the Daily Worker, "Woody Sez," he became enamoured of folk music. His commitment to Pete Seeger and the Weavers and Woody Guthrie 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. After tremendous initial success with record selling songs such as "Goodnight Irene" and "Tzena, Tzena, Tzena," the group was Blacklisted as communists, and then had such difficulty finding a place to perform that they disbanded in 1952. But Leventhal’s commitment to the group and their audience persisted, and in 1955 he organized a Christmas Eve Weavers reunion concert at New York City'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 a voice of the country's conscience, and Harold Leventhal was among those most 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 the character Irving Steinbloom, the impresario immortalized 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 Lead Belly. Leventhal was also a noted music publisher of folk songs including such titles as "Where Have All the Flowers Gone" and "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face." Other Genres 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