Tag: Leslie Fish

So Long and Thanks for all the Filk Leslie
Blog Post

So Long and Thanks for all the Filk Leslie

Daniel Kelly2 Comments

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.

 

Blog Post · Folk Music · Spirituality and Philosophy

Filk the World

Daniel Kelly9 Comments

This week, through a series of seemingly random events I became aware of the work of Leslie Fish. As an Electrical Engineer, Computer Programmer and a Science-Fiction/Fantasy fan I was surprised that the whole phenomena of ‘Filk’ music had largely passed me by.

I suspect it was because most of my Science Fiction/Fantasy reading was done in secret in small-town rural Australia, which wasn’t exactly overflowing with Star Trek conventions. It was probably also because my parents largely viewed that whole ‘dressing up’ scene with Pentecostal Christian fear and loathing. Dungeons and Dragons was, after all, a sure-fire pathway to demon possession.

Whenever I travel for work, my partner writes Facebook posts outlining the mayhem that often ensues with our five children. In the posts, the characters from Star Trek are borrowed as stand-ins for family members. As I am the one staying home this time, I made a few posts in the same theme and a friend mentioned ‘Banned from Argo’ in a comment (I had facetiously mentioned Mos Eisley in the context of Star Trek).

I made a recording of this amusing, raunchy, Star Trek inspired song and was surprised to get a comment back from Leslie. As I do for most of the songs I record, I researched the background. This is how I became immersed in the history of this prolific and rich cultural treasure known as ‘Filk’.

The cynic would pass the genre off as parodies and fan-fiction of little consequence. They would be wrong. Leslie’s 2012 album, Avalon is Risen, is a triumph of thought and expression in so many ways. It goes well beyond ‘space songs’ and covers issues of social commentary, paganism and fundamental questions of humanity. Fortunately, this beautifully produced booklet that goes with the album is available from Prometheus Music.

I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised, as the same things that drive authors and fans to the genre of Science-Fiction and Fantasy are the things that make them question our history, our present society and our future. People who have a subconscious instinct from birth that the religious dogma and history they are presented with in adolescence feels contrived and doesn’t come close to fitting our lived experience find themselves looking for something else.

While Banned From Argo is an amusing romp, I picked The Sun is Also a Warrior to cover for my YouTube Channel. I read this song as a well-written rebuttal to the rose-tinted views of pacifism that often accompany the ‘New Age’ movement. Our race is, by its nature, in violent competition with our environment and each other.

The other serious song of Leslie’s that I am in awe of and wouldn’t attempt to re-record is Hope Eyrie. Set to some appropriate images in this video, the song perfectly captures the momentous nature of our mission to the moon in 1969. The song frames the event as not just a technical flea-hop off our planet, but the momentous start of the journey which will take us to other galaxies and ensure our existence beyond the small window of time in which we will consume this planet’s resources. It has taken some 50 years, but we are now seriously looking at a manned Mars expedition.

I have always appreciated artists who write and perform their songs out of a genuine desire to communicate and change society for the better, as opposed to making money giving comforting narcissistic fluff to wealthy consumers. I would place Leslie in the same league as Pete Seeger, Alistair Hulett and Billy Bragg and it is sad that her influence isn’t wider. Leslie’s song Chickasaw Mountain, on Avalon is Risen, is a tribute / letter to Phil Ochs, one of the great genuine folk writers of the 1960s.

This interview with Leslie, by Aya Katz, gives a good overview of Leslie’s views and some background to her songs and career. You can read more about Leslie in her blog here or her website here. If you want to know more about the Filk scene, this compiled ‘history’ by Gary McGath makes for interesting reading.