Frank Hayes mounts the stage at the Clarion Hotel in Dublin, Ohio. He faces an audience of more than 300 people, some in medieval attire, others wearing tech-company schwag. The 50-year-old singer with thick glasses and a salt-and-épepper goatee strums his acoustic guitar and launches into his signature song, a paean to the good old days:
When I was a boy, all our networks
Were for hauling in fish from the sea
Our baud rate was eight bits an hour
(but she was worth it!)
And our IP address was 3.
And you kids who complain
That the World Wide Web
Is too slow oughtta cut out your bitchin',
'Cause when I was a boy every packet
Was delivered by carrier pigeon …
Hayes is the guest of honor at the 21st annual Ohio Valley Filk Fest, held in October. Filk music grew out of late-night song swaps at early sci-fi conventions. (Supposedly, its name originated in a misprint of folk in a fanzine.) A typical filk song features a guitar-toting nerd performing a familiar tune with lyrics retooled to celebrate everything from Doctor Who to the Unix operating system.
Hayes is a columnist for Computerworld who writes about CRM software and Microsoft's Longhorn OS for an audience of IT professionals. But he's also the Grand Old Man of filk. He started performing at cons in the 1970s. Since then, he's racked up four Pegasus awards - the filk equivalent of a Grammy - for funny, off-kilter tunes like "Never Set the Cat on Fire":
Don't start an interstellar war;
it has no helpful uses.
When someone asks you,
"What's it for?"
you'll only make excuses.
If 30 trillion folks get hurt,
you'll go to bed with no dessert!
He's so beloved that there are dozens of parodies of his songs. (One is called "Never Set Frank Hayes on Fire.") He also has die-hard fans in NASA: Hayes' song "Cosmos" (about Carl Sagan's PBS series) has twice been played to awaken astronauts on Hubble Space Telescope missions.
"Filk is a tribe," says Juanita Coulson, who's been filking since the 1950s, when she set Robert Heinlein lyrics to music. Her subculture is "patiently kind to those who want to participate but are seriously short on musical ability," Coulson says. "As an outsider commented after observing us in action, 'You people must like each other!'" Hayes is beloved despite his everyman singing voice and a tendency to forget the melodies and lyrics of his own songs (a condition that fans have affectionately dubbed Frank Hayes disease).
"A lot of us are social misfits and don't know how to talk to people," says Tom Smith, an affable, bearded mountain of a man. "This is how we do it." Smith is known as the world's fastest filker. To prove it, he removes his guitar from a case covered with Geek Speak and Dr. Demento stickers, and composes a ditty:
I'm writing this for Alanna Nash.
She's working for Wired;
they're paying her cash.
I hope her interview will include me.
I hope that they'll put me on page 23!
Smith actually ekes out a living writing songs on demand and selling CDs. Frank Hayes' works are also sold online and at conventions, but he isn't quitting his day job anytime soon. "How much money have I made over the years? Maybe in the low four digits."
Hayes sees the filk scene as thriving in some ways, pointing to filk.com's 24-hour Internet radio station. But he says it's fading as well. "What I don't see much of is kids in college or just out of college doing it. Maybe they've moved on to anime."
- Alanna Nash
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