Nina Simone, Harlem, 1969: on Sunday 17 August, the third day of Woodstock, she walked onto a stage in front of a reported 50,000 people.
A television crew filmed the whole concert. Then the tapes went into storage, and almost nobody saw them for fifty years.
Over six Sundays between June and August, tens of thousands of people gathered in Mount Morris Park in Harlem for a series of free concerts featuring some of the biggest names in Black American music.
Stevie Wonder played there. So did Mahalia Jackson, B.B. King, Gladys Knight & the Pips, Sly and the Family Stone and the 5th Dimension.
The Harlem Cultural Festival
The Harlem Cultural Festival had existed in different forms earlier in the 1960s, but its 1969 edition became something much larger. Organised around six free Sunday concerts in what is now Marcus Garvey Park, it brought together gospel, soul, blues, jazz, Latin music and emerging funk at a moment of profound political and cultural change.
The performers alone make the surviving line-up extraordinary. Stevie Wonder was there, still only 19 but already an established Motown star. Mahalia Jackson and the Staple Singers represented gospel. Gladys Knight & the Pips and David Ruffin brought Motown. Sly and the Family Stone played the opening Sunday, seven weeks before they appeared at Woodstock.
Nina Simone appeared on 17 August, the fifth of the six Sundays.
By then she was no longer simply a jazz and cabaret singer. Songs including “Mississippi Goddam,” “Four Women” and “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” had placed her music directly inside the political struggles of the decade.
Harlem was an especially significant place to hear it.
A television producer filmed the whole thing
Much of what happened that summer survives because television producer Hal Tulchin was there with a camera crew.
Tulchin recorded roughly 40 hours of footage from the festival, capturing not only the performances but the audience: children sitting on shoulders, families filling the park, people dancing, listening and reacting to the musicians onstage.
Some of the material did actually reach television at the time. Two hour-long programmes drawn from the festival were broadcast in 1969.
But the larger project Tulchin hoped for never happened.
For years, he tried to persuade broadcasters and distributors that the footage deserved a wider release. He later described the festival as a kind of “Black Woodstock,” but could not find anyone willing to turn the material into a major film.
Eventually, the tapes went into storage. And stayed there.
Woodstock happened at almost exactly the same time
The comparison is difficult to avoid. Simone’s Sunday fell on the third day of Woodstock, held from 15–18 August 1969 in Bethel, New York.
Woodstock quickly became something much bigger than a concert. The 1970 documentary won an Academy Award. A multi-LP soundtrack became a bestseller. Photographs from the festival became visual shorthand for the counterculture, and the event was repeatedly revisited in books, films and anniversary releases.
The Harlem Cultural Festival had been attended by hundreds of thousands of people across its six Sundays and featured some of the most important Black musicians in America.
Yet for decades, it occupied nothing like the same place in popular memory.
Tulchin continued trying to change that. He preserved the footage and sought interest in it for years, but died in 2017 without seeing the film he had hoped it might become.
Nina Simone: Harlem, 1969
The surviving footage of Nina Simone makes it easy to understand why the tapes mattered.
She played to a reported audience of around 50,000 gathered in the park. Her set included “Backlash Blues” and “To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” plus a version of “Revolution” introduced with David Nelson’s poem “Are You Ready?”
The last of those songs had particular resonance.
Simone had written “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” with Weldon Irvine in memory of her friend Lorraine Hansberry, the playwright behind A Raisin in the Sun, who had died in 1965 at only 34.
At Harlem in 1969, Simone was performing it before a huge Black audience at a moment when its message could hardly have been more immediate.
It’s worth watching this one 👇
Watching the performance today, however, means seeing something its original audience could not have known.
The cameras were preserving a piece of history that would largely disappear from public view for the next half-century.
Questlove finally saw the tapes
The footage eventually reached Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, drummer and co-founder of The Roots.
When he began working with the material, he was not simply dealing with a forgotten concert film. He had dozens of hours of performances and audience footage from an event that had been largely absent from mainstream accounts of 1969.
The resulting documentary was released in 2021 under a title that acknowledged exactly what had happened:
Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised).
Questlove combined Tulchin’s original footage with new interviews, historical context and testimony from people who had actually attended the festival.
Some of the most affecting moments came not from the stage but from those former audience members.
They were now watching themselves as young people.
For some, it was the first time they had seen the footage at all.
From a basement to an Oscar
The response to Summer of Soul was very different from the response Tulchin had received when he tried to sell the material decades earlier.
The film won the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award at Sundance, followed by the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2022. It also won the Grammy Award for Best Music Film.
More than fifty years after the festival, the performances of Nina Simone, Stevie Wonder, Mahalia Jackson, Sly and the Family Stone and the other musicians finally received the kind of international audience Tulchin had believed they deserved.
For Simone’s performance in particular, the delay adds another layer to an already extraordinary document.
She died in 2003, eighteen years before Summer of Soul appeared. Tulchin died four years before its release. Neither lived to see the footage become part of the broader history of 1969.
But the cameras had kept running that summer. And the tapes survived.
For around half a century, footage of Nina Simone performing “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” before tens of thousands of people in Harlem was sitting largely unseen.
Featured image: Ron Kroon / Anefo, CC0, adapted, via Wikimedia Commons
