‘I realized that I have always selected songs that meant something to me, and what I didn’t realize was that it was almost a shield, a protection, to sing very poignant, vulnerable lyrics that I didn’t write.’ – Leslie Smith Photo by Donn Young

It’s hard to listen to Leslie Smith’s music without becoming certain that valor has its own distinctive, jazz-tinged voice.

  Smith, a New Orleans native whose prodigious vocal talent has long been respected within the local music community, recently released Paper Doll, a high-quality, self-produced CD of all-original material. After listening to her emotive voice and soulful lyrics, it’s hard to tell whether she’s the most jaded Pollyanna you’ve ever heard or, perhaps more likely, the most starry-eyed of well-grounded realists. In her song "Don’t Try to Say Goodbye," she sings that she’s a "tough girl with a soft spot," only later to sing that she’s a "soft girl with a hard spot."

  And she has a life story, right out of Mark Twain-meets-Dickens-meets-S.E. Hinton, to prove it.

  Artistic temperaments seem to run in Leslie Smith’s family. Her mother’s mother, Helen Blackshear, was until two years ago the official poet laureate of Alabama. Leslie’s mother, Sue Reid Blackshear, is an accomplished painter. Her father, Michael P. Smith, somewhat rebellious scion of a socially prominent New Orleans family with a distinguished military lineage, is world-renowned for his photographs of New Orleans musicians.

  As for their child Leslie, both extraordinarily precocious and extraordinarily untamed, she could have been the subject of an entire textbook chapter on juvenile delinquency.

  Leslie Smith was expelled from five different elementary schools, and she never finished a grade higher than Fourth. Yet, self-educated, she quotes entire passages of Shakespeare plays from memory and has tutored visiting foreign professors at Tulane in computer skills. And she now runs the business side of her father’s photographic pursuits.

  She spent most of her childhood as a runaway. She eventually was sent to a troubled-youth center in Victoria, Texas, with Exceptional Children’s Act funding secured through her mother’s efforts. The facility was later found guilty of widespread abuses, and Leslie escaped from there "three or four times" – once illegally crossing and recrossing the Mexican border, then heading north toward Canada before turning around again at Williston, N.D. Every time, she picked up whatever temporary odd jobs, such as picking cherries in Colorado, aiding carpenters, or mopping restaurant floors, she could find along the way.

  "I lived like a nomad," Smith says now as she laughs. "I had an insatiable desire for adventure and discovery."

  And yet always, as a last resort when no other odd jobs would suffice, she had a stunning vocal range and volume to fall back on. She eventually made her independence stick, at age 13, by making a subway stop in San Francisco her home base for two years, singing in return for pedestrians’ donations at the subway entrance.

  But in reference to some darker experiences, she says, "I was a coiled spring – I was just exploding with outrage."

  At various times, she says, "I had a lot of violent things. I’ve been attacked, I’ve been stabbed, I jumped out of moving trucks, I’ve been shot at. But there’s no question about the fact that I’m blessed. ... As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more and more grateful for my childhood and my adolescence, and now I’ve actually reached a point where I’m so, so happy that I’ve had every single experience that I had, especially the bad ones – it sounds crazy – because I’ve had a very rare and precious insight into a lot of things that maybe your average person might not have."

  She continues, "I’ve had several times recently where I’ve had an opportunity to affect another person, in what I hope is a positive way, and I don’t believe I would have been able to get through to those people, if I hadn’t had those experiences."

  As she sings in the song "Reaching Out," from Paper Doll, "I’m shedding tears for those who cannot cry/ I’m rising up for those who cannot fly … Reaching out I see/ What this life means to me."

  Her fortitude and refusal to be cowed by experience is a palpable presence in Smith’s songwriting and singing.

