Leigh Ann Hussey
May. 17th, 2006 10:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacKilled Tuesday evening when her motorcycle crashed. This was on the freeway twelve miles west of Altamont, site of another musical tragedy. This one will be remembered just as long. Here's the cold details. Leigh Ann was a supremely talented musician who worked in the electric folk realm, especially notable for her fiddling. She was also one of the most vital and interesting people I've ever known, a forceful reminder that the world is full of different folks, and of how wonderful it is that you can make friends with them.
When I first met her, she was in her bathrobe. This was at Greyhaven, the fantasy writers' house in Berkeley. It's a large house with many residents both permanent and temporary, a place where it's not at all unusual to visit and find complete strangers making themselves at home. On this occasion I was there one evening for a planning meeting for the 1984 Mythcon, when a young woman in a bathrobe wandered, yawning, into the room. She called herself Siobhan. When she found out we were planning a conference to study myth and fantasy literature and that I was its scholarly-papers coordinator, she perked up. On a subsequent visit she proudly handed me a paper on the medieval Welsh poem The Battle of the Trees, formally bylined Leigh Ann Hussey.
At Mythcon, Siobhan was lively and active. She read her paper, reciting chunks of the original in Welsh. She played the heroine of Diana Paxson's play, "The Wood Witch," whose cast featured many MythSoc stalwarts. She wrote a Mythcon report to the tune of "The Rawtenstall Annual Fair." When I remember that particular Mythcon, it's primarily her presence that comes to mind.
Over the next few years Leigh Ann dropped the "Siobhan" and poured herself into a series of interests. After Ursula K. Le Guin's Always Coming Home was published the next year, she became a devoted fan of the book and a remarkable expert in Kesh culture, particularly its music and drama: so much so that when we held Mythcon again in 1988 with Le Guin as GoH and I chaired, I appointed Leigh Ann entertainments coordinator under the title "Kesh consultant" and let her rip. Le Guin was fascinated by our plans, which resulted in one committee meeting where I handed the astonished Leigh Ann a slip of paper with a phone number on it and said, "Ursula wants you to call her."
Leigh Ann threw herself into this Mythcon as she had the previous one. With her then-husband David Oster (whom I think she had first met at that previous Mythcon) she designed Kesh-style name badges, made Kesh musical instruments and led the opening procession with them, helped Todd Barton lead the chanting of heya, and put on a production of a short play from the book, "The Plumed Water," a ritual celebrating the Calistoga geyser. On the day after the con, a number of us rented a small van and toured the Valley of the Na, the book's setting. Leigh Ann was our party's expert in all the local botany as well as Kesh lore. We finished up at the geyser and found it, luckily for us, erupting. This is not Old Faithful where you have to keep a quarter-mile away; you can go right up to this geyser and stand under the fringes of the spray. Unusually, the geyser kept on going, and Leigh Ann pulled out a copy of Always Coming Home and quickly organized another whole reading of the play. The geyser didn't stop until after we were finished.
In the next few years, as I recall, Leigh Ann's interests were mostly Wiccan. She appeared on a few "science vs. magic" convention panels arguing forcefully for a pagan view of the universe, but her most creative work in this field was musical. If Christians had hymns and carols, why shouldn't Wiccans? So she collected a lot of folksongs suitable for the purpose and started writing her own, and recorded them on tape. I have a couple of these cassettes; here's one called The Homebrewed Book of Pagan Carols, Volume 1: Winter. There were songbooks too.
Some of this stuff was really good, and soon enough Leigh Ann formed a Celtic folk band called the Daoine Sidhe, notable for their sizzling performance of "Follow Me Up to Carlow." They also did some excellent Steeleye Span covers. At one performance of "Twa Corbies," Leigh Ann joked about an alternate version, "Twa Corgies," and I remember her laughter when I suggested that the band for that version should be Steeleye Spaniel. Leigh Ann wrote many of the songs, sang them in a powerful mezzo, and played fiddle and pennywhistle with increasing mastery.
The other principal figure in the Sidhe was Elton Wildermuth (song-writer, singer, and guitarist), and he and Leigh Ann stayed together as the center of a frequently-changing cast of musicians as the Sidhe changed their name to Annwn and slowly mutated into a Celtic-influenced rock band a la Avalon Rising (in Annwn's first CD, The Lovers Enchained) and then returned part of the way and became an electric-folk band (their second, Come Away to the Hills). In those days I was going to every gig of theirs I could get to. Later on they moved slightly in a punk direction (Anarchy and Rapture) and I kind of lost interest. Then Annwn folded altogether, I never found out why, and it's been several years since I've seen Leigh Ann. The band's self-published label website is still around, but frustratingly all the CDs are apparently out of print, dammit. Too bad: Come Away to the Hills is a masterpiece of its kind. It features two of Leigh Ann's best songs: "The Red Queen," a tribute to pirate-queen Anne Bonney featuring a tricky but lively audience-participation clapping part, and "The Bard's Exhortation to the Salaryman," a beautiful paean to the love of nature from whence the album's title (and a brilliant cover photo):
When I first met her, she was in her bathrobe. This was at Greyhaven, the fantasy writers' house in Berkeley. It's a large house with many residents both permanent and temporary, a place where it's not at all unusual to visit and find complete strangers making themselves at home. On this occasion I was there one evening for a planning meeting for the 1984 Mythcon, when a young woman in a bathrobe wandered, yawning, into the room. She called herself Siobhan. When she found out we were planning a conference to study myth and fantasy literature and that I was its scholarly-papers coordinator, she perked up. On a subsequent visit she proudly handed me a paper on the medieval Welsh poem The Battle of the Trees, formally bylined Leigh Ann Hussey.
