HAROLD LEVENTHAL appeared on British television screens only a week before his death — in No Direction Home, Martin Scorsese’s acclaimed documentary about Bob Dylan, he reminisiced about his part in the singer’s early career.
And Dylan was only one of his many famous clients. Over several generations — from the era of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger to the 1960s folk revival that made stars of Joan Baez and Peter, Paul and Mary — as a promoter, publisher, manager and all-purpose folk entrepreneur, the soft-spoken, cigar-smoking Leventhal helped to guide the careers of almost everyone who was anyone in American folk music.
Born into a Jewish family in New York, he grew up on the Lower East Side and in the Bronx, and landed his first job in music in his late teens, as a song plugger for Irving Berlin.
The job involved pitching the veteran songwriter’s compositions to leading stars of the day such as Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby and Dinah Shore, and with such wonderful songs to work with as Let’s Face the Music and Dance and I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm, it was not exactly a difficult sell. But it afforded plenty of opportunity to hang around in nightclubs and make valuable music industry contacts on both the publishing and performing sides.
During the war he was posted as a corporal with the Army Signal Corps to India, where he met Mahatma Gandhi. One of his favourite stories was how the first thing Gandhi said to him was to inquire after the health of Paul Robeson.
On demobilisation he returned to New York and took a job with his brother’s company, which manufactured ladies’ girdles. But he spent his nights frequenting music clubs and the coffee houses in Greenwich Village, where a bohemian, left-leaning folk scene was emerging around the Weavers, a group led by the singer Pete Seeger.
Leventhal took over the management of the group in 1949, though he did not give up his day job until the following year, when the Weavers enjoyed a No 1 million-seller with their version of Leadbelly’s Goodnight Irene.
It was the era of Senator Joe McCarthy’s witch-hunt against alleged Communists in the entertainment industry. Leventhal himself was a Communist sympathiser, as was the openly left-wing Seeger, who was summoned before the Un-American Activities Committee in 1952 and blacklisted.
As a result, Leventhal was unable to secure bookings for the Weavers, and they disbanded. However, he was not going to be deterred so easily and it became a matter of pride for him to withstand the McCarthyite persecution. After telling each of the Weavers’ four members that the other three had already agreed to a reunion, three years later on Christmas Eve 1955, he defiantly booked the group to make their comeback at the most conspicuous venue he could find — Carnegie Hall. It seemed that every New Yorker who had been secretly appalled by McCarthyism came out to show their support, and the concert was a spectacular sell-out.
Leventhal also became manager to Seeger’s friend and colleague Woody Guthrie, who, with some irony, wrote his best-known song, This Land is Your Land, as an angry response to the flag-waving of God Bless America, composed by Leventhal’s first employer, Irving Berlin. By the mid-1950s Guthrie was suffering severely from Huntington’s chorea, and in 1956, when he was no longer able to administer his own affairs, Leventhal set up a trust fund for the singer’s children. On Guthrie’s death in 1967, Leventhal was appointed his executor. He also organised a famous 1968 tribute concert to him at Carnegie Hall and became a trustee of the Woody Guthrie Foundation and Archives.
One of those who played at the Guthrie tribute concert was Bob Dylan, whom Leventhal had met seven years earlier, when he arrived in New York.
Dylan was a disciple of Guthrie and, during 1961-62, visited him regularly in hospital, so the two men’s paths inevitably crossed. After Dylan signed his first record deal with Columbia and was looking for a manager, John Hammond, his vastly experienced mentor at the label, suggested Leventhal. In the end, Dylan chose instead to appoint Albert Grossman, a decision he lived to reget when their relationship ended in a bitter and protracted legal action. However, Leventhal did promote Dylan’s first big New York concert appearance, at the Town Hall in April 1963.
By then Leventhal was also managing or promoting most of the other big names in the folk world, including Joan Baez, Harry Belafonte, Judy Collins, Phil Ochs, Odetta, Tom Paxton and Peter, Paul and Mary. He also played a significant part in the career of Woody Guthrie’s son Arlo, employing him as an office boy and then encouraging him to come out from under the considerable shadow of his famous father as a singer and composer in his own right, and co-producing Arlo’s film, Alice’s Restaurant (1969).
As a promoter Leventhal also brought such international artists as Jacques Brel, Miriam Makeba, Nana Mouskouri and Ravi Shankar to the US for their first concert tours. He also produced several films, including the Oscar-winning Bound for Glory (1976), a biography of Woody Guthrie starring David Carradine, and Wasn’t That a Time!, a documentary about a Weavers’ reunion which he organised in 1980.
In 2003 his lifelong commitment to folk music was honoured with a tribute concert at Carnegie Hall, featuring Theodore Bikel, Peter, Paul and Mary, Arlo Guthrie and the octogenarian Pete Seeger, among others. A documentary film Isn’t This a Time!, about the event and Leventhal’s life, is scheduled to open in New York in December.
Much to his amusement, Leventhal was also the inspiration for Irving Steinbloom, the imaginary folk impresario whose memorial concert is a key moment in the comedy film, A Mighty Wind (2003), which did for folk music what Spinal Tap did for rock’n’roll.
He is survived by his wife Natalie and two daughters.
Harold Leventhal, folk music impresario, was born on May 24, 1919. He died on October 4, 2005, aged 86.
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