My girlfriend just sent me this via e-mail. A life lived well?
U. Utah Phillips, a Grammy-nominated folksinger, rabble-rouser and
anarchist whose wild white beard re-called his years as a tramp, died
of heart disease May 23 at his home in Nevada City, Calif. He was 73.
Phillips, who over four decades on the road combined storytelling with
song, described the plight of the work-ing class, the power of labor
unions and the necessity of direct action. He dubbed himself the
"Golden Voice of the Great Southwest," but his words, more than his
baritone voice, carried authority; he had been a soldier, railroader,
state archivist, union organizer, founder of a homeless shelter and
homeless himself.
He recorded the oft-overlooked value of rubber pockets, a necessity
when stealing soup. His tall tale "Gaffing" was a rich illustration of
populist scams. He honored the likes of Hood River Blackie and Fry Pan
Jack, and never hesitated to leaven his history lessons about the Ford
Strike of 1932, the Spokane Free Speech Fight of 1910 and the Canine
Corps of World War II with such hysterical stories as "Suspender" and
"Blackie & the Duck."
His fans have posted dozens of videos of him or his songs on YouTube;
in the mid-1990s, a new generation discovered him when folk musician
and entrepreneur Ani DiFranco edited about 100 hours of homemade tapes
of his performances and combined them with electronic hip-hop,
creating an album called "The Past Didn't Go Anywhere" (1996) and
releasing it on her Righteous Babe label.
In 1999, he collaborated with DiFranco on the live album "Fellow
Workers," which was nominated for a 2000 Grammy in the contemporary
folk album category.
"He was a real storyteller in his performances. He was just a
catalogue of people's history in United States," DiFranco said in an
interview this week. "He was so engaging on many, many levels."
Phillips was a card-carrying member of the Industrial Workers of the
World (Wobblies), a radical union that called for all working people
to unite. He ran, unsuccessfully, for president in 1976 as an
anarchist, but he never voted — except in 2004 when President Bush's
policies so enraged him, DiFranco said.
"He voted for 'Not That Guy,' " she said.
Emmylou Harris, Waylon Jennings, Joan Baez, Tom Waits and Arlo Guthrie
have all sung Utah Phillips songs, but he refused to let Johnny Cash
record his standards, his eldest son told the Sacramento Bee
newspaper, because he didn't trust the music industry.
The Boston Globe called him "the kind of guy you'd want to sit next to
on a long plane ride. Here's a rascal with a clutch of good songs
that'll entertain you, educate you, and probably even get you fired up
over the cur-rent state of politics."
He was born as Bruce Phillips on May 15, 1935, in Cleveland to two
labor organizers. His family moved to Utah in 1947, where Phillips
learned to play the ukulele from an instruction manual, then took to
the roads and rails of the West as a teenager. He adopted the name U.
Utah Phillips in emulation of country vocalist T. Texas Tyler.
"I worked with lots of old drunks only fit to shovel gravel, but they
all knew songs, and they showed me how to play them," he said.
Broke and out of work, he joined the Army in 1956 and was sent to
Korea for three years. "I wanted to learn a trade, but all they taught
me was how to shoot," he said in a Sing Out magazine interview. "What
I really learned in the army was how to be a pacifist."
After his discharge, he began to drink heavily and ride the rails. He
drew a distinction between what he did and those of hobos and bums,
quoting the 19th-century physician to the poor, Ben Reitman.
"A hobo works and wanders, a tramp dreams and wanders, and a bum
drinks and wanders," Phillips told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in
2006. "That's about right. I tramped. When I was on the freight
trains, I wasn't looking for work. I was looking to go from place to
place without paying any money."
He took a job with the Utah state archives, and he volunteered at Salt
Lake City's Joe Hill House, a shelter for tramps and itinerant
workers. His 1968 race for a U.S. Senate seat as the nominee of the
Peace & Freedom Party cost him his state job. He believed he was
blacklisted.
"All I had was an old VW bus, my guitar, $75, and a head full of
songs, old- and new-made," he wrote two weeks ago in a message to his
local radio station, KVMR-FM. "Fortunately ... I landed at Caffe Lena
in Saratoga Springs, New York. That seemed to be ground zero for folk
music at the time. ... It took me a solid two years to realize I was
no longer an unemployed organizer, but a traveling folk singer and
storyteller."
In 1973, folk fans discovered his song, "Moose t**d Pie," about the
food served to laborers on a railroad gang. The bluegrass duo Flatt &
Scruggs recorded his train song "Starlight on the Rails," and Joan
Baez became the first of many to record the dark romantic ballad "Rock
Salt and Nails," a song that became something of a folk and country
standard.
He settled in Nevada City, where he helped start the Peace and Justice
Center and the Hospitality House, a homeless shelter. He launched a
100-episode syndicated radio show, "Loafer's Glory," and made
occasional personal appearances, where he urged audience members to
sing along on such tunes as "Dump the Bosses."
Survivors include his wife, Joanna Robinson of Nevada City; three
children, Duncan Phillips of Salt Lake City, Brendan Phillips of
Olympia, Wash., and Morrigan Belle of Washington; two stepsons,
Nicholas Tomb of Monterey, Calif., and Ian Durfee of Davis, Calif.;
three brothers; a sister; and a grandchild.
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