Harold Leventhal - and Beyond...

And Beyond...

Leventhal's tastes were eclectic, from Lightnin' Hopkins' blues to jazz greats such as Duke Ellington and Dexter Gordon to folk traditionalists Cisco Houston, Theodore Bikel, Oscar Brand and Mahalia 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, including Judy Collins, Miriam Makeba, Buffy Sainte-Marie and Joan Baez. He represented Ireland's Clancy Brothers, Britain's Ewan MacColl, Donovan and Pentangle, and also had an eclectic international roster including Jacques 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 for Martin Luther King, Jr. at Carnegie Hall in 1961 helped King appeal to the white general public. He produced fund raising tribute concerts for Phil Ochs, Paul Robeson, the Spanish civil war's Abraham 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 starring David Carradine as Woody Guthrie. Among his other films was the Pete Seeger documentary A Song and a Stone (1972), the Weavers documentary Wasn't that a Time! (1984) and the 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.

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.