goddamn late.” Talking heads guide us through the seminal shift from Negro to Black, process to ’Fro, peaceful protest to Black Power. The musical apogee of this change in consciousness is delivered in the final performance of the film in a somewhat off-kilter set in which the iconic Nina Simone, looking like a gorgeous African Queen who has swallowed a bad potion, struts jerkily around the stage intoning, “Black people, are you ready? Are you ready to kill?” Simone, long an idol of mine, was the musician I was most excited to see, but this was not her finest hour either politically or musically. Still, the response of the enthralled crowd to her imprecations lay bare the widely shared radicalism of this moment in Black history. 

We are currently in what can only be called a reckoning spree. Does this mean that a change is going to come? In Wesley Morris’s New York Times piece, “The Reconciliation Must Be Televised,” he asks what an American version of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission should look like. It would need to include hearings, theater, therapy, and church, he argues, and it should be at some deep level an “entertainment intended to restore, heal, repair, reveal, to midwife.”

While I was watching, Summer of Soul, I kept thinking of the words W.E.B. Dubois wrote in 1903: “Our song, our toil, our cheer, and warming have been given to this nation in blood-brotherhood. Are not these gifts worth the giving? Is not this work and striving? Would America have been America without her Negro people?” 

118 years later, Summer of Soul argues Du Bois’s case. A restoration of a brilliant cultural display of “the gifts of song and story” Black Americans have contributed to their unchosen land, it is implicitly an argument for reparations, meeting all the criteria for Morris’s fantasy Truth Commission. It is at once a riveting entertainment and a work of “sobering virtue,” that provides “catharsis rather than a loophole…It is not a way out.” It is a way in. If a Truth and Reconciliation Commission ever were to happen and if it were televised, Summer of Soul needs to be its overture.  

Mary F. Corey teaches history at UCLA, specializing in intellectual history, popular culture, and Black nationalism.

Copyright © 2021 by Cineaste Magazine

Cineaste, Vol. XLVI, No. 4