Weavers' tribute caps film fest

Catholic New Times, Oct 24, 2004 by Ted Schmidt

Isn't That a Time: a tribute to Harold Leventhal and Pete Seeger, directed by Jim Brown, 2004, 90 minutes

He's the man with the banjo and the 12 string guitar / And he's singing us the songs that tell us who we are / When you look into his eyes you know that somebody's in there / Yeah, he knows where we're going and where we been / And how the fog is getting thicker where the future should begin / When you look at his life you know he's really been there / What is the name they're callin' that man? Old folkie

--Harry Chapin "Old Folkie" 1979

Hard to believe that the tribute the late singer Harry Chapin wrote to Pete Seeger was 25 years old, and harder still to believe that the "old folkie" himself, now 85, is still performing.

Undoubtedly the vast majority of people who showed up the last night of the Toronto Film Festival were there to honour Pete Seeger, the lead singer of the most important folk group in American musical history. The occasion was a tribute to the Weaver's manager, a cherubic 85-year-old named Harold Leventhal.

The film, directed by Jim Brown, is called "Isn't That a Time." Brown had actually directed a 1983 tribute to The Weavers called "Wasn't That a Time". This time the focus was on Leventhal.

The notoriously shy and self-effacing Leventhal, a product of hardscrabble poverty (his mother was left with five children to raise when his father died early), always has been an unapologetic Jewish leftist whose politics was forged by the poverty of the Depression. Beginning work with Irving Berlin, he left to manage a bevy of "protest" singers like Woody Guthrie ("This Land is Your Land") and Seeger and The Weavers.

Leventhal openly defied "black lists" to bring the music of social change to the masses. At first the music was banned from the air waves but through the persistence of Leventhal and the honest content of the lyrics, it managed to get a hearing. Without Leventhal, it never would have happened.

In the 1960s, the torch was passed to Peter, Paul and Mary, Phil Ochs and the early Bob Dylan.

The film was a traditional Thanksgiving concert that Leventhal annually produced, starring Arlo Guthrie, Peter, Paul and Mary, Leon Bibb and Theo Bikel. The annual concert at Carnegie Hall has sold out for years. In the 1983 film, the legendary bass player of The Weavers, the sardonic Lee Hays, reminded everybody that even though Ronald Reagan was riding high in popularity: "This too shall pass." Now, twenty one years later ,with a new concert film, narrated by Guthrie and financed by Toronto rock promoter Michael Cohl (U2, The Rolling Stones). Leventhal, uncomfortable in the spotlight, was introduced before the film by director Brown and characteristically deflected praise. "It's not just a celebration of me. It's really a celebration of a community of people who share a wonderful philosophy, an inclusive view of mankind and a vision of a kinder world."

"Isn't That a Time" is a feelgood snapshot, a tribute to the power of music to embolden and galvanize people, to lift their spirits in a troubled time. Leon Bibb was a good reminder of this. A veteran of the civil rights struggles where the music in the black community helped people to keep on, Bibb gives a moving rendition of "Shenandoah." Peter, Paul and Mary of course are the great bridge from the Weavers of the 1940s up to the present. Their rendition of a new song, "Have You Been to Jail for Justice," was stirring. In the end, it gets back to Seeger and his classics like, "Guantamera," his rendition of Jose Marti's hymn to "los pobres de la tierra" (the poor people of the earth), and "Wimoweh." Seeger explained that the song, written in Johannesburg in 1939, was a really a coded hymn to the explosive power of democracy, which was stirring in the black masses.

Did the white group The Tokens who sang the song in the early 1960s understand the words they were singing? "In the village the quiet village, the lion sleeps tonight." Most likely not. The point was that black South Africans did.

It was Desmond Tutu as rector of the Anglican Cathedral in Johannesburg in the 1980's who made it more specific. "Freedom is coming. I hear it. You can't stop it."

This is a film destined for a small audience, maybe at the rep houses. No matter. It is a historical as well as a musical document, a reminder of Seeger's wise words, "If you fight for what is right, you are part of a victory."

The highlight of the evening was the Weaver's mini-concert of five songs after the lights came on. It probably was the last time a Canadian audience will see Seeger, Fred Hellerman and Ronnie Gilbert perform. Nevertheless the film will remind us that there always have been a great, often anonymous communion of saints who have kept hope alive. Seeger and Harold Leventhal in his shy way are two. After the concert and film, I bumped into Seeger enlering for the post-event party. At 85, he said, his body wasn't too bad from the neck down, but sometimes the oxygen had trouble reaching the brain. Not that he needed any assurance from me, but I told him as far as I could see his spirit was still intact.