The Weavers were banned by NBC on this day in 1962 — 59 years ago — after refusing to sign a political loyalty oath disavowing the Communist Party.
One of the most significant folk music groups of the postwar era, The Weavers saw their career nearly destroyed during the Red Scare of the early 1950s. Even with anti-communist fervor in decline by the early 1960s, the Weavers' leftist politics were used against them as late as January 2, 1962, when the group's appearance on The Jack Paar Show was cancelled over their refusal to sign an oath of loyalty.
The importance of the Weavers to the folk revival of the late 1950s cannot be overstated. Without the group that Pete Seeger founded with Lee Hays in Greenwich Village in 1948, the folk music revival may not have happened.
The Weavers helped spark a tremendous resurgence in interest in American folk traditions and folk songs when they burst onto the popular scene with "Goodnight Irene," a #1 record for 13 weeks in the summer and fall of 1950.
The Weavers sold millions of copies of innocent, beautiful and utterly apolitical records like "Midnight Special" and "On Top of Old Smoky" that year. And then it came to light that members of the group had openly embraced the pacifism, internationalism and pro-labor sympathies of the Communist Party during the 1930s.
When word of their political past spread, the backlash was swift. The Weavers' planned television show was canceled, the group was placed under FBI surveillance and Seeger and Hays were called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee.
The Weavers lost their recording contract with Decca in 1951, and by 1953, were unable to book most concert venues and banned from appearing on television and radio. They then disbanded.
The Weavers enjoyed a significant comeback in the late 1950s, but the group never shook its right-wing antagonists.
On the afternoon of January 2, 1962, in advance of a scheduled appearance on The Jack Paar Show, the Weavers were told by NBC officials that their appearance would be canceled if they would not sign a statement disavowing the Communist party. Every member of the Weavers refused to sign.
This where Harold Leventhal saved the day. The former manager of Woody Guthrie and now the Weavers, resisted the anti-Communists. In 1955, he organized 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 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 McCarthyism and the flowering of the American civil rights movement, folk music became the voice of the country's conscience, and 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 immortalized in the 2003 movie comedy, A Mighty Wind.
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Somehow, many years ago, I got on the good side of Harold Leventhal.
He always personally handled my ticket requests for Arlo Guthrie at Carnegie Hall and I always got the best seats. He personally arranged for me to interview Pete Seeger. The success of the Weavers was due to Harold. He invited me to the first public performance in New York City of Woody Guthrie’s granddaughter, Sara.
Harold died in 2005 at the age of 86 and life was never the same after that.
Leventhal began his career as a song plugger for Irving Berlin. He ended up managing not only the Weavers, but Woody Guthrie. He handled artists including Peter, Paul and Mary, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Harry Belafonte, Neal Young, Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton, Earl Scruggs, Theodore Bikel, Johnny Cash, Cisco Houston, Alan Arkin and the Mamas and the Papas.
At a Carnegie Hall during the 2004 Thanksgiving holiday, The Weavers came together for a final reunion in honor of Leventhal, who would die within a year.
When the remaining Weavers took the stage that night, Oscar Brand, another former Leventhal client and a folk legend himself who was sitting in front of me, turned to all behind him and shouted: “We are witnessing history here tonight.”
Fred Hellerman, the last surviving member of The Weavers, at a party at the Museum of the City of New York on June 15, 2015. Hellerman died on Sept. 1, 2016.
Photo by Frank Beacham
Pete Seeger, Carnegie Hall, New York City, 2008
Photo by Frank Beacham