Leon Redbone: A vaudevillian stuck in a TV age
Leon Redbone’s family issued an announcement for his death Thursday that said he “crossed the delta for that beautiful shore at the age of 127.” Even in death, Redbone was in character.
I heard about Redbone’s passing while typing another story about Elton John, and was struck by similarities and differences between the two musicians.
Both were born in the late 1940s and had a certain visual style involving hats and glasses. Each created a persona and lived within it so thoroughly that their previous selves — Reggie Dwight for John, Dickran Gobalian for Redbone — ceased to exist. Both made their new name playing music in the 1970s.
Traditionally, we reserve much of our praise for the musicians who take the old and make something entirely new. And John did just that, sloshing his classical music background with an affinity for roof-rattling Little Richard-inspired rock ’n’ roll into some arena-ready permutation of grandiose popular music.
Redbone went the opposite direction. He was truly a man out of time, a vaudevillian who tottered along in a television age decades after vaudeville had run its course. Just peek at the cover of “On the Track,” his 1975 debut album. There’s Chuck Jones’ iconic Michigan J. Frog, the top-hat-wearing amphibian from Merrie Melodies prone to singing old Tin Pan Alley fare.
But he heard in the music of the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s something ageless. He celebrated the mix of ragtime, old-time, blues, country and jazz when those styles of music bled into one another — before we sifted American music into the rude conformity of genre.
So Redbone wasn’t an inventor. But he was a portal. As rock ’n’ roll’s knuckles drew closer to the ground in the 1970s, its bombastic sound ever more removed from the blues that birthed it, Redbone served as a repository of song from an age that grew ever more faint in the public imagination.
I don’t recall which artists I found specifically from listening to Redbone albums. Because he played so cunningly with time — insisting he was born in 1892 — the music all came across like buckets of water from a river. My personal favorite was his take on “Shine On Harvest Moon,” a Tin Pan Alley tune credited to Nora Bayes and Jack Norworth around 1908. I’ve heard dozens of versions over the years, and my favorites remain recorded takes by Texas songster Mance Lipscomb and Redbone. Both eked a sweet melancholy from the song, gently stretching its vowels for a blue, moody effect.
Redbone’s albums served as little strings to be pulled. A songwriter credit could lead to a singer that could lead to an anthology. He was my white rabbit leading to other worlds.
That Redbone was able to exist independent of biography was striking in the 20th century and remarkable in the 21st as access to information became so easy. His family roots in Cyprus became known, as well as some other biographical details. But he largely existed as a stage creation.
“I don’t do anything mysterious on purpose,” he said. “I’m less than forthcoming, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m mysterious. It just means I’m not inclined to go there.”
Avoiding ‘there’ allowed the songs to be the star, which was likely a significant part of his intent from the first time he placed a Panama hat on his head, threw on a set of shades and pretended that he and Emmett Miller were contemporaries.
He made only about a dozen recordings in his 69/127 years, with a handful of live albums, too. He was always a joy to see at McGonigel's Mucky Duck, his nasal voice finding every corner of the hushed room.
But the payoff listening to any of them remains great. And each one feels like a little treasure map.