to filk or not to filk, part 2

[calimac]

So I was recounting how filkers got tired of "Banned from Argo", although it was the best filksong ever. They even began denying that they had ever liked it. Leslie Fish, its author and composer, has been telling a story for many years now that she always detested the song and sang it only under duress, and that story appears in Gary McGath's history of filking.

All I can say is that, if Leslie felt that way when I knew her, she did an awfully good job of disguising it. Everybody loved that song, and I mean everybody. Yes, we had it only once per filking session, usually at the end, but that's because we were saving up the best for last, like a fine wine.

So let me tell you about Leslie Fish. She was the household idol, the resident goddess, of Bay Area filking, long before any of us had ever met her. We loved all her songs, not just That One, and they formed a major part of our repertoire. Her name is, I think, the most frequent on the contents pages of The Westerfilk Collection. So she knew she had some fans out here.

And the person who should be thanked for discovering her for us was a local filker named Amy Bradley (then Falkowitz), the Unknown Hero of local filking. Amy was a proto-filker, someone who brought a guitar to parties and sang with it back when few people did that. It was Amy's guitar that played at that germinal party at Octocon where regular Bay Area filking was founded.

Amy was also a dedicated Trekfan at a time when that was still not really common in fandom. I believe she had attended smaller fannish Trekcons in New York state, which is where Leslie hung out and sang her Trek and space-exploration songs. Amy certainly had Leslie's albums, she knew the songs, and she sang them regularly. There may have been other locals who knew their Fish independently, but I heard all those early songs first from Amy.

It was accordingly a Big Deal when the Off Centaur crew announced that they'd gotten Leslie Fish, herself and in person, to attend our first local filkcon, Bayfilk I. (McGath says Margaret Middleton was the GoH, but I don't think that's right. But my paperwork from those days is buried deeply.) Leslie herself has written (about 3/4 down this page) about how thrilled she was to be invited and appreciated, and how she ran back to New York to pack her stuff and move out here permanently.

We were just as excited. I remember being among the people gathered at the house - I don't recall whose, probably Cathy Cook's - where Leslie was to stay before the con, when she arrived from the airport. The door opened and in walked this gaunt, gravel-voiced, chain-smoking woman with black hair and a pale complexion, and we all tried to keep calm and not goshwowoboyoboy our way around the room. And the con was terrific. Leslie's 12-string guitar and her ever-increasing songbook, especially of Kipling settings, became a central part of our world. There were other talented singer-songwriters in our filking circles, notably Cynthia McQuillin (McGath says she was from LA, but I don't recall Cindy living there in my time; certainly for quite a while she was up here), but Leslie was supreme.

A couple other miscellaneous points on the history of filking from that period:

Bardic Circles - I could have told McGath the origin of this term. ("Pick, pass, or perform," the alternate terminology, either comes from an independent invention of the procedure, or else was concocted by someone who felt the term "Bardic circle" was too opaque for neos.) It comes from the poetry readings that Paul Edwin Zimmer, a poet who evoked the character of a bard of old, used to host at his home, Greyhaven, and also at SF cons that he attended. (Though Paul is long gone, we still have them at Mythcons.) At these the procedure was to go around the circle, and each person would either recite a poem or decline; there was no picking someone else, and singing was discouraged. But when we started the Bay Area housefilks and the question came up of how we would choose who would go next, someone who'd been to Greyhaven - possibly me - suggested we adopt the procedure of the Bardic Circles, and a filking term was born.

Ose - McGath says the catchphrase is "ose and morose." That's not how we said it in the Bay Area. With us, it was always "ose, ose, and morose," with "morose" pronounced clearly as "more ose." McGath attaches the style to Bill Roper. We knew some of Roper's songs, but at the time not him personally: for us "ose" meant Gary Anderson. A cheerful guy whom everybody liked, Gary nevertheless invariably contributed to filk sessions long, grim, morbid northlands ballads which he would mumble in an out-of-key monotone. Nobody really understood this habit, and gently mocking them as ose, ose, and morose was our way of handling this.

There's lots else I could discuss.
The Off Centaur house in El Cerrito: in the early years they didn't have that. Everyone moved around frequently back then. When we started, Teri Lee was still in an apartment in the Richmond Annex flatlands that she'd filled to bursting with her spinning.
I should mention the Westerfilk Collection art. Much of it was by Don Simpson, and highly apropos for the songs it illustrates, but none of it was drawn for the book. Don lacked the time, and possibly the inclination, to draw to order. But he let us paw through his huge collection of random drawings and take anything we wanted. It's amazing how many perfect fits we found. The rest of the art, including the cover, was by Wendy Rose, a Native American friend of Teri's, and that was commissioned for the book. Wendy occasionally came to filksings, and I remember having to explain to her what Leslie Fish's "Hope Eyrie" was about. (Here's Julia Ecklar singing Leslie's greatest space-exploration song.)
Speaking of Julia Ecklar, McGath mentions her becoming known at Capricon in 1981. That may have made her name locally in Chicago; she burst upon filkdom in general at the Chicago Worldcon the next year when she blew everyone's socks off with her adaptation of Stephen King's Firestarter, "Daddy's Little Girl." Julia was the first of a whole breed of talented singer-songwriters who found filk a small pond where they could be big enough fish (ahem) to be appreciated, instead of knocking their heads and pounding their feet in the coldness of the music biz. They did change the nature of filk, but their work certainly enriched it.

