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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
-Jordan Fisher Smith and Molly Fisk (Molly Fisk, 530.277.4686 molly@mollyfisk.com
Jordan Fisher Smith 530.277.3087 jordanfs@gv.net)
Word document here: http://www.utahphillips.org/utahphillipsdeadat73.doc
PDF version: http://www.utahphillips.org/utahphillipsdeadat73.pdf
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