[NFCB] Utah Phillips Passes Away

[Steve Baker]

It is with deep regret that we at KVMR-FM make the following 
announcement. Here is the family's official release.
--Steve Baker, Program Director

“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 community radio station  KVMR-FM (Nevada City) 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