Wes Leslie and His Deadly Medley is:
Wes Leslie, Jordon Jo, Ted Davis, Chloe Mier, Cayla Harris, Tyler Cornfield, Kristyn Poehner, Cornelius McMoyler, Jhameel, and sometimes even more.
And Now, A Brief Biography:
Bob Dylan. Doc Watson. Pete Seeger. Wes Leslie.
It sounds like Wes Leslie should be a folk singer, but that alone doesn’t make him one. No, it’s his roots, his family story, that led him on this journey. Inspired by romantic tales of his great-grandfather hopping trains to come out west, and with a beat-up acoustic that his mother taught him how to finger pick, Wes took off to find California and follow his family tradition. But you can’t hop freight trains that easily today.
You see, post-9/11 America isn’t exactly the same environment as the one his great-grandfather did his traveling in. The economy might be in the same place, but after train-jumping nearly got Wes physically thrown off once or twice and threatened with arrest another time or two, he took to the equally-unpredictable-yet-slightly-less-illegal travel of hitchhiking. Sure, the trip was slow and had a few detours, but that’s what made it great. San Francisco wasn’t waiting for Wes Leslie, and it was only on the road, meeting real people, that Wes could have found his voice as a folk singer.
So he’s finally made it to San Francisco. Wes’s uncle mailed him the family banjo, and the secondhand stores sell old LP’s for fifty cents a pop. There’s an old expression, to go west, and it refers to something being destroyed or lost. But in this case, going West has nothing to do with going west. At least, not for Wes.