Harold Leventhal

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
For the judge, see Harold Leventhal (judge).

Harold Leventhal (May 24, 1919 – October 4, 2005)[1] was an American music manager. Leventhal's career began as a song plugger for Irving Berlin and then Benny Goodman. While working for Goodman, he connected with a new artist, Frank Sinatra, booking him as a singer for a Benny Goodman event. Leventhal later managed The Weavers, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Alan Arkin, Judy Collins, Theodore Bikel, Arlo Guthrie, Joan Baez, Mary Travers, Tom Paxton, Don McLean and many others, and promoted major concert events in the genre, thus playing a significant role in the popularization and influence of American folk music in the 1950s and 1960s.[2] He died in 2005 at the age of 86.

Personal life

Born in

Orthodox Jewish immigrants from Ukraine and Lithuania, Leventhal was eight weeks old when his father, Samuel, died in the 1918 influenza pandemic
at the age of 34. His mother, Sarah, moved her five children to the Lower East Side, where she worked as the tenement's janitor to provide for her children. They then moved to the
Oxford Pledge
" strike, aimed at persuading students to refuse to fight further wars.

He lost his first factory job for union organizing, but his brother Herbert, a songwriter who at that time worked as a song plugger for Irving Berlin, got Harold an opportunity to work as an office boy for Berlin. Soon Harold was working as Berlin's "plugger" as well, taking his songs around the nightclubs to be bought by bandleaders such as

Gandhi. He later founded American Friends of India, and, at a 1954 party hosted by the Indian delegation to the United Nations, Leventhal met Nathalie Buxbaum, a UN guide, who was to become his wife. Leventhal and Buxbaum had two daughters and raised them in the Upper West Side of New York City
.

Folk music

After the war, while working for his brother Gabe's business, Youthcraft Foundations, Leventhal continued to be active in left-wing causes. Through reading Woody Guthrie's column in the Daily Worker, "Woody Sez," he became enamoured of folk music. His commitment to Pete Seeger and the Weavers and Woody Guthrie 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

communists, and then had such difficulty finding a place to perform that they disbanded in 1952. But Leventhal’s commitment to the group and their audience persisted, and in 1955 he organized a Christmas Eve Weavers reunion concert at New York City's Carnegie 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 recognizing the talent of a 19-year-old Bob 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 organized world tours for folk singers that the U.S. state department forbade from taking part in official cultural exchanges.

In the era of

leftist whose music business acumen turned him into folk music's most successful promoter. He was the model for the character Irving Steinbloom, the impresario immortalized in the 2003 movie comedy A Mighty Wind
.

In 1988, Leventhal won a

Where Have All the Flowers Gone" and "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face
."

Other genres

Leventhal's tastes were eclectic, from

Ravi Shankar. Leventhal produced concerts at venues such as Carnegie Hall for artists such as Pete Seeger, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Phil Ochs, Arlo Guthrie, Peter, Paul and Mary
, Neil Diamond, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Judy Collins, and many others.

He had a knack for producing big shows that could focus the energy of an era. A birthday

Abraham Lincoln Brigade and, most memorably, for Woody Guthrie in March 1956 and then again, after Guthrie's death, in 1968 and 1970.[3]

After Guthrie's death in 1967, Leventhal virtually adopted Woody's son

Emmy-winning We Shall Overcome (1988). Leventhal also produced theatre, starting with his fellow blacklister Will Geer performing Mark Twain's America off-Broadway
in 1952. Harold Leventhal was also integrally involved in the theatrical and film careers of both Alan Arkin as well as Theodore Bikel.

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 and Jules Feiffer's The White House Murder Case.

Tribute

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. Leventhal may have been defined best in the program notes for that concert, as embodying the definition of the Yiddish word, mensch, meaning "man" in the sense of "an upright, honorable, decent person, someone of noble character". American singer-songwriter, Guthrie Thomas, stated, "Harold Leventhal was an instrumental key in keeping the art of folk music alive in the eyes of many thousands of listeners of the folk music style throughout the world and, equally as well as Alan Lomax."[citation needed]

References

  1. ^ Fox, Margalit (October 6, 2005). "Harold Leventhal, Promoter of Folk Music, Dies at 86". The New York Times. Retrieved March 31, 2009.
  2. ^ Applebome, Peter (November 26, 1998). "He Caught Folk On the Rise And Held On". The New York Times. Retrieved March 31, 2009.
  3. ^ "Tribute to Harold Leventhal". Woody Guthrie. Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc. Retrieved July 27, 2021.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Harold_Leventhal&oldid=1195503087"