- Harold Leventhal
Harold Leventhal (1919-2005) was an American music manager. He died in 2005 at the age of 86. His career began as a song plugger for
Irving Berlin . He managedThe Weavers ,Woody Guthrie ,Peter, Paul and Mary andJoan Baez .Personal life
Born in
Ellenville, New York , toOrthodox Jewish immigrants fromUkraine andLithuania , Leventhal was eight weeks old when his father died. His mother moved the family to the Lower East Side, where she worked as their tenement's janitor. They then moved to theBronx , where in 1935, at James Monroe high school, Leventhal, already a member of theYoung Communist League , was arrested for organising an "Oxford Pledge " strike, aimed at persuading students to refuse to fight further wars.He lost his first factory job for union organising, but was hired as an office boy by the songwriter Irving Berlin. Soon he was working as Berlin's "plugger", taking his songs around the nightclubs to be bought by band leaders such as
Harry James , theDorsey Brothers andBenny Goodman . He then joined Goodman'sRegent Music Company, before enlisting in the army when the U.S. joined the Second World War. Assigned toIndia with theSignal Corps , Leventhal sought out the Congress movement, meetingNehru andGandhi . He founded American Friends of India, and, at a 1954 party hosted by the Indian delegation to theUnited Nations , Leventhal met Nathalie Buxbaum, a UN guide, who was to become his wife.Folk music
After the war, while working for his brother's
foundation garment business, Leventhal continued to be active in left-wing causes. Through reading Woody Guthrie's column in theDaily Worker , he became enamoured of folk music. His commitment to Seeger and the Weavers led to his representing more and more artists.Two concerts in particular sealed Leventhal's fame. While working on the doomed 1948 presidential campaign of the progressive
Henry Wallace , Leventhal met folk singerPete Seeger , and soon became the manager of Seeger's group,The Weavers .Blacklisted ascommunists , the group had such difficulty finding a place to perform that they disbanded in 1952. But Leventhal persisted, and in 1955 he organised a Christmas Eve Weavers reunion concert atNew York 'sCarnegie Hall , persuading the members to take part by convincing each one that the others had already agreed. The concert ignited the folk music boom of the late 1950s and early 1960s, which in turn led to Leventhal recognising the talent of a 19-year-oldBob Dylan , and promoting his first concert, at the Town Hall in New York city in April, 1963.Denied a passport until 1955 because of his Communist sympathies, Leventhal organised world tours for folk singers that the U.S. state department forbade from taking part in official cultural exchanges.
In the era of
McCarthyism and the flowering of theAmerican civil rights movement ,folk music became the voice of the country's conscience, and Harold Leventhal was the man responsible for making that voice heard. Leventhal was a committedleftist whose music business acumen turned him into folk music's most successful promoter. He was the model forIrving Steinbloom , the impresario immortalised in the 2003 movie comedyA Mighty Wind .In 1988, Leventhal won a Grammy award for , a tribute to Woodie Guthrie and
Leadbelly .And beyond...
Leventhal's tastes were eclectic, from
Lightnin' Hopkins 'blues toCisco Houston 's country, fromjazz greats such asDuke Ellington andDexter Gordon to folk traditionalistsTheodore Bikel ,Oscar Brand andMahalia Jackson . His reputation for getting black and women artists fair deals with record companies led to his representing many of the leading female folk singers, includingJudy Collins ,Miriam Makeba ,Buffy Sainte-Marie andJoan Baez . He representedIreland 'sClancy Brothers , Britain'sEwan MacColl ,Donovan and Pentangle, and also had an eclectic international roster includingJacques Brel ,Nana Mouskouri ,Mercedes Sosa and Ravi Shankar.He had a knack for producing big shows that could focus the energy of an era. A birthday
benefit concert forMartin Luther King, Jr. at Carnegie Hall in 1961 helped King appeal to the white general public. He produced fund raising tribute concerts forPhil Ochs ,Paul Robeson , theSpanish civil war 'sAbraham Lincoln Brigade and, most memorably, for Woody Guthrie.After Guthrie's death in 1967, Leventhal virtually adopted Woody's son Arlo, who worked in his office before making his hit record
Alice's Restaurant . He helped produce the film based on that song, and later co-produced the Oscar-winning Bound for Glory starringDavid Carradine as Woody Guthrie. Among his other films was the Weavers documentaryWasn't that a Time! (1984) and theEmmy -winningWe Shall Overcome (1988). Leventhal also produced theatre, starting with his fellow blacklisterWill Geer performingMark Twain 's 'America'off-Broadway in 1952.Reflecting his political and musical interests, he produced, among others,
Joseph Heller 's We Bombed in New Haven,Jules Epstein 's But Seriously,Rabindranath Tagore 's King of the Dark Chamber andJules Feiffer 's The White House Murder Case.Tribute
Fittingly, in 2003, Leventhal received his own tribute concert at Carnegie Hall. A film of that show, Isn't this a Time, was released in 2004. He may have been defined best in the programme notes for that concert, as embodying the definition of the
Yiddish word,mensch , meaning "man" in the sense of "an upright, honourable, decent person, someone of noble character".
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