Sound and sight: Leah Leslie – Singing for the audience

After years of touring, including a yearlong residency—six nights a week, at the Tui Room, in the legendary Huntsville Empire Hotel, Leah Leslie decided to take a bold and daring step. At the invitation of her musician friend Riley Watkins, who had booked a series of shows in Las Vegas and needed a vocalist, Leah, travelling on a one-way ticket, arrived, hoping perhaps to establish herself as an international singer. 

Unbeknownst to Leah and her musical partner, Vegas was shut down by a general strike. In 1984, over 17,000 members of the Culinary Union, along with Bartenders, and Musician Unions, struck for over sixty days—one of the longest in Vegas history.

Scrambling for a means to support themselves, Riley found work in Colorado, performing in venues like the Best Western. Soon thereafter, Leah met her future husband and decided to put her youthful adventure behind her in pursuit of a non-musical professional career and to raise her children.  

Shortly before the pandemic lockdowns, Leah recognized that something was amiss in her life. “I was thinking, I’ve got to get back, this is what’s missing in my life, I need to have music in my life again. And so, I started working, I started practicing, I started writing and I intended to have a concert in March 2020. I was getting all ready for the concert, then COVID came. So, I decided I don’t want to lose my momentum, so I will record a song every day and post it on Facebook until the pandemic is over in April.” Leah laughs, at the memory. 

“It didn’t end, and I kept doing it every day religiously for six months. I slacked off a bit doing four or five a week for another six months. Now, here we are, almost four years later, periodically still posting songs on Facebook. Because I’ve always been someone who plays music for others to hear, that’s my motivation, that’s what keeps me going and I know there are people who listen for it. So now, I feel almost a responsibility to keep it going.” 

Like her earlier period in music, Leah is challenging her abilities to keep growing, but more importantly to find a way to present her songs through more generally acceptable and accessible platforms such as Spotify, YouTube, and other streaming services. 

With the help of her Bracebridge friend, Brad Hammond, she has begun to record her own material and some covers that she hopes will give her fan base more lasting, polished versions of her performances. 

For those who follow Leah on Facebook, her songs offer respite and quiet reflection from the cacophony of influences that daily bombard us, seeking our attention. Her gentle finger picking and velvety vocals recall an earlier period when music was something cherished, revered for the stories, characters, and communal shared emotions. Leah skillfully evokes an interplay between timelessness and a rapidly changing world. It is a comfort to take a few daily moments to spend with her.  

Leah Leslie remembers always wanting to sing for people. Like so many other musical talents, from a very young age, she had to sing. “Ever since I can remember I’ve wanted to sing for people. When I was nine years old, I went to see ‘Your Cheating Heart’ at the Capital Theatre in Huntsville, I heard Hank Williams sing, ‘Cold Cold Heart’ and it made me feel something so deep within me that I knew at that point that I wanted to make people feel something like that”, she explains. 

Fortunately, she found a mentor in a high school teacher, Carole Purchase, who encouraged Leah to delve into and develop her talents and assisted her by handwriting lyrics and chords for Leah to practice and perfect. It was only a matter of time before Leah was deeply immersed in folk music and making vital connections with a myriad of Canadian masters of the craft. 

David Essig, famed guitarist, songwriter, and producer became a friend while he lived in Emsdale. Often requesting that Leah sing on demos he was working on. Opening for Stan Rogers at the Hub—a coffee house in London, left a lasting impression.

Soon Leah was working steadily with jazz organist Ted White who not only introduced her to the vast catalogue of astounding female jazz stylists such as Sarah Vaughn, Billie Holiday, and Edith Piaf but also prompted her to sing their repertoire in French, allowing them to tour in francophone regions of Canada. 

As a professional musician, Leah was booked in countless engagements from Deerhurst in Huntsville to the Ledo Hotel in Sudbury. She stayed fit by lugging Ted’s B3 Hammond organ from show to show. A concert at El Mocambo in Toronto, with renowned innovative guitarist and teacher, Richard Smyth, marked the apex of her touring career. Leah found that a professional life in music has to be augmented by other employment and slowly she lost her vigour for the trade, choosing to make a career as a Director of Sales for the Hotel and Hospitality Industry in which she still provides sales and marketing support through her consulting company, Destination Coach.          

At this juncture in her life, Leah finds her deepest joy and pleasure in singing for an audience, a path she is discovering slowly as she reemerges into the local Huntsville music scene as a solo artist, with her soon-to-be-released catalogue of material for all to hear.     

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