"Summer of Soul" Revisited

"Beautiful!"

From the stage and from the audience, those remembering the Harlem Cultural Festival of 1969 for the documentary Summer of Soul often say how beautiful the crowd was and how it was beautiful to see so many black people together in one place enjoying themselves. A middle-aged guy lights up remembering how beautiful his 12-year-old self found singer Marilyn McCoo to be.

Footage shows spectators pressing up to the stage, stretching back to the top of a craggy rock in Marcus Garvey Park, Harlem (formerly Mt. Morris park). When Motown star David Ruffin sings "I've got a sweeter song than the birds in the trees," he shouts out to a young man perched on a high limb. We see young parents with infants and toddlers, clusters of pre-teen boys and pre-teen girls joking with each other, and more elderly residents, some in their church clothes, looking surprised to be delighted.

[PHOTO Collage from Summer of Soul, from the top: Crowd, Stevie Wonder, Fifth Dimension, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Sly Stone, Nina Simone]

"Beautiful" is not how I would have seen this crowd back then. I would have been alarmed. The only black adults I'd seen in real life stood behind counters or maintenance equipment. Aside from them and a few black performers on TV shows, my mental images of black neighborhoods came from the kinds of media depictions that director "Questlove" Thompson replays for us. Boarded-up shops, rubble, listless-looking black people hunched on stoops and hanging around corners, garbage overflowing, rioters setting fires and breaking glass after the King assassination the previous summer, and police trying to revive a young black man strung out on heroin.

But members of the crowd remember that Harlem wasn't like that. Yes, there were streets you avoided, but most of the people worked every day, loved their families, befriended their neighbors black and Latino. Questlove gives us alternative footage of neighbors gathered on stoops with instruments singing and dancing; kids engineering water games with intertwined hoses, smiling entrepeneurs with customers. Lin Miranda, former councilman, with his son the famous composer, remembers Harlem as a supportive, vibrant community. (I recently heard an interview with novelist James McBride about Harlem that same year, the setting for his novel Deacon King Kong.)

Crowd Touches Performers That's the Harlem we see at the festival, a crowd whose positive energy uplifted the performers. Today Marilyn McCoo admits to feeling trepidation before she stepped onstage with her group The Fifth Dimension, even though they'd had the best-selling single of the year. White consumers had made "Aquarius" a hit, but McCoo explains that the group was criticized for not sounding black enough. In the footage from that Sunday in 1969, when that Broadway song melds into a gospel chorus "Let the Sunshine In," a gospel veteran in the group growls and shouts encouragement to the crowd, bringing an upswell of enthusiasm and warmth. Watching the event today, McCoo tears up.

Gladys Knight was buoyed by the crowd. "That's really where it started," Knight says today as she watches her young self belt "I Heard it Through the Grapevine" while her cousins "the Pips" sing and dance in the background. She looks like a girl in prep school, but one of the commenters says Knight sounded like "the new queen of soul."

Stevie Wonder tells Questlove that he felt the crowd's presence and that the concert was a turning point. At 19, Stevie, formerly "Little Stevie," was already a seasoned performer. I loved his hit that summer, "Ma Cherie Amour," pleasantly arranged for Stevie's supple voice to soar between iterations of the sappy hook. At the festival, Stevie Wonder cuts loose from his pop hit "Shoo-Be-Doo-Be-Doo-Da-Day" to play a wild keyboard improvisation. Soon, he would get full artistic control of his own music and record a micro-opera about poverty ("Living for the City") and and musical essays on faith and spirituality ("Superstition" and "Higher Ground"). While he plays, we get the sense that he's crossing into "higher ground" right there and then.

Successive Sundays focused on genres besides pop. We see and hear about blues, Latin American music, and gospel. Mavis of the Staples Family tells us how, sharing the festival stage with blues artists, she realized that her dad's guitar playing was as much blues as gospel. Subjects tell Questlove that the raised voices and trembling of gospel singing were release, something black people did among themselves free of judgmental white eyes.

I know this from the other side. I judged blues and gospel to be very alienating. I liked when black performers looked what I thought of as classy - the women had straight hair, the men wore formal outfits, everyone stayed cool in the sense of staying dry. I liked black artists who sang within the lines, as when The Fifth Dimension sang "Aquarius," but not when they let loose on "Let The Sunshine In." When the Edwin Hawkins Singers in church robes perform their hit from the time, "O Happy Day," I remember thinking back in 1969 how depressing they sounded. For people like me, Questlove explains to Terry Gross on NPR's Fresh Air (07/24/2021), a black musician learns early to project the message "We come in peace."

