Summer of Soul: Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised (Mass Distraction Media, RadicalMedia, Vulcan Productions, Hulu, Searchlight Films, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I ended up running for my husband Charles and I the 2021 documentary Summer of Soul: Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised, about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival. This was a project of a Black lounge singer turned musical entrepreneur, Tony Lawrence, who had been working with the city of New York as early as 1964. Lawrence actually put on the first Harlem Cultural Festival in 1967 with a varied lineup of acts reflecting the diversity of African-American music – and not just African-American, either; according to the Wikipedia page on the festivals, the first one in 1967 featured “a Harlem Hollywood Night, boxing demonstrations, a fashion show, go-kart grand prix, the first Miss Harlem contest, and concerts featuring soul, gospel, calypso, and Puerto Rican music.” For the second festival in 1968 Lawrence brought in documentary filmmaker Hal Tulchin and presented concerts with Count Basie, Bobby “Blue” Bland, Mahalia Jackson and Tito Puente. Some of Tulchin’s footage was broadcast locally by New York TV station WNEW (so much for the inaccurate moniker that this was a time when “the revolution could not be televised”!). The current film was made in 2021 based on footage from the 1969 festival, and directed by Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, who won both an Oscar and a Grammy for it.

The list of artists included is quite impressive: Stevie Wonder, the Chambers Brothers, B. B., King (introduced by Tony Lawrence as “the world’s greatest blues singer” – yes, he was great, but that seemed like a strange thing to say in 1969, when Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and T-Bone Walker were still alive and active), Herbie Mann (the one token Caucasian headliner), the Fifth Dimension (who jumped at the chance to perform for the first time in Harlem because a lot of people had thought they were white and they wanted people to know they were Black), the Edwin Hawkins Singers (doing their huge hit “Oh, Happy Day,” but with a rougher, more gritty lead singer, Shirley Miller, than Dorothy Morrison, who had sung lead on their hit record and then departed for a brief and unsuccessful run at a secular soul career), the Staple Singers, Mahalia Jackson (whose duet with Mavis Staples on the song “Precious Lord” is the high point of the program – this was a year after Mahalia performed the song at Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s funeral and three years before Aretha Franklin would sing it at Mahalia’s funeral), David Ruffin (former lead singer of The Temptations, who screwed himself out of a potentially major solo career by marrying and then divorcing one of Motown Records founder Berry Gordy’s sister; Marvin Gaye sabotaged his Motown career by doing the same thing). Gladys Knight and the Pips (doing “I Heard It Through the Grapevine”), Sly and the Family Stone (more on them later), Mongo Santamaria, Ray Barretto (both Latino artists put on the program in recognition of the Latino, particularly Puerto Rican, heritage of Harlem), jazz drummer Max Roach and his then-wife, singer Abbey Lincoln, trumpeter Hugh Masakela (a refugee from South Africa and its wretched apartheid system of near-total racial segregation), and the amazing Nina Simone. (Oddly, Stevie Wonder, Hygh Masakela and the Roach-Lincoln group were left off the soundtrack CD if the film.)

The show featured interviews with people who were at the Festival (one woman recalled that in order to get away from theri strict mothers, she and her girlfriend had to lie and sneak out of the house to attend), including a man who remembered the cultural shock when he saw Sly and the Family Stone. He had been used to the idea that all Black groups performed in suits and ties, or the female equivalent thereof, and out came Sly in his hippie finery, leading a band that was not only interracial (his drummer, Gregg Errico, was white) but multi-gendered. Next to Sly, the most powerful musician in the band was Sly’s sister, Rose Stone, who not only sang but played trumpet – and I’ve long wondered why Rose Stone never went out on her own when Sly’s career started unraveling under the influence of drugs, which among other things distorted his sense of time so much he would literally not show up for gigs. (One of the interviewers recalled that even when Sly Stone was introduced from the stage, you could never be sure he would actually be there.) Director Thompson did a good job covering the political and social ferment of the time through contemporary news clips; ordinarily I’m peeved at music documentaries that interrupt the songs with interview segments and voice-overs, but this time I didn’t mind so much because Thompson was using them to depict the overall context of the show and how the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival fit into the overall social and political ferment of the time.

About the only thing I would fault the film for is it way overdid the argument that racism was why this footage sat in a basement for over 50 years until Thompson acquired the rights and started restoring it. (There are literally hours of footage and I hope we could see the rest of it someday.) Despite Thompson’s slapping the contentious subtitle “When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised” on his film, the fact is that two TV specials were made from Tolchin’s footage and shown on major networks in 1969: one on CBS on July 23 (while the shows, six weekends in a row in July and August, were still going on) and one on ABC on September 16. Thompson’s narration hints that the reason the footage sat unseen for so long is racism, but the real reasons were a lack of funding and legal battles between Tony Lawrence and Hal Tolchin over who owned the rights to the footage. At one point Tolchin attached the title Black Woodstock to the project in hopes that evoking the legacy of Woodstock (a far less well produced event whose promoters lost their proverbial shirts on it, though they were bailed out by royalties from the Woodstock movie) would get him the backing he needed for his Harlem Cultural Festival film. (Ironically, two acts seen at the Harlem Cultural Festival – the Chambers Brothers and Sly and the Family Stone – also performed at Woodstock. Jimi Hendrix was legendarily pissed off that the only Black acts at Woodstock besides himself were Sly, the Chamberses and Black folksinger Richie Havens.) And in the early 1970's, while Tulchin's footage sat in a basement, at least two major concert films with multiple Black artists, Wattstax and Soul II Soul, were released and were box-office hits.

The film also claims that the Black Panther Party provided security for the Festival, which was true only for the concert featuring Sly and the Family Stone; despite the fractious history of relations between New York’s Black community and the New York Police Department (then and since), the NYPD were there for all the other concerts. “Are you ready to kill if necessary? … Are you ready to smash white things,to burn buildings?” Nina Simone asks in the song “Are You Ready?” (a poem by David Nelson which Simone reads over a backing of Latin precision, like the Last Poets, the pioneering rap group that had made their first record in 1968), putting herself in the most radical current of Black thought of that time. One of the most interesting stories in the film is narrated by New York Times reporter Chariayne Hunter-Gault, who recalled how in 1969 she wrote a story about a group of 200 Black women – and her editors changed “Black” to “Negro,” Hunter-Gault wrote an 11-page memo to her editors explaining why she had used the word “Black,” and her editors ultimately went along with her and set “Black” as the way Black people would be referred to in the New York Times from then on.