  At 15, Smith made her way back to New Orleans, where she set up shop singing on a French Quarter street corner, blowing away passers-by who wondered how such a large sound could come from such a waif-like beauty. Other musicians took notice, and eventually pianist David Torkanowsky persuaded her to take some gigs at $50 per night at the late great Tyler’s club on Magazine Street. For nearly a decade, Smith was all long legs and raw energy, backed by New Orleans musicians such as Torkanowsky, Johnny Vidacovich, George Porter Jr. and Zigaboo Modeliste, as she prowled the Tyler’s stage and sometimes "ran [while singing] across the cocktail tables in spiked heels," as pianist and longtime friend Mike Pellera remembers it.

  "She was a comet ready to burn out when she was young," adds Pellera.

  Smith didn’t burn out, but she did marry, move to Alabama, and take nearly a decade off from public performing. Now divorced and back in New Orleans among its "so many superb musicians that I wanted to work with again," she relaunched her musical career in 1998 – not just as a vocalist, but as a songwriter and, lately, pianist as well.

  As a singer, she may have lost the slightest bit of her range and volume, but she’s found an even greater degree of finely modulated expressiveness. And personally, says Pellera, "she has definitely mellowed."

  The wild-child has become a thoughtful, focused woman still youthful enough to be "carded" for her age twice in one month this year, but so empathetic that "most of the children in this neighborhood call me ‘Mom,’" she says.

  All of which plays into her new role as a songwriter, for which she has been earning terrific reviews from writers, fans and fellow musicians alike. Though there is no mistaking the jazz and blues roots in her voice – "The root of her is always that kind of soul, almost like Janis Joplin," says Pellera – the songs themselves have sort of a New Orleans pop and roots-rock sound, attached to lyrics poetic enough that they have drawn comparisons to Carole King’s and Joni Mitchell’s.

  "She has developed as a songwriter and piano player way beyond anyone’s expectations," says Torkanowsky. "When she’s singing her own music, she becomes an amazing artist ... lyrically and harmonically."

  Even so, Smith sometimes wrestles with her newfound musical direction. "It requires a deeper energy commitment on my part, somehow, when I’m doing my own material. ... I think that something that people have grown attached to in my singing is my vulnerability, my opening completely up when I perform. It’s much harder to do that with my own material. I realized that I have always selected songs that meant something to me, and what I didn’t realize was that it was almost a shield, a protection, to sing very poignant, vulnerable lyrics that I didn’t write. I was interpreting someone else’s experience. ... [But] when I write the lyrics and have to deliver them with a totally open heart, I’ve lost that shield, I’ve lost that veil of protection between myself as an interpreter and myself as a storyteller."

  Smith also says that there’s a constant struggle between a New Orleans audience’s expectations of hearing jazz and R&B, and her drive to play her own material of such a different and tough-to-define style.

  "They are two completely different animals," she says. "To survive financially in New Orleans, I need to do rhythm & blues and jazz in the clubs. That’s what people want to hear here, and that’s how I can have a following here. ... I’m feeling that it’s very hard to make that switch over into doing my own original music."

  On the other hand, she says she feels impelled to play her own songs, the writing of which is "like a treasure hunt. You get really excited about the wonderful treasure that’s out there, with little mysteries along the way. You are drawn forward toward the prize – the prize is to express myself musically with the passion I feel inside."

  She’s pursuing that goal with the help of some esteemed old friends. In March, Smith performed with Torkanowsky, Porter and Vidacovich in a "Tyler’s Reunion" at the Old Point Bar. The magical, musical and personal connection in the quartet still resonates, and Smith is reconvening the band in semi-regular performances as schedules permit. In these performances, the past, present and future come alive, and Smith seems on top of the world.

  "Somehow I hope I can communicate the preciousness of what we all have, just to be here – and how it’s better to be awake and to feel everything than to be numb," she says. "Even with some of the sad songs I write, I’m grateful that I can be here and get to feel sad. By all rights, I shouldn’t be here at all, with my childhood and all the adventures that I had. ... Some people mock me for that and say that I’m not realistic. Well, I’m still here, and I love life.".

Quin Hillyer, an editorial writer and columnist for the Mobile Register, is a former managing editor and associate editor of Gambit.