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Very early Mythcons singing was not discouraged at Bardic Circles, that I do remember.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

The first I went to was in 1976. Paul was still holding them privately in his room them. There was very little singing, though there always was some. So it didn't need to be discouraged; the question of thinking that a Bardic circle was for singing rather than poetry never came up.

But as the term "Bardic circle" came to be known in filking years later, some attendees presumed that that's what the term meant at Mythcon too, and Paul took to cautioning people that a Bardic circle as he had created it was a poetry reading and not a filksing. Songs were never prohibited, but it had to be made clear that singing per se was not what we'd come to do.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I just remember singing at Bardic Circles at Mythcons 1 and 2. I didn't go to 3, and after that I didn't attend them as they went too late at night and I couldn't keep awake.

[nellorat.livejournal.com]

Very interesting to read.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Is "Hope Eyrie" an original melody, or is there a folk song to which Leslie Fish wrote her words? That is a really catchy melody!

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Original. Leslie's brilliant melodic gift is a highlight. Besides setting her own verses, as here, she produced dozens of original settings of Kipling poems, all of them also terrific.

But of all her serious songs, this was the finest.

[mneme]

I didn't know that you were involved in earlyish filk! Very informative.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

If I'd realized you didn't know, I'd have mentioned it to you long since. I've tended to assume that The Westerfilk Collection is still remembered, and my name is on that.

The other thing in filking I did that seems to be best remembered, though this time without my name on it, is writing a set of parody lyrics called 'Filkers Dining Together.'

[mneme]

Westerfilk is still remembered, but hymnal singing was on its way out even in the '90s, so I've not spent that much time with it in my hands.

I'm not sure whether I've heard the (much mutated, it seems) "Filkers dining together" story.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

"hymnal singing was on its way out even in the '90s"

What does that mean? Does that mean group singing has been deprecated? Pity. I like attending concerts (solo or group) by singer-songwriters, I like it a whole lot when they're good, but it's its own thing and not filking.

In my day I'd say there was a roughly even mix of three things: hymnal singing, older songs delivered solo which people who knew them might join in on the choruses of, and performance pieces by the better singer/guitarists, often originals, to which people were often asked not to join in.

[mneme]

If by "group singing" you mean gathering in a group and taking turns (ish) singing, very, very much not. The filksing is the heart of filking, and is likely to remain so (although I'd argue that the "Main Concert" as practised at the British Filkcon, where the one shots become a central communication medium of their own, is very much filking and not just "attending concerts". And that absolutely includes people leading songs that nearly everyone knows and nearly everyone sings along with.

But people are much, much less likely to sing from a single hymnal, which most people have, these days. The closest I've seen to that recently was the Conflikt (the Pacific Northwest filkcon) "Songbook sing" -- where they invite authors of songs in that year's songbook to come and lead group singing of the songs out of the songbook. I won't say that they haven't been on the schedule occasionally and I've missed them, but even the hymnals themselves are much less seen in this decade.

Instead, people are much more likely to have a personal songbook (which will have some popular songs they like), and/or an internet connected device (on which might also be stored an electronic songbook). So when one of the old favorites comes out--an old old favorite like Ship of Stone, Hope Eyrie, or a newer old favorite like Acts of Creation, Uplift, or Rocket Ride--people will download, open, or otherwise pull out a copy of the lyrics (sometimes from memory) and sing along.

One thing not in your triad is people singing or jammming along with songs that aren't "old favorites" -- something I've certainly seen becoming more common (particularly on the East Coast) over the years, as musicianship got higher on the high end and even midrange, so the result became less "playing along" or "singing along" and more "making something new with harmony."

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

No, by group singing I do not mean taking turns. That's the group-concert format I contrasted it with. By group singing I mean the entire group singing a song together. That's what you need a hymnal (or equivalent) for, so that everyone will have the words handy.

We had personal songbooks then too. I'd photocopied things out of the Nesfa and Hopsfa hymnals that I really liked, added obscure songs not of filkish origin that I liked to sing, added in lyrics whose writers had passed copies around, etc., and put them in a binder.

I can't remember for sure who it was, but I think it was Bob Laurent who had the biggest personal binder ever seen in our group. It was about 3 feet long, the covers and rods were metal, and it sat on a stand. Supposedly it had every filksong ever written and every other song likely to be heard at a filk. It would of course have had to grow massively very quickly to keep that distinction up, but nowadays you could fit it in your pocket. Good to hear that people are doing that sort of thing now.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Oh - we didn't do jam sessions of the kind you describe in your last paragraph in west coast filking in those days. Our people just didn't have that skill set, or perhaps the interest. It was known to occur in the midwest, though, particularly Mpls.

[ravan]

I was there for the breakfast the song was about. Gods those times were fun.