Redbone showed up in Toronto in the late 1960s—from where, no one seemed certain. He was from Shreveport, Louisiana, people said, or from New Orleans, or maybe from Cleveland, dodging the draft. One musician detected a British lilt to his phrasing, but by the late 1970s, an interviewer heard “a New England accent” in Redbone’s “low, nasal speaking voice.” Redbone later claimed to have been born in Bombay, the love child of Jenny Lind and Niccolo Paganini; in Manhattan, the day of the 1929 stock market crash; and in Memphis, Tennessee. When an interviewer asked where in Memphis he’d gone to school, he changed the subject.
In Toronto, he was a regular at Fiddler’s Green, a folk club that rented space a couple nights a week in a run-down house owned by the YMCA, and his gigs there landed him a spot at Mariposa Folk Festival. But his earliest appearances may have been at the Pornographic Onion, a coffeehouse at Ryerson University that hosted hootenannies sponsored by the Toronto Folklore Center in the 1960s. Shelley Posen, who used to emcee those shows, remembers that whenever someone gave Redbone a lift home, he’d ask to be let out at an intersection in Forest Hill where there was a large apartment building. No one knew if he lived there. After exiting the car, he stood on the sidewalk “and waited there, waving goodbye, until the car disappeared from view. If the car didn’t move, he didn’t move.” Once, says promoter Richard Flohil, someone did see Redbone enter an apartment building, only to walk back out a few moments later, climb into a cab, and head off. Another time, recalls musician Michael Cooney, someone dropped Redbone at a hotel, and “he went in the front door and came out the side door and went into the subway.”
In those days, the only way to reach Redbone was by phoning the pool hall by the subway stop at the corner of Bloor and Yonge Street and asking for Mr. Grunt, though the guys there also knew him as Sonny. Redbone was something of a shark, stalking the billiard table and sinking balls with graceful ferocity. A 1973 profile describes the way that, “Right foot back, pool cue resting emphatically on thumb and knuckle, he double-banks a red into the side pocket and prepares to make an eighty degree cut black.” Then he proclaims, “‘I don’t have a past. The past begins tomorrow.’” Another bank shot.
The bio he submitted for the 1972 Mariposa Folk Festival program reads as follows: “I was born in Shreveport, La., in 1910, and my real name is James Hokum. I wear dark glasses to remind me of the time I spent leading Blind Blake throughout the south, and I now live in Canada as a result of the incident in Philadelphia.” The editors noted that, when asked for a photograph, Redbone had sent them a picture of Bob Dylan, but they didn’t print it. The joke proved prescient: Dylan showed up at the festival unannounced, searching for Leon Redbone. John Prine describes the scene with delight in the new documentary short Please Don’t Talk about Me When I’m Gone, produced by Riddle Films: there was Redbone, followed by Dylan and his wife, followed by hordes of adoring fans. The festival took place on an island, accessible by ferry, but at the end of the day, Dylan, Gordon Lightfoot, and Redbone sailed away on a private boat.