At Mythcon, Siobhan was lively and active. She read her paper, reciting chunks of the original in Welsh. She played the heroine of Diana Paxson's play, "The Wood Witch," whose cast featured many MythSoc stalwarts. She wrote a Mythcon report to the tune of "The Rawtenstall Annual Fair." When I remember that particular Mythcon, it's primarily her presence that comes to mind.
Over the next few years Leigh Ann dropped the "Siobhan" and poured herself into a series of interests. After Ursula K. Le Guin's Always Coming Home was published the next year, she became a devoted fan of the book and a remarkable expert in Kesh culture, particularly its music and drama: so much so that when we held Mythcon again in 1988 with Le Guin as GoH and I chaired, I appointed Leigh Ann entertainments coordinator under the title "Kesh consultant" and let her rip. Le Guin was fascinated by our plans, which resulted in one committee meeting where I handed the astonished Leigh Ann a slip of paper with a phone number on it and said, "Ursula wants you to call her."
Leigh Ann threw herself into this Mythcon as she had the previous one. With her then-husband David Oster (whom I think she had first met at that previous Mythcon) she designed Kesh-style name badges, made Kesh musical instruments and led the opening procession with them, helped Todd Barton lead the chanting of heya, and put on a production of a short play from the book, "The Plumed Water," a ritual celebrating the Calistoga geyser. On the day after the con, a number of us rented a small van and toured the Valley of the Na, the book's setting. Leigh Ann was our party's expert in all the local botany as well as Kesh lore. We finished up at the geyser and found it, luckily for us, erupting. This is not Old Faithful where you have to keep a quarter-mile away; you can go right up to this geyser and stand under the fringes of the spray. Unusually, the geyser kept on going, and Leigh Ann pulled out a copy of Always Coming Home and quickly organized another whole reading of the play. The geyser didn't stop until after we were finished.
In the next few years, as I recall, Leigh Ann's interests were mostly Wiccan. She appeared on a few "science vs. magic" convention panels arguing forcefully for a pagan view of the universe, but her most creative work in this field was musical. If Christians had hymns and carols, why shouldn't Wiccans? So she collected a lot of folksongs suitable for the purpose and started writing her own, and recorded them on tape. I have a couple of these cassettes; here's one called The Homebrewed Book of Pagan Carols, Volume 1: Winter. There were songbooks too.
Some of this stuff was really good, and soon enough Leigh Ann formed a Celtic folk band called the Daoine Sidhe, notable for their sizzling performance of "Follow Me Up to Carlow." They also did some excellent Steeleye Span covers. At one performance of "Twa Corbies," Leigh Ann joked about an alternate version, "Twa Corgies," and I remember her laughter when I suggested that the band for that version should be Steeleye Spaniel. Leigh Ann wrote many of the songs, sang them in a powerful mezzo, and played fiddle and pennywhistle with increasing mastery.
The other principal figure in the Sidhe was Elton Wildermuth (song-writer, singer, and guitarist), and he and Leigh Ann stayed together as the center of a frequently-changing cast of musicians as the Sidhe changed their name to Annwn and slowly mutated into a Celtic-influenced rock band a la Avalon Rising (in Annwn's first CD, The Lovers Enchained) and then returned part of the way and became an electric-folk band (their second, Come Away to the Hills). In those days I was going to every gig of theirs I could get to. Later on they moved slightly in a punk direction (Anarchy and Rapture) and I kind of lost interest. Then Annwn folded altogether, I never found out why, and it's been several years since I've seen Leigh Ann. The band's self-published label website is still around, but frustratingly all the CDs are apparently out of print, dammit. Too bad: Come Away to the Hills is a masterpiece of its kind. It features two of Leigh Ann's best songs: "The Red Queen," a tribute to pirate-queen Anne Bonney featuring a tricky but lively audience-participation clapping part, and "The Bard's Exhortation to the Salaryman," a beautiful paean to the love of nature from whence the album's title (and a brilliant cover photo):
Come away to the hillsMay that be Leigh Ann's legacy, and may we take her advice to the healing of our hearts' ills today.
Come away where the wine of life distills
To the healing of your heart's ills
Come away, come away.
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no subject
Date: 2006-05-17 05:18 pm (UTC)I've been waiting for someone to post something with content and feeling, and especially something about the music. This helps.
I remember that gig
Date: 2006-05-31 07:43 am (UTC)G
no subject
Date: 2006-05-17 06:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-17 08:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-17 10:35 pm (UTC)DAMN.
no subject
Date: 2006-05-17 11:48 pm (UTC)We are reaching the age, me and thee, where more and more of our friends are going to start leaving us forever and irrevocably... I hadn't seen or communicated with LAH in several years, and now I wish I had, and it's too late. I tend to think people will "always" be there. They won't.
no subject
Date: 2006-05-18 03:21 pm (UTC)Surfing for a little info on Leigh Ann, I came across a review of Anarchy and Rapture that said it was funk-influenced. Maybe it is. The fact that I probably couldn't tell the difference between funk-influenced and punk-influenced is merely a marker of my profound ignorance in certain fields of music.
no subject
Date: 2006-05-18 05:13 pm (UTC)I hate this whole mortality thing.
no subject
Date: 2006-05-18 10:24 pm (UTC)