So Long and Thanks for all the Filk Leslie

I made a post on the PaganMusic Reddit a day or two after Leslie Fish passed, just saying this:

      I know Leslie was mostly a Filk musician, but her pagan repertoire is fabulous. I spent some time singing her songs in memory.

The post was deleted by the moderators within a day with this:

      Your post or comment has been removed because you have broken the rule, No Folkish or Far-right Rhetoric, Content, or Associations.

I made a second post on r/PaganMusic after the lovely Zoom Filk Circle that Aya Katz hosted on Friday 5 December, but as I expect that may also be removed, I’m posting my thoughts here.

One particular user, Kolfianna, made comments on both posts, this from the second one:

      “Gross, she was a hateful transphobic who supported Trump”

I want to respond here, because it will persist, but will also post my response on Reddit.

Leslie was born in 1944, she visited Woody Guthrie while he could still communicate and played the song she had written for him (as recorded in John Greenway’s 1966 essay, Woody Guthrie: The Man, the land, the Understanding). Leslie got to meet Phil Ochs at the end of his fame, and the beginning of hers. I know this because I was fortunate enough to spend three hours swapping Rudyard Kipling settings with Leslie (hosted by Aya Katz) in 2024, and I also spent many tens of hours listening to the conversation between Leslie and Katrina Joyner during the week that Katrina spent recording Leslie in 2023 doing tunes from her Filk Book before they were lost completely.

In her younger years, Leslie was part of the workers movement, and sung at many I.W.W. events. Leslie sung the classics from the Labour songbook, and from Guthrie’s repertoire, but also wrote her own songs in support of workers, in support of Social Justice, in support of the Feminist cause (as it was in the 60s and 70s). Leslie cared strongly about people, about their causes, about what was done to them by the system (be it Church, Government or any other manipulative Ideology).

As shared on the Zoom Memorial event, Leslie was a part of the beginnings of the Pagan movement on the West Coast of the USA in the 1980s and recorded Isaac Bonewits’ anthem for the rise of Paganism. Her chants and songs are still used in ritual circles today. In my interactions with Leslie on Pagan topics, I found her very knowledgeable and I feel that she knew better than many the real power of song. If the owners of the Off Centaur label had headlined Leslie’s pagan music, her career may have followed a very different path.

I am not going to use this post to write apologetics for Leslie’s stance on Transgenderism, you can read her views here. I can say that I have read them all, and I don’t believe that Leslie warranted the ‘Raging/Hateful/*Expletive* Transphobe’ label that seems to get posted within hours of her name appearing anywhere on social media. I also know that Leslie was an agitator, a ‘shit-stirrer’ as we say here in Australia. And she loved an argument, and (I suspect) would often take and defend a position that she knew would engage/enrage whoever her audience happened to be. Whether she held these views for real, we will now never know.

However, what I know of reading Leslie’s work, listening to those who spoke about her at the memorial, and hearing her interactions with people, I do not believe that she willed harm on any but a handful of people (for reasons related to business, rather than belief). And that her posts and views reflected 81 years on a planet which has experienced many shattering shifts of ideology in that span of time.

I know communities are grappling with art from people who did real physical harm to children. Leslie is not in that category, and does not warrant the response that I have seen.

I’m not even going to bother talking about guns and Trump, those problems exist in enough of the USA voting population too make it a fare scarier problem than one (actually peaceful) anarchist with a handgun.

Finishing this post with a song that Douglas Davidson sang in the filk circle that followed the published part of the Zoom memorial. I think the subject matter is very appropriate to the stone throwing that has been happening.