The Filk Hall of Fame honors those who have contributed to filk over the years as performers, organizers, and facilitators. New inductees are announced annually during FilKONtario. 

The inductees for 2025 are:

• T.J. and Mitchell Burnside Clapp
• Eric Coleman and Lizzie Crowe

Their Hall of Fame citations follow the jump.

T.J. and Mitchell Burnside Clapp

T.J. and Mitchell are one of the filk community’s best-known couples and have over 80 years of fan and filk experience between them. 

T.J.’s involvement in fandom and filk, dates back to 1975 when she attended Star Trek conventions like August Party and Shore Leave. Despite only being in her teens, she immediately began publishing a fanzine (Fesarius) and writing con reports. Singing, songwriting and performing followed soon after.

With Linda Melnick and Sheila Willis, T.J. formed Technical Difficulties, one of the first filk groups (and all-women filk groups at that). Their close harmonies, their arrangements of classic songs like Julia Ecklar’s “Ladyhawke”, and their own compositions set a standard of excellence and served as an inspiration to other groups that followed them. Their two recordings Please Stand by and Station Break set a high standard for the time and remain among the best recordings produced in the community.  They drew people into filk music with their polished performances.

T.J. holds two individual Pegasus Awards for “Lullaby for a Weary World” and “Weekend-Only World” and a Best Performer Pegasus with Technical Difficulties. She’s also been nominated for Best Writer/Composer and for her song “I’m Robin Hood”.

Mitchell is an engineer and rocket scientist who discovered filk in the 1980’s, starting with Marcon, while stationed at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio. He is possibly best known for the classic parody “Falling Down on New Jersey” which won the Best Classic Filk Song Pegasus, 2007. Other notable songs include the original “Red Star Rising” a truly ominous song which was nominated Best Song in1989; and “Spies” (to the tune of “Lies”), which he claims has a secret verse he was only able to sing once, to Jordin Kare, while in a SCIF (sensitive compartmented information facility). He also won a Best Performer Pegasus in 1990, and has other nominations including twice for Best Writer/Composer.

T.J. and Mitchell have performed at many conventions and been guests for several: including the first Concertino in 1992 (the second NEFilk convention ever) and Conflikt 9. They were Toastmasters for OVFF 26 and Contata 7 and guests of Honour at GaFilk 2025. Their children have carried on the family musical tradition and have joined T.J. and Mitchell on stage on occasion.

For many years T J and Mitchell performed separately.  More recently they have begun to write and perform together. The outcome is delightful.

For these contributions to filk music and the filk community, T J and Michell Burnside Clapp are inducted into the Filk Hall of  Fame, this third day of April, two thousand twenty five.

Eric Coleman and Lizzie Crowe

Eric Coleman got his performance starts in punk music and standup comedy. He was singing, songwriting, playing guitar and drums, and hanging out with a series of punk bands in Iowa before settling into playing at a seven-year stretch of open mikes, coffeehouses, folk festivals, and science fiction conventions. His song “Bang My Bald Spot” was played multiple times on The Dr. Demento Show during this time. In 2007 Daniel “gundo” Gunderson acted on Eric’s suggestion of a “hard rock filk band” and formed the band Toyboat, with which Eric played drums until hand ailments and surgeries forced him to stop in 2012. While Eric was a member, Toyboat was nominated twice for a Best Performer Pegasus Award.

Meanwhile, Lizzie Crowe was growing up in a literary and musical household, starting to write two novels and composing a piano piece by the age of 17. In college she worked at a bookstore and built basic websites to pay for her primary hobbies: Star Wars and Sailor Moon fandom and Renaissance reenactment. As a member of Shire Cuil Choluim in the SCA’s Kingdom of the Middle, she discovered madrigals and briefly became a Soprano of the Realm before moving to Chicago. There, S. J. “Sooj” Tucker persuaded her to attend science fiction conventions and introduced her to filk.

Eric had been writing music that wasn’t a good fit for Toyboat and that he didn’t feel he could do justice to as a singer. After hearing Lizzie’s amazing voice at a Windycon 2009 open filk, he asked her to join him onstage at Capricon 2010 to sing some of this material. Thus began a personal relationship between them that led to their marriage and a musical relationship that led to the formation of their filk duo, Cheshire Moon. The duo  recorded four albums and two EPs of “mythpunk”-style filk, have been guests at many filk and SF conventions. In 2014 they won two Pegasus Awards; Best Filk Song for “Snow White, Red Road”, and Best Performer. They have no comparator within the filk community; their originality is a rare and beautiful thing

Significantly, in 2018 Eric founded the weekly FilkCast song podcast, which has allowed listeners around the world to hear live and studio filk recordings from the last half-century, many of which are so badly out of print that they would be considered “unobtainium”. For over six years and almost 300 bi-weekly episodes at the time of this writing, Eric and Lizzie have been hosting FilkCast and bringing a huge swath of the collective filk songbook to members of the global filk community who would otherwise not have an opportunity to hear it.

For these contributions to filk music and the filk community, Eric Coleman and Lizzie Crowe are inducted into the Filk Hall of Fame this fifth day of April, two thousand and twenty-five.