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.”