Welcome to the show.
-Thank you. Thank you for having me. -How you doing, sir?
-How have you been? Yeah? -This is great. I love this.
-Yeah. -There-there are few people I know who-who have had
more jobs than you and excel at more jobs than you.
I know many people who've had more jobs than you,
but for a bad reason. I don't know many people who've had
as many jobs as you have and just done well at them.
I was one of those people, though. Because, at one point,
I thought there was honor in sort of matching James Brown
in the hardest-working man in show business.
Um, once I stopped
doing everything,
then a whole new world of magic
opened that I never knew of, and one of them
is what I call storytelling, or directing.
Which-- This definitely wasn't on my...
my, uh, my bingo card
back in 2005.
But if you look at it,
everything I've done to this point
-is preparing for... this-this point. -This moment.
'Cause, I mean, those-those 40 hours could go...
the 40 hours of the footage
that sat in the basement for five decades...
Yeah, I still don't-- wait a minute, let's talk about that.
I still don't understand this. Because nobody has seen
all of these performances, nobody has seen these moments,
nobody has seen what happened in Harlem in '69.
I need to start with that. So...
How did you even begin to find 40 hours of footage of--
It would be like... It would be like somebody now finding,
"Hey, I found a-a concert with Jay-Z and Beyoncé
and, like, Michael Jackson and, like..." Just, like, everyone.
-Right. -And it was in a basement somewhere.
I-I directed this film, and I refused to believe it.
I get word backstage at The Tonight Show
that these two gentlemen want to talk to me
about this, uh, so-called Black Woodstock.
And I was like, "Black Woodstock?
"And... Well, I'm thinking of Woodstock,
and you're saying there was a Black version of that?"
And then I was like, "Well, wait a minute."
I'd-I'd like to think that I was a music expert
-or knew things. -Yeah.
Like, how come I didn't know
that over 300,000 people gathered in Harlem
for a collective six-weekend affair
with Stevie Wonder? Stevie Wonder.
Sly Stone. B.B. King. Mavis Staples.
Like, how come I didn't know about this?
And, you know, I was, like, calling other...
"You heard of Black Woodstock?"
"No, I never heard of it."
-And so... -I don't understand how that's possible.
I didn't believe it... I didn't believe that it happened.
So the very first meeting, I just thought
that these two were trying to just scam me
-for, like, Tonight Show tickets or whatever. -(laughs)
That's what I thought it was.
And then they came by the next week with a hard drive,
and even then I was like, "Well, the footage must be bad,
-or maybe Stevie had an off day, or..." -Right, right, right.
And everything I saw was magic.
And...
To this day...
The-the reason why...
Even when I agreed to do this,
at first I was just gonna compile, like, 17 songs.
-Yes. Right. -What, like a mixtape.
You know, that sort of thing.
But the curiosity
kept burning me inside that, like...
The question I asked is, "Is Black erasure this easy?"
And that's the thing. I think oftentimes,
when, you know, when we speak of, like, Black Lives Matter
or, uh, you know, is that racist or not racist,
I think people think of the most extreme definition of it.
Like, in their minds, they're saying,
"Well, I've never once hung somebody to a cross
-or castrated them or set them on fire." -Right, right. Mm-hmm.
"So I'm not racist." But there's other...
There's benign levels of racism, as well.
And even as sort of the-the...
sort of the dismissal of like,
"Well, we'll pass."
You know? "We're good."
For a lot of people, their first view of us
was either in blackface
or mired in trouble or controversy
-or, you know, getting arrested, getting hosed down. -Mm-hmm.
And... But Black joy is the component
that shows that we're human.
You know? And...
this could have been that moment,
had it allowed-- been, you know, the spotlight
that Woodstock had-had gotten.
It was also a crucial time as well, you know?
It's the summer of '69. So many things were happening
-in America. -A lot was changing. Right.
You know, a lot was changing in the country.
And I remember watching this.
I-I had never seen it.
I had never seen something like this.
To your point, a lot of what you see
from that time period
is a-- is a very one-dimensional view of Black America.
-Mm-hmm. -So it seems like Black America has only existed
-in strife for a long time. You know? -Exactly.
And ex-- And-and only strife, I should mention.
And then you watch this and you're like, "Man, this is..."
I-I couldn't believe the scale.
I couldn't believe the party people were havening.
I cou-- Having. I couldn't believe, like,
who was there and how they were there,
who was performing and-and what it signified.
When you-- when you told that story,
what do you think the significance of this event was?
(sighs) The-the significance of the event,
at least what I got from it,
was that this was a community trying to heal.
And so, for me,
shall I say, a really beautiful...
uh, gander
into...
the-the infinite possibilities of what a future is.
You're seeing Stevie Wonder
a mere two years before his-his genius period.
You're seeing Nina Simone give one of her very first
non-jazz, non-love song,
non-Broadway musical performance
and, like, Nina Simone stepping into her activism shoes
in real time.
So you're seeing all these artists.
But, really, you're also just watching the people.
And that's the thing, like, when I say, like,
we were robbed of that,
not just as Black people but the world to see,
you know, "Oh, families just like mine.
-Music just like mine. Happiness just like..." -Yeah. Yeah.
And that's... and that's sort of the...
that's sort of the-the missing fiber element
in telling our stories from the civil rights period
-that people don't know. -Right, right, right.
You look at America's story over and over.
It's such a giant country, you know,
where, if people don't have an interaction
with the people on the ground... You don't know a Black person.
You don't meet an Hispanic person.
-You don't know... Do you get what I'm saying? -Right. Yeah.
-You can get into where... -Just knowing someone at your job
-doesn't make you... Right. -Right, right.
And maybe you don't even.
That's what I loved about this documentary--
I think it's to what you're saying--
is it showed a joy, it showed a normality, it showed a...
There's just a human element
that I didn't even know I was looking for.
Like, because I didn't know that this was going
to invoke some sort of emotion out of Marilyn McCoo
-as she's watching herself. -Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
-I'm thinking like, "You hosted Solid Gold." -Right.
"How do you remember this very specific show
back then?" But, you know, when she started
-to really open up about code-switching... -Yes.
...and, you know, something that every Black person relates to
on the professional job, and even I needed to see that.
Like, wow. Even when you're the number-one singing group
in the world, like, you still have to code-switch,
and you still have to always be on guard,
and you're never comfortable, and, you know,
you have longings for just love from your people.
-Right. -Yeah.
You just want to be accepted. I-I won't lie.
I think... I think you deserve every award
that this film has won and is going to win because it's...
-Thank you, Trevor. -You know what it is, man.
-It's telling a story from history that is lost. -Mm-hmm.
It's sharing a joy from history that is... that is lost.
And I think it's something that people need today
where you go like, "Hey, you know, yeah, we can fight,
"yeah, we can argue, yeah, we can... we can deal with
-what we need to deal with." -Mm-hmm.
"But at the end of the day, don't forget joy,
because that's what makes us human."
So thank you, man. Thank you for being here.
-Well, thank you for having me. -Thank you for the documentary.
-Thank you. -And now, I'm gonna watch it again.
I watched the clip, and now, I'm back into it.
Let's go watch right now during the commercial break.
Let's do it right now. Let's do it right now. All right.
Summer of Soul is currently streaming on Hulu and Disney+,
and it will make its broadcast television debut
February 20 on ABC.