Helen and Gil Levine: a legacy of music, hope and change

By Kathy Kennedy

Sometimes we start off with a song. Singing sets the tone at planning meetings for Gil’s Hootenanny around the table at Tamara Levine’s house on Craig Street. Our group works hard but we don’t forget to have fun. Now, during our busiest time leading up to the May 1 Hootenanny, we’re also keenly aware that there will be a hole in the audience this year.

Gil Levine died at 85 in 2009 and three words in his obituary, “… plan a hootenanny,” were the beginning of Gil’s Hootenanny, a celebration of the collective power of song to change the world. Levine was the founding director of research at the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) and a great lover of folk music. It’s held each year on May Day and this year the Hootenanny will be celebrating its 10th anniversary.

Gil and his wife Helen hosted hootenannies and May Day celebrations at their home for decades. Helen, a regular at every Hootenanny since 2010, died at 95 on October 24, 2018.

A force in her own right, Helen Levine was a lifelong feminist whose influence and legacy carries on in many ways. She was a social worker who found her passion and her life’s work in the women’s movement. She was a beloved professor of women’s studies at the Carleton School of Social Work in the 1970s and 80s during which she advanced a feminist approach that revolutionized the way social work was taught.

Helen Zivian grew up on Sunset Boulevard in the Glebe and attended Mutchmor, Glashan and Glebe during the 1920s and ’30s. Tamara Levine, Helen and Gil’s daughter and Gil’s Hootenanny producer, says that Helen remembered her early Glebe days with great fondness, playing baseball and basketball at Mutchmor, paddling on Dow’s Lake and riding her bike everywhere.

Helen went to Queens and the University of Toronto School of Social Work, moving back to Ottawa in 1957 with Gil and their two young daughters. In 1989, she received the Governor General’s Persons Award, which commemorates the anniversary of the 1929 groundbreaking Persons Case and honours those who have made significant national contributions to advancing the status of women.

Helen was featured in the 1994 National Film Board (NFB) documentary Motherland by filmmaker Helene Klodawsky, which examines “motherhood since the mid-20th century” and offers “new ways of thinking about what it means to be a good mom.”

Helen and her friend Oonagh Berry initiated a year-long correspondence of handwritten letters which became the book Between Friends: A Year in Letters (2005). This collection of “thoughts and confidences” has been compared to “sharing a warm pot of tea with two frank, articulate and experienced companions.”

Helen considered herself an “old folkie,” taking up the ukulele at age 91. Like Gil, Helen was a Pete Seeger fan. She loved folk music and feminist songs like the union ballad “Bread and Roses,” a standard in the Gil’s Hootenanny repertoire. Tamara explained that her mother understood the power of collective singing for social and political movements. The message in “Bread and Roses” came out of the successful 1912 textile strike by immigrant women in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and resonated with Helen. It’s an anthem of both the women’s and the labour movements that calls for not only fair wages for women (bread), but also dignity, respect, education and culture (roses). It is also a song of hope for a better world for both women and men.

Gil’s Hootenanny has seen increasingly larger audiences joining featured artists and the house band in singing along with new and traditional songs of hope and protest. The featured artists for the 10th anniversary Hootenanny are Maria Dunn (mariadunn.com) and Maria Hawkins (mariahawkins.ca) with a special presentation by Third Avenue resident Steve Richer who will pay homage to Pete Seeger on the 100th anniversary of his birth.

The 2019 Hootenanny will take place on Wednesday, May 1 at 7:30 p.m. in Clark Hall at the RA Centre, 2451 Riverside Drive. The RA Centre is staffed by UNIFOR members, is accessible, has loads of parking and is well serviced by OC Transpo.

Tickets are $10; kids are free. See gilshootenanny.ca.

Kathy Kennedy is active in promoting and protecting the well-being of Ottawa’s downtown neighbourhoods and is on the organizing committee for Gil’s Hootenanny.