Motown Eddie
08-13-2019, 06:20 AM
From Rolling Stone Magazine.com:
The Harlem Cultural Festival attracted everyone from Stevie Wonder and Nina Simone to Jesse Jackson and Marcus Garvey Jr., but quickly faded into obscurity. Fifty years later, a rediscovery is finally underway.
In October 1969, the writer Raymond Robinson took to the pages of the New York Amsterdam News, the city’s leading black newspaper, to pose a question. That previous summer, Harlem’s Mount Morris Park had hosted a series of free Sunday afternoon concerts, known collectively as the Harlem Cultural Festival, which featured a startling roster of artists, including Nina Simone [[https://www.rollingstone.com/t/nina-simone/), Stevie Wonder [[https://www.rollingstone.com/t/stevie-wonder/), Sly and the Family Stone [[https://www.rollingstone.com/t/sly-and-the-family-stone/), B.B. King, the Staple Singers, the 5th Dimension, and Gladys Knight and the Pips.“The 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival was, indeed, a meaningful entity,” Robinson wrote, “but was it fully appreciated?”
The series had been an unprecedented success, with combined attendance numbers [[roughly 300,000) that nearly rivaled those of that summer’s other unexpected musical phenomenon, Woodstock, which took place 100 miles north. As was the case with Woodstock, a filmmaker — Hal Tulchin — had captured the entirety of that year’s Harlem Cultural Festival, confident that the combination of the music [[Nina and Stevie) and the setting [[a post-’68 Harlem reeling from the assassination of MLK) would add up to a feature-length film that could cement the series of uptown Manhattan concerts as generation-defining events.
Read more here:
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/black-woodstock-harlem-cultural-festival-history-859626/
The Harlem Cultural Festival attracted everyone from Stevie Wonder and Nina Simone to Jesse Jackson and Marcus Garvey Jr., but quickly faded into obscurity. Fifty years later, a rediscovery is finally underway.
In October 1969, the writer Raymond Robinson took to the pages of the New York Amsterdam News, the city’s leading black newspaper, to pose a question. That previous summer, Harlem’s Mount Morris Park had hosted a series of free Sunday afternoon concerts, known collectively as the Harlem Cultural Festival, which featured a startling roster of artists, including Nina Simone [[https://www.rollingstone.com/t/nina-simone/), Stevie Wonder [[https://www.rollingstone.com/t/stevie-wonder/), Sly and the Family Stone [[https://www.rollingstone.com/t/sly-and-the-family-stone/), B.B. King, the Staple Singers, the 5th Dimension, and Gladys Knight and the Pips.“The 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival was, indeed, a meaningful entity,” Robinson wrote, “but was it fully appreciated?”
The series had been an unprecedented success, with combined attendance numbers [[roughly 300,000) that nearly rivaled those of that summer’s other unexpected musical phenomenon, Woodstock, which took place 100 miles north. As was the case with Woodstock, a filmmaker — Hal Tulchin — had captured the entirety of that year’s Harlem Cultural Festival, confident that the combination of the music [[Nina and Stevie) and the setting [[a post-’68 Harlem reeling from the assassination of MLK) would add up to a feature-length film that could cement the series of uptown Manhattan concerts as generation-defining events.
Read more here:
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/black-woodstock-harlem-cultural-festival-history-859626/