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Utah
Phillips
1935-2008
The
music and activist communities lost one of our own this past month
when Utah Phillips died May 23,2008 of congestive heart failure.
He was 73. For decades, Phillips has been a steadfast supporter
of peace groups and labor unions, singing and storytelling his
way through the world. His words and voice - at once heartwarming,
funny, observant and challenging to the status quo - are some
of the best out there. Daemon Records had the honor of releasing
some of Phillips's work, which you can find below.
For more information about Utah Phillips, please visit www.utahphillips.org.
"Folksinger,
Storyteller, Railroad Tramp Utah Phillips Dead at 73"
Nevada City, California
Utah
Phillips, a seminal figure in American folk music who performed
extensively and tirelessly for audiences on two continents for
38 years, died Friday of congestive heart failure in Nevada City,
California, a small town in the Sierra Nevada mountains where
he lived for the last 21 years with his wife, Joanna Robinson,
a freelance editor.
Born
Bruce Duncan Phillips on May 15, 1935 in Cleveland, Ohio, he was
the son of labor organizers. Whether through this early influence
or an early life that was not always tranquil or easy, by his
twenties Phillips demonstrated a lifelong concern with the living
conditions of working people. He was a proud member of the Industrial
Workers of the World, popularly known as "the Wobblies,"
an organizational artifact of early twentieth-century labor struggles
that has seen renewed interest and growth in membership in the
last decade, not in small part due to his efforts to popularize
it.
Phillips
served as an Army private during the Korean War, an experience
he would later refer to as the turning point of his life. Deeply
affected by the devastation and human misery he had witnessed,
upon his return to the United States he began drifting, riding
freight trains around the country. His struggle would be familiar
today, when the difficulties of returning combat veterans are
more widely understood, but in the late fifties Phillips was left
to work them out for himself. Destitute and drinking, Phillips
got off a freight train in Salt Lake City and wound up at the
Joe Hill House, a homeless shelter operated by the anarchist Ammon
Hennacy, a member of the Catholic Worker movement and associate
of Dorothy Day.
Phillips
credited Hennacy and other social reformers he referred to as
his "elders" with having provided a philosophical framework
around which he later constructed songs and stories he intended
as a template his audiences could employ to understand their own
political and working lives. They were often hilarious, sometimes
sad, but never shallow.
"He
made me understand that music must be more than cotton candy for
the ears," said John McCutcheon, a nationally-known folksinger
and close friend. In the creation of his performing persona and
work, Phillips drew from influences as diverse as Borscht Belt
comedian Myron Cohen, folksingers Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger,
and Country stars Hank Williams and T. Texas Tyler.
A
stint as an archivist for the State of Utah in the 1960s taught
Phillips the discipline of historical research; beneath the simplest
and most folksy of his songs was a rigorous attention to detail
and a strong and carefully-crafted narrative structure. He was
a voracious reader in a surprising variety of fields.
Meanwhile,
Phillips was working at Hennacy's Joe Hill house. In 1968 he ran
for a seat in the U.S. Senate on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket.
The race was won by a Republican candidate, and Phillips was seen
by some Democrats as having split the vote. He subsequently lost
his job with the State of Utah, a process he described as "blacklisting."
Phillips
left Utah for Saratoga Springs, New York, where he was welcomed
into a lively community of folk performers centered at the Caffé
Lena, operated by Lena Spencer.
"It
was the coffeehouse, the place to perform. Everybody went there.
She fed everybody," said John "Che" Greenwood,
a fellow performer and friend. Over the span of the nearly four
decades that followed, Phillips worked in what he referred to
as "the Trade," developing an audience of hundreds of
thousands and performing in large and small cities throughout
the United States, Canada, and Europe. His performing partners
included Rosalie Sorrels, Kate Wolf, John McCutcheon and Ani DiFranco.
"He
was like an alchemist," said Sorrels, "He took the stories
of working people and railroad bums and he built them into work
that was influenced by writers like Thomas Wolfe, but then he
gave it back, he put it in language so the people whom the songs
and stories were about still had them, still owned them. He didn't
believe in stealing culture from the people it was about."
A
single from Phillips's first record, "Moose Turd Pie,"
a rollicking story about working on a railroad track gang, saw
extensive airplay in 1973. From then on, Phillips had work on
the road. His extensive writing and recording career included
two albums with Ani DiFranco which earned a Grammy nomination.
Phillips's songs were performed and recorded by Emmylou Harris,
Waylon Jennings, Joan Baez, Tom Waits, Joe Ely and others. He
was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Folk Alliance
in 1997.
Phillips,
something of a perfectionist, claimed that he never lost his stage
fright before performances. He didn't want to lose it, he said,
it kept him improving.
Phillips
began suffering from the effects of chronic heart disease in 2004,
and as his illness kept him off the road at times, he started
a nationally syndicated folk-music radio show, "Loafer's
Glory," produced at KVMR-FM, and started a homeless shelter
in his rural home county, where down-on-their-luck men and women
were sleeping under the manzanita brush at the edge of town. Hospitality
House opened in 2005 and continues to house 25 to 30 guests a
night. In this way, Phillips returned to the work of his mentor
Hennacy in the last four years of his life.
Phillips
died at home, in bed, in his sleep, next to his wife. He is survived
by his son Duncan and daughter-in-law Bobette of Salt Lake City;
son Brendan of Olympia, Washington; daughter Morrigan Belle of
Washington, D.C.; stepson Nicholas Tomb of Monterrey, California;
stepson and daughter-in-law Ian Durfee and Mary Creasey of Davis,
California; brothers David Phillips of Fairfield, California,
Ed Phillips of Cleveland, Ohio and Stuart Cohen of Los Angeles;
sister Deborah Cohen of Lisbon, Portugal; and a grandchild, Brendan.
