The Summer Nobody Filmed

Three weeks after Woodstock ended, a television producer named Hal Tulchin packed up forty hours of footage from six Sundays in Harlem and started making phone calls. He had filmed Nina Simone, Stevie Wonder, Sly and the Family Stone, B.B. King, Mahalia Jackson, and Gladys Knight, among many others, performing for crowds that reached 300,000 people across the summer. He took it to ABC. He took it to CBS. He took it to NBC. All three networks passed. The tapes went into his basement in Bronxville, New York, where they stayed for the next fifty years. "It was a peanuts operation," Tulchin said later, "because nobody really cared about Black shows."

Tony Lawrence and the Park

The Harlem Cultural Festival was not a spontaneous happening. It was the work of Tony Lawrence, a St. Kitts-born singer and New York Parks Department employee who had been running versions of the festival since 1967. By 1969, in its third year, it had grown into something that demanded attention. Mayor John Lindsay provided city support. The concerts ran on six consecutive Sundays from June 29 to August 24 in Mount Morris Park, now renamed Marcus Garvey Park, in the center of Harlem. Admission was free.

The summer of 1969 was not a peaceful backdrop. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated the year before. The Black Power movement was reshaping how a generation understood protest and identity. On the opening day, the NYPD refused to provide security. The Black Panther Party stepped in instead. That arrangement, tense on paper, held. The crowds were enormous and the shows were orderly. Lawrence from the stage called it Soul Time, and for those six Sundays, it was.

What Was Actually on That Stage

The lineup across the six weekends was not a secondary circuit of artists. It was the center of American music in 1969, concentrated in a public park in upper Manhattan. Stevie Wonder was nineteen years old and already playing drums and harmonica in addition to everything else. Sly and the Family Stone, the only act to play both the Harlem Cultural Festival and Woodstock that summer, brought a version of "I Want to Take You Higher" that the upstate crowd had heard days earlier. B.B. King played blues on a scale that matched the mood of the moment. The 5th Dimension opened the first Sunday. David Ruffin, fresh off his departure from the Temptations, performed. Gladys Knight and the Pips were there. Hugh Masekela brought South African rhythms. Mongo Santamaria and Cal Tjader brought Afro-Cuban jazz.

Then there was Nina Simone. She performed "Backlash Blues," "To Be Young, Gifted and Black," and a version of "Revolution" she ended by reciting a Black nationalist poem by David Nelson that called the crowd to account. At a separate concert, Mahalia Jackson sang "Take My Hand, Precious Lord," the same song she had sung at Martin Luther King's funeral in Atlanta the year before, and Mavis Staples joined her onstage. When the announcement came on July 20 that the United States had landed on the moon, the crowd at that Sunday's show responded with a sustained chorus of boos. An editorial in the Amsterdam News that week ran the line: Yesterday, the moon. Tomorrow, maybe us.

Tulchin's Forty Hours

Hal Tulchin had been a television director and producer since the 1950s. He brought five portable videotape cameras and filmed the entire series largely on spec, betting that the footage would sell. Some of it aired locally on WNEW, New York's Metromedia station, in hour-long Saturday night specials during the summer. But Tulchin had bigger ambitions. When Woodstock became a cultural landmark and its concert film became a major theatrical release, he saw his opening. He had documented something equally significant, arguably more musically diverse, and far better attended on a per-day basis. He pitched it to all three major networks as "Black Woodstock." They all said no.

Producer Robert Fyvolent, who would later bring the footage to the world, said there was no other way to read the rejections: the networks were afraid of a show featuring an all-Black lineup of artists. Tulchin himself was direct about it. He stored the tapes, held onto the rights, and waited. Brief fragments surfaced over the years. Four minutes of Sly and the Family Stone appeared in a soul club in Japan that Questlove stumbled into in 1996. He assumed it was a European festival. A small clip of Nina Simone appeared on a 2005 CD-DVD release. A 2015 documentary used a few seconds. But the full picture of what had happened in that park remained invisible.

Questlove and the Recovery

In 2018, producer Robert Fyvolent acquired the rights from Tulchin and approached Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson about directing a documentary. Questlove, drummer for the Roots and bandleader on The Tonight Show, had never heard of the Harlem Cultural Festival. He tweeted the question to his three million followers: did anyone attend? The responses flooded in. One of them came from a film producer named Musa Jackson, who said the festival was his first memory. He had been five years old in 1969.

The documentary, titled "Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)," premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2021 and won the Grand Jury Prize. The following year it won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. Questlove worked from Tulchin's forty hours of footage, most of which the public had never seen. He wove in new interviews with people who had been in the crowd and on the stage, and set the performances against the political and cultural context of that particular summer.

What the Burial Cost

Stevie Wonder said it plainly in the film. The so-called powers that were did not find it significant enough to keep as a part of history. Because it is a part of history. That framing captures both what was lost and what was deliberate about the loss. The Harlem Cultural Festival was not forgotten because it was small or undocumented or poorly attended. It was forgotten because the people who controlled distribution decided its audience did not matter. Woodstock was treated as a document of a generation. The Harlem Cultural Festival was treated as a local television segment.

The fifty-year gap between the filming and the release is not a story about lost footage. The footage was never lost. Tulchin knew exactly where it was. He talked about it in a 2007 Smithsonian interview and said he believed that sooner or later someone would have interest. He was right, but it took until 2021. By then, virtually everyone who performed in that park had spent decades without their work being recognized as part of the same cultural moment that made Woodstock into a permanent fixture of American memory.

The music in Mount Morris Park that summer was not smaller than what happened in upstate New York three weeks later. In some ways it was larger. It simply had the wrong audience, in the wrong neighborhood, playing the wrong kind of music for the people who decided what got preserved. The cameras were rolling the whole time. That part, at least, turned out to matter.

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