From Gary McGath
December 1, 2025
Leslie Fish, one of the best-known members of the filk music community, has died. She was talented, opinionated, outgoing, and just weird (in the best sense of the word). I didn’t know her well, but I’d seen, heard, and talked with her on many occasions. Other people who knew her better will write about her, but I should give my perspective here.
She appeared on the fannish scene around 1975. With a group called the DeHorn Crew, she produced a vinyl LP called Folk Songs for Folk Who Ain’t Even Been Yet. Another, Solar Sailors, came out the next year. The songs focused on Star Trek and space travel. In addition to being a fan, she was an anarcho-syndicalist, associated with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), aka the “Wobblies.” She was no fan of central economic planning, and her politics often ran in a libertarian direction.
Her early songs include what may be the two best-known songs in filk. One is “Banned from Argo,” a tale of the Enterprise crew (not named but easily recognized) running wild on shore leave. It became so popular that she got tired of it and for a while refused to sing it. It’s had hundreds of parodies. The other is “Hope Eyrie,” a tribute to the first Moon landing. It’s practically the national anthem of filk.
A favorite topic of her songs was stories of people thwarting authoritarian schemes. “Rhododendron Honey,” “Serious Steel,” and “The Arizona Sword” are examples. Others, such as “The Day It Fell Apart” and “Freedom of the Snow,” show people rising to emergencies.
She was a dedicated smoker. She insisted on smoking at filksings, even when convention policies started banning the practice in function spaces. She tried scheduling “sin pit” sessions or dividing the room into a smoking side and a non-smoking one. The smoke refused to stay put.
She appeared at international filk conventions, including Contabile in the UK (1989) and FilkContinental in Germany (1999). I was at that FilkContinental. When she lit a cigarette, I remember the con committee reacting as if she’d lit a bomb fuse.
Her main 12-string guitar, “Monster,” had a sound almost as distinctive as her voice. She said that part of her payment for having it made was to help the maker avoid the draft during the Vietnam years. I don’t know what specifically she did.
Her views were always her own, not repetitions of what she’d gotten from some opinion bubble. Leslie claimed to be the only person who belonged to both the NRA and the IWW. She liked to express herself controversially, so she sometimes got people angry even when her underlying point wasn’t so unreasonable. A big part of the problem is the increasing tendency of people to divide the world into absolute allies and irredeemable enemies. If you disagree on anything, you’re evil. Leslie’s views never neatly fit the orthodoxies of the right or the left. This makes them “problematic,” and many people can’t stand problems.
I have my issues with her. She’s tended to put a lot of blame on Arab conspiracies, more than is reasonable. One of her last Facebook posts referred to Mamdani as an “Islamist,” which is highly inaccurate. Her song “Susan B” presents vigilante murder of accused rapists in a positive light. Another song, not a well-known one, imputes racial guilt to the descendants of the Aztecs. She was seriously wrong about some things. So are other people I know and care about. Maybe I am too.
What’s more important is that she was an enthusiastic musician, a supporter of other musicians, a passionate advocate of justice, and a visionary. She once said, “The ethics I hold, the things I worship, are life, freedom, intelligence, and art, in that order.”
As a friend said on learning about her death, “May we remember her as she was, but may the good outweigh the bad.”
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From Daily Illuminator
December 5, 2025
Leslie Fish, multiple-award-winning singer, songwriter, author, and gadfly, passed away last week.
Leslie and I were friends from conventions decades ago. In more recent years we both traveled less and somewhat fell out of touch, but it was always great when our paths crossed again. When she was talking, I listened and argued; that was fun. When she was singing, I shut up and just listened.
I hardly know which of her talents to praise first. As a performer, she was equally comfortable in front of a big audience and in a small filk circle – and either way, she gave her all. As a composer and lyricist, her range went from the raunchy lyrics and catchy hook of "Banned on Argo" to the soaring "Hope Eyrie." It could be argued that she invented filksinging. If she didn't invent it, she gave it wings.
Leslie was a libertarian in the old small-L sense (on the few days, that is, when she wasn't a flat-out anarchist). She was a card-carrying member of the Industrial Workers of the World and a Second Amendment absolutist. She read Kipling and set his poems to music. She bred her cats for intelligence – which probably made her a danger to humanity, but I digress. She wrote fiction on original themes, she wrote mock-scholarly articles, and she wrote Trekfic (including one of the first K/S stories published). She did LARPs and SCA. There was no one box big enough to contain all Leslie Fish's passions, talents, and beliefs.
Oh, and she was also a Car Wars fan, which would have endeared her to me even if she couldn't sing a note.
Gonna miss her.
-- Steve Jackson
PS – Much of Leslie's music is out of print. However, Prometheus Music offers several of her albums, and the sample tracks on their site will let you hear her voice.
Comments
> Her song “Susan B”…
anonymous (not verified) Thu, 12/25/2025 - 12:42
> Her song “Susan B” presents vigilante murder of accused rapists in a positive light.
That's mostly unobjectionable. Kill your local rapist is good politics, IMO, if the accusations are true. The state won't do anything.
Racism, not so great. And when combined with a careless approach to KYLR, you reinvent lynching.
Anyway, she sounds like an interesting person. She sounds like the kind of friend who always pisses you off but you still care for. I have a lot of those it seems. I'm sorry you have one fewer. Thanks for telling us about her.
"She liked to express…
anonymous (not verified) Fri, 12/26/2025 - 07:28
"She liked to express herself controversially, so she sometimes got people angry even when her underlying point wasn’t so unreasonable. A big part of the problem is the increasing tendency of people to divide the world into absolute allies and irredeemable enemies."
some of my best friends... well, and me. damn.
As is frequently the case…
anonymous (not verified) Fri, 12/26/2025 - 12:59
As is frequently the case with obituaries here, your subculture is so hermetically walled-off from the larger world outside that you can't be bothered to give the deceased individual's dates of birth and death. This involves some extremely rudimentary communication skills.
aw, poor thing. here's a…
anonymous (not verified) Fri, 12/26/2025 - 14:39
In reply to As is frequently the case… by anonymous (not verified)
aw, poor thing. here's a link for you and your broken fingers...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Fish
you're welcome!
The mountain will never come…
anonymous (not verified) Sat, 12/27/2025 - 14:33
In reply to aw, poor thing. here's a… by anonymous (not verified)
The mountain will never come to Mohammed, and you and your consumer society subculture are not Mohammed.
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