He was preceded in death by his father Edwin Phillips and mother
Kathleen, and his stepfather, Syd Cohen.
The
family requests memorial donations to Hospitality House, P. O.
Box 3223, Grass Valley, Callifornia 95945, (530) 271-7144, www.hospitalityhouseshelter.org.
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Daemon
Records and AK Press proudly presents
Utah Phillips: Starlight on the Rails: A songbook
Daemon
Records and AK Press have joined together to bring you some of
the most thought provoking, politically charged folk music around.
These following releases are some of the best of the genre and
a must for you collection.
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Starlight on the Rails
A Songbook
Four Discs/61 songs with reflections, 281 minutes,
accompanying 12 page booklet.
$38.00
The
Songs and Stories of U. Utah Phillips
Special Guest Artists:
Kate Wolf, Rosalie Sorrels, Kate Brislin & Jody Stecher,
Finest Kind, Mark Ross, Kendall Morse, and Kuddie.
"Call him a conspicuous enigman; a canny, uncanny blend
of Mark Twain and Will Rogers, with a touch of P.T. Barnum
and more than a hint of Huck Finn. Utah Phillips is also
one of the most important songwriters to be found in North
American"
-Rolling Stone
Also:
Please check out
Utah's release
"I've Got to Know"
available at Daemon.
Utah's
offical site
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Starlight
on the Rails is the culmination of a lifetime as it was
experienced by Utah Phillips. This four disc box set speaks
volumes to the legacy that human beings such as Utah gift
to us, the seekers. If you don’t know him by now,
Starlight on the Rails is your ticket to ride. Or you can
do as Utah did and just jump the train destined for wherever
it is you hop off.
Hello,
Many years ago I worked as a warehouseman in Salt Lake City,
Utah. My employer, Earl M. Lyman, an older man was the great-grandson
of Amasa M. Lyman, one of the apostles of the LDS (Mormon)
Church. I worked at a long table where I wrapped boxes for
shipping from a great roll of brown butcher’s paper
fastened to the end of the counter. When Mr. Lyman was in
the mood, he would hoist himself up onto my table, lean
his back up against the roll of paper, and yarn about the
old Mormon pioneer days: the Nephites, the Morrisites, Mountain
Meadows, Big Bill Hickman. As long as Mr. Lyman was camped
there on my work table yarning, I couldn’t work. That’s
when I learned the value of storytelling. At the end of
the day, I made it my practice to stop by the library, the
Utah Room, and read up on territorial history so that the
next day I would have questions to fuel Mr. Lyman’s
excursions onto a past through which his kin had lived.
I worked very little, but I learned a lot.
Most of all, I asked questions and listened. Storytelling
begins with questioning and listening. That’s what
Elder Lyman taught me, and I have learned the same lesson
again and again-from stranger and friend, whoever happened
to be closest at hand. I’ve sat in the shade of vermillion
cliffs and listened to Father Liebler, the padre of the
San Juan, tell about the Old Navajo ways and sing the Plainsong
using Navajo an Zuni medicine chants. I’ve walked
through mud and rain and a sea of ruins to a bombed out
auditorium in Korea and listened to them debate the proper
Latin translation of "Death Before Employment."
Or again, I have sat listening to Gail I. Gardener, who
wrote "Tying Knots in the Devil’s Tail."
He was 96 when I saw him last, and his voice was like the
wind in the high desert. He talked about horses. In Chicago,
I listened to a concert pianist who lost an arm serving
in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil
War-Ed Belchowski. Through his canny madness and explosive
rants shone a quiet, compassionate intelligence that you
could carry away and learn. I have listened to tramps talk
about trains; street revivalists talk about tramps; booming
workers talk about camps, the mines, the woods; harvest
stiffs (home guards now) talk about old immigrant dreams,
old union dreams, recalled with fire and deep passion. "We
came so close. So close." For eight years I listened
to Ammon Hennacy, anarchist, pacifist, conscientious objector
during two world wars, tax refuser, vegetarian, one-man
revolution in America (which covers it), who ran a house
of hospitality for tramps and migrants in Salt Lake. He
was 70 years old when I met him, and he arranged my brain
when I got back from Korea in such a way that I could survive
the twentieth century and any number of industrial revolutions.
Well, that’s it. I tell stories molded together out
of an inheritance of working class lore-comic, tragic, weird-compounded
equally of love and violence, handed on to me by my elders
because I took the time to ask questions and, most of all,
to listen. In turn, they taught me that my life, each of
our lives, is a story. The most we can hope for is that
in the end it will have been well told. My favorite street
rabbi, Ezra the Scribe, wrote this, which lays out pretty
much what I’m up to:
He is propped upright
In some last, lost corner of his life
Waiting for the only new things left to see.
He cultivates memories
Rich and brown like gardens.
Hardly eighty, his eyes already inward turning,
He has banished himself to worlds of fine, gray dust.
Tonight, wrapped around a chair,
He rolls another damp cigarette
And sends those blue clouds
On their familiar reach
Into the bag of weathered yarns.
And like some deft and protosplasmic being,
Turns himself inside out
to feed on the silence that is me.
Thanks for listening.
-Utah
 Utah
on "Yuba City" (MP3)
Yuba
City (MP3)
Utah
on "Talking N.P.R Blues" (MP3)
Talking
N.P.R. Blues (MP3)
Utah on "Old Buddy, Goodnight" (MP3)
Old
Buddy, Goodnight (MP3)
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