Meeting Leslie Fish: Filk Singer and Musician Extraordinaire

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I first heard music by Leslie Fish the summer my ex brought home a collection of boot-leg audio cassettes from a convention. The tapes were in terrible condition—scratchy, poorly recorded, with a hiccup or two where some player or other had eaten the tapes. He inserted the tape I would later learn was “Skybound”, Fish’s tribute to Star Trek, and asked, “Is that a man or a woman singing?”

I listened carefully. The voice was raspy and bore a strong resemblance to a whiskey tenor. The r’s were strong and the diction good. The guitar-work (the only accompaniment on the tape) was excellent. “Woman,” I decided, having recently covered vocal intonation in my speech pathology class. “There’s no timbre.”

Woman, indeed. Activist, anarchist, gun ownership advocate, song advocate for the Industrial Workers of the World—in song and on paper she sounds fierce.

Six years, a bachelor’s degree, a divorce, and a second husband later, I had the opportunity to meet her in person. She was a lot smaller than I had anticipated. Standing about 5-foot-2, she was dressed in black leather pants. She had long, dark hair that she wore tucked into a head-band—the cloth, hair-out-of-the-face kind, not the around-the-head hippie kind. She was filk guest-of-honor at OKON 1988.

OKon, or the Oklahoma Science Fiction Convention, ran for 15 years. It was sponsored by a Star Trek fan group based in Tulsa, Oklahoma. For those of you who have never been fortunate enough to attend a good science fiction convention, it should have lots of authors, a game room, a movie room, a con-suite (where they stash the goodies), a dealers room (where people sell every thing from Automatons to Zodiac jewelry, and a LOT of stuff in between), an art room, story-telling and LOTS of music.

OKON 1988 had a pretty much all-star cast: Diana Gallagher and her daughter, Suzette Haden Elgin, Randy Farran, Elizabeth Moon (an author, not a singer), R.A. Lafferty (another author), and Leslie Fish—just to name a few. A semi-formal filk-concert was scheduled for the first day. Fish took her place on the stage quietly with her 12-string guitar, Monster, thanking the gofer for the whiskey and ice she had requested. She started off her portion of the evening’s entertainment with a rendition of “The last Vampire song”. (I think that’s right—it has been a long while since those days.)