Mavis & Mahalia, Stevie, Nina Astound in a Better-Half-a-Century-Late-Than-Never "Summer of Soul"7/23/2021
1969: the year of Woodstock. That festival was such a cultural a-bomb that I’ve always mentally classified notable 20th century events (music-related or not) as having happened pre-Woodstock and post-Woodstock. But there was another festival in that same summer of ‘69—presented over six Harlem weekends, including Woodstock weekend—that later came to be known as “Black Woodstock,” and although it ended up largely forgotten for over half a century, it was every bit as significant, musically and culturally, as its better-known counterpart festival 100 miles to the northwest. I’d read that the highlight of drummer/DJ/bandleader/music historian Questlove's Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised), a new documentary chronicling the Harlem Cultural Festival of 1969, was Mavis Staples and Mahalia Jackson singing together. I didn’t know any details beyond that, though. By the time that monumental moment queues up, we’ve already experienced some pretty jaw-dropping musical performances—a 19-year-old Stevie Wonder drum solo to get our blood pumping; a sweat-soaked B.B. King and Lucille in their prime; the far-out flower-powered 5th Dimension with their effortless soaring harmonies; the Chambers Brothers grooving hard as they went “‘Uptown’ to Harlem”; multiple sprawling, electrifying, fully robed gospel group ensembles; and most gloriously, Mavis and the Staple Singers’ own rocked-up gospel set. And all of the above happens in the first 40 minutes! Now, for me, the musical highlight of the whole film is Stevie, when Questlove fully unleashes him on us later on in the festivities. More on that in a bit. But the emotional highlight, by far, is indeed Mavis and Mahalia, during what I’m guessing was the finale of the second afternoon of the festival, when all the day’s artists gathered on stage to perform “Take My Hand, Precious Lord.” Festival mastermind and emcee Tony Lawrence sets the moment up for the crowd by remarking on the deaths of JFK, Harlem’s own Malcolm X, RFK, and of course MLK, whose favorite song, we learn, was “Precious Lord.” Lawrence introduces the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Memphis saxophonist Ben Branch and his Operation Breadbasket Band, who begin laying down a bed of music under which the reverend recounts—vividly, in prayer—Dr. King’s final moments that occurred in Memphis one year and a few months earlier. Turns out Branch was there with Rev. Jackson at the Lorraine Motel when King was killed. He and his band were getting ready to perform at a rally that evening, and King asking Branch to play “Precious Lord” for him “real pretty” were his last words. Jackson speaks of that exchange, and the shot that rang out, and the gruesome result, and how King did not die afraid though his spine was severed and his face blown off...and by then, as a viewer, the anger is really bubbling up, just at the thought of it all. And then Mavis Staples reminisces, in present-day voiceover, that by the end of Jackson's mini-sermon, “I just wanted to shout.” We get a distant view of the whole packed stage with little Mavis standing motionless in the middle of a catwalk leading out into the crowd. And when she starts to sing, the mic’s not turned up because it was supposed to be Mahalia singing, “Precious Lord” being a signature song of hers. But Mahalia wasn’t feeling well and had asked Mavis to start the song instead. “Precious Lord…” They turn up her mic as the crowd titters a bit. “Take my hand…” And then we get a close-up of Mavis, in deep contemplation, her chin trembling a bit as if she’s about to be overcome, either with human emotion, the Holy Spirit, or most likely both. And then, she bursts. “Leeeeeeeead me onnnnnnnn…yyyyeah, oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah...” That guttural “on,” whew. (The backs of my eyeballs are itching at this point.) The audience is crying out with approval now, recognizing spoken prayer time may be over, but the church service is not. “IIIIIIII...I’m tired…” She’s pausing after each phrase, looking for a split second as though she is indeed tired, like she might not be able to go on, but then… “IIIIIIII...IIIIIIIIIII...I’m weeeeeak...” And she pauses again, and kind of shakes her head in exasperation, as if she can’t believe MLK, Malcolm X, Medgar Evers...they’re all gone. “Lorrrrd, yeah (ha)...Lorrrrd, yeah (ha ha)...I’m WORRRRRRRRRRN!!!” But now instead of looking tired, or weak, Mavis can’t keep from hopping in place as she sings “worn” (making that itch behind my eyes move to my nose now, to make room for a little moisture...it’s an intense moment, alright??) I’ll quit with any more details and just let you watch from there, but needless to say it’s otherworldly when Mahalia Jackson, Mavis’s all-time hero, joins her at center stage and they begin trading vocal blows, possessed by a mixture of grief and glory-on-high, at times wailing away and at times, indeed, just straight shouting. Rev. Al Sharpton, whose thoughtful comments often propel Summer of Soul’s narrative, says gospel permeated far beyond worship services back then. It was “therapy for the stress and pressure of being Black in America. We didn’t go to the