Festival Touches the CrowdQuestlove's selections from those six Sundays in 1969 conveys the message that the festival is also changing the crowd. Clips from the later weeks pick out examples of African motifs on clothes and accessories, dashikis, Afro hair on men and women, a general relaxation of the button-down fashions we saw earlier. We also see the Black Panther uniform, khaki and berets, as the group provided security for the concerts. (NYPD stepped in after the first Sunday turned out not to be a riot.) One of the attendees remembers how he and his buddies at the time had aspired to be singers with identical steps, identical suits. After they saw Sly and the Family Stone, he laughs, "no more identical suits."

The crowd is getting restless when Sly Stone saunters on stage. A witness describes it as a "two-tone" band that included a white guy on drums and both a black and a white woman on trumpet, all wearing their own stuff. In still photos from Sly's days leading a gospel choir, we see a slight young man, buttoned-down and baby-faced. But in 1969, his Afro is a corona, his sideburns give him a commanding look, his shirt is wide open to show his gold chains and sweat-gleaming chest, and in no time he gets the jostling, hooting crowd to clap and sing along.

He sings his hit "Everyday People" --

You love me you hate me
You know me and then
You can't figure out the bag I'm in
I am everyday people

I remember this hit from around third grade because it was funny to me how Sly set a lyric about prejudice to the playground chant "Ring Around the Rosie," which may have been my first taste of musical irony:

There is a yellow one that won't
Accept the black one
That won't accept the red one
That won't accept the white one

Different strokes for different folks
And so on and so on and
Scooby dooby dooby
Ooh sha sha

Other verses mock prejudice towards race, class, and style. Sly has the crowd singing along.

In this last part of the documentary, Nina Simone seems to be the bad cop to Sly's sunny good cop. Magisterial in African robes, she strides on stage unsmiling, takes her seat at the piano, and slams chords on the keyboard. Her first number "Mr. Backlash" tells anyone uncomfortable with black gains in the civil rights era to get over it. "I'm gonna leave you with the backlash blues."

By the time Simone enters, Questlove has already given us a capsule history lesson of the civil rights years and backlash with clips of young Charlane Hunter-Gault being met with crowds of white students at the University of Georgia protesting her admission. We've heard Jesse Jackson's memories of King's assassination with clips from the time, and we've seen Boby Kennedy announce King's death -- then be gunned down himself weeks later.

Hunter-Gault has also explained the new significance of the word "black" in 1969, when there was a catch phrases "Black Power" and "Black is Beautiful." A demeaning term in 1960, by 1969 the word had come to connote pride, common heritage, solidarity. She wrote an eleven-page letter that convinced her editor at the New York Times to replace the word "negro" with "black" in a story of hers.

So we appreciate how Simone's performance of her song "Young, Gifted, and Black" uplifts her audience in 1969. Questlove chooses clips of young, hopeful, intent black people in the crowd listening to her song. Looking back, one of Questlove's subjects remembers that Simone sounded "somehow mournful and defiant at the same time."

Simone's final piece in the set is her band's instrumental improvisation while she prowls the stage declaiming someone else's poem from a typed page, "Are you ready?" i.e., to unite, to kill, to "destroy white things." It feels like she has crossed a line, and I bet she'd shoot back with examples of white groups crossing that same line with actions, not words, for 100 years.

But in the end, there was no violence and nothing to make headline news; the memory of the festival faded. The reels of the film sat in a basement for five decades.

What lasts? "It was the birth of 'black' as a brand," quipped David Brancaccio, host of NPR's Marketplace (07/21/2021). The new "Philadelphia sound" of soul supplanted Motown adding new black voices to radio; the movie Shaft in 1971 was the first to feature a sexy black action hero, ushering in an era of "blaxploitation" movies; we had a proliferation of TV shows featuring black stars ( Sanford and Son, Good Times, The Jeffersons, and comedian Flip Wilson's show).

A middle-aged black man, filmed as he watches the footage, says that it's "beautiful" as he remembered it. "I wasn't crazy!" he laughs. But he's also crying.

Why? The festival celebrated a kind of coming out after a year outstanding for contention, violence, and disappointment. Then it was forgotten. Now we have Summer of Soul in 2021 after 2020, another year for the record books.

I reacted, too, seeing how much I'd had to learn to appreciate the beauty of people very different from me in many ways. Of course, the movie shows how alike we are, too, how much we can all identify with. Summer of Soul gives me a feeling of starting over right, this time.