Harold Leventhal - Folk Music

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 the Daily 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 singer Pete Seeger, and soon became the manager of Seeger's group, The Weavers. Blacklisted as communists, 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 at New York'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 recognising 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 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 the American 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 committed leftist whose music business acumen turned him into folk music's most successful promoter. He was the model for Irving Steinbloom, the impresario immortalised in the 2003 movie comedy A Mighty Wind.

In 1988, Leventhal won a Grammy award for Folkways: A Vision Shared, a tribute to Woodie Guthrie and Leadbelly.