psychiatrist, we didn’t go lay on a couch, we didn’t know anything about therapists...but we knew Mahalia Jackson.” For her part, Gladys Knight says she could feel in the moment that the festival was about so much more than the music. She and the Pips played the third day of the gathering, July 20, 1969—the day Armstrong and Aldrin landed on the moon. But as we hear some festival attendees express, folks in Harlem thought the landing was a fine achievement for science and all, but it was hard to feel celebratory about something going down 300,000 miles away when poverty and heroin were gobbling up their neighborhood right then and right there in front of them. What if even 0.01% of the $28 billion that went into the Apollo program (and that’s 1960s dollars, by the way) had instead been funneled into stabilizing the Harlem community? “‘69 was the pivotal year when the ‘Negro’ died and ‘Black’ was born,” Rev. Sharpton says. He explains how “black” was almost a slur within the Black community up to that point: “If somebody called you black that meant they wanted to fight you.” The Harlem Cultural Festival clearly helped enable that collective boost of Black pride for Harlemites as they prepared to leave the turbulent Sixties behind. Many of the artists who performed in Harlem that summer saw the event as a turning point for them personally, as well. As previously mentioned, Stevie Wonder’s genius is on full display in Summer of Soul. There he is, age 19 (barely 19, in fact), pounding out a Clavinet solo during “Shoo-Be-Do-Be-Do-Da-Day,” his foot tapping on a Jimi Hendrix Cry Baby wah-wah pedal to make the sound even more wigged-out, leaping up from the foldout chair that was subbing for a piano bench to yank the microphone off its stand and dig even deeper into an already searing falsetto, receiving a quick body-pivot assist from his stage manager so he’s facing the audience again after becoming so consumed by the music he got a little turned around. Present-day Stevie confirms that the festival constituted an artistic crossroads for him: “Where was this going to lead me? What was my motivation” moving forward, he remembers wondering. He’d already churned out a ton of hits; he easily could’ve coasted, continuing to rely on safe pop and his phenomenal live show. His handlers were warning him not to fix what wasn’t broke...to stay away from anything too heady...to avoid rocking the boat at all costs. But, “In my mind, I didn’t give a 4-letter word,” Stevie says. ”I never wanted to let fear put my dreams to sleep.” And sure enough, the following months saw him officially put to rest “Motown’s Little Stevie Wonder” to make way for politically minded Talking Book and Innervisions Stevie Wonder. Marilyn McCoo of first-day headliners the Fifth Dimension gets emotional talking about how much appearing at this particular festival meant to her group. They’d been reeling from critics suggesting their brand of New Age pop-soul wasn’t “Black enough,” which hurt: “Our voices sound how they sound...how do you color a sound?” she remembers thinking. So this was their big chance to perform for their people: “We were just hoping they would receive us,” McCoo says, her voice breaking. “We were so happy to be there.” And on the other end of the spectrum, one of the festival’s closing headliners back in '69 also provides the film’s closing musical and cultural argument: a spellbinding head-on confrontation of Black struggle from “High Priestess of Soul” Nina Simone. Doubling down on her already-relentless artist’s mission of fearlessly reflecting the times, Simone debuts both her civil rights anthem “To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” as well as a spoken-word recitation of the David Nelson poem “Are You Ready, Black People?,” during which she demands the transfixed audience answer questions like: “Are you ready to do what’s necessary?” “Are you ready to smash white things, to burn buildings?” “Are you ready to change yourself, turn yourself inside out, and make yourself a through and through, and through and through, and through and through...REAL Black person? I SAY, ARE YOU READY??” I certainly echo the bewilderment that’s accompanied Summer of Soul’s release regarding quandaries like, How could the public have been deprived of such essential footage for so long? And, Who would fail to see how vastly important, not to mention wildly entertaining, this footage is?
When the film’s first 10 minutes went by and there hadn’t been much music shown yet, I wondered how we could possibly have time for all the performances I’d anticipated with less than two hours to work with? “Deliver the goods, already, Quest!” My fears were unfounded, though: the musical goods came through, alright, right alongside a stirring account of one of the most trying yet exhilarating times and settings in not just music history, but American history. One last quote from Reverend Al, describing Nina Simone’s impact on both the festival and the civil rights movement in general: “She sang in a tone that was somewhere between hope and mourning. Nobody could capture both spirits like Nina. It defined a whole generation, because you could hear in her voice our pain, but [also] our defiance.” Comments are closed.
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