Harold Leventhal

Harold Leventhal (May 24, 1919 – October 4, 2005) was an American music manager. He died in 2005 at the age of 86. 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. Personal life Born in Ellenville, New York, to 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 Bronx, where in 1935, at James Monroe high school, Leventhal, already a member of the Young Communist League, was arrested for organizing an "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 Harry James, the Dorsey Brothers and Benny Goodman. He then joined Goodman's Regent Music Company, before enlisting in the army when the U.S. joined the Second World War. Assigned to India with the Signal Corps, Leventhal sought out the Congress movement, meeting Nehru and 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.