quote:

For the first few decades of the occasional science fiction convention, there had been late-night singing sessions in hotel rooms. Part of this practice may have been rooted in an older folk culture of fans. Some of the oldest filks coming out of fandom were protest songs with original words and music written by a group of New York fans called The Futurians, and were written by Fred Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth (see Damon Knight's book of the same name, which contains the words and music to several of them). With the break up of the city clubs common during the Great Depression, filking moved to science fiction conventions, often in the form of late-night singing sessions in hotel rooms, lobbies, service passages, or wherever else the filkers could find enough room to play/sing music uninterrupted.