[Harp-L] Utah Phillips RIP

[Tom Ball <havaball@xxxxxxx>]

The offical Obituary as provided by the family.

May 24, 2008
"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, California 95945 (530) 
271-7144 www.hospitalityhouseshelter.org