[Announce] Fw: Folksinger, Storyteller, Railroad Tramp, Friend of Cathoilic Workers Utah Phillips Dead at 73

[Robert Waldrop]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Frank Cordaro" <frank.cordaro at gmail.com>
http://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 
Korea 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, California 95945 (530) 
271-7144
www.hospitalityhouseshelter.org


Jordan Fisher Smith and Molly Fisk

-----------------------

Molly Fisk, 530.277.4686 molly at mollyfisk.com 
Jordan
Fisher Smith 530.277.3087 jordanfs at gv.net


Word document here:
http://www.utahphillips.org/utahphillipsdeadat73.doc
PDF version:
http://www.utahphillips.org/utahphillipsdeadat73.pdf
http://www.utahphillips.org

"Feed the people! Stop the killing! Do it NOW! " 
Julian Beck