A year ago, we published this post on Questlove’s award-winning documentary Summer of Soul, right after it premiered at the digital Sundance Film Festival. We loved it at Sundance, and we love it now, available on Hulu. If you want to see more premieres well before they hit streamers and theaters, poke around this year’s digital Sundance Fest, happening in collaboration with Seattle’s Northwest Film Forum. And add Summer of Soul to the top of your watchlist. It’s almost Academy Awards time, and all the movie-gossips expect it to get nominated for a statue.
Some footage is found in a basement. This footage contains a long forgotten event: the Harlem Cultural Festival of 1969. It featured a banging amount of black and brown talent. Nina Simone (the storm), Sly and the Family Stone (the radical racial and gender experiment), Stevie Wonder (the boy genius), B.B. King (the king), Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach (the black modernists), Gladys Knight and the Pips (the perfection of slick), the Staple Singers (the grund of soul), Mahalia Jackson (the queen of heaven), and Hugh Masekela (the shumba of black Africa). This is what black gold looks like. And a stunning 300,000 (mostly) black people attended the six-week concert. Yes, it ran for six weeks. And without a hitch.
The Harlem Cultural Festival was a great success. Even New York City’s then-mayor, the Republican John Lindsay, showed up, gave a brief speech, and looked like he was really digging the scene. The documentary, Summer of Soul, informs us that the black voters of Harlem regarded Lindsay in a warm light. Republicans were a different breed back then.
