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May 25, 2008

Folksinger, anarchist, presidential candidate Utah Phillips dies in sleep

The video is of Utah singing, telling stories and cracking political jokes at California's Strawberry Music Festival in 2007. More video here.

Utah Phillips died in his sleep Friday night at 73.

Mp3s: Hearing Voices from NPR offers these in a tribute:
From Starlight On The Rails : A Songbook, Utah talks about his song “Talking NPR Blues” (1:15 mp3):

Talking NPR Blues itself.

From an obit in the Sacramento Bee (Singer Utah Phillips left a colorful legacy):

He ran for president but never voted. Emmylou Harris, Waylon Jennings, Joan Baez, Tom Waits and his friend Arlo Guthrie all sing Utah Phillips songs, but he refused to let Johnny Cash make an album of his standards, his eldest son said, because he didn't trust the record industry.

His official site: Utah Phillips - A short jog through a long memory; Utah's Page.

From his obit at his site, written by his family:

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 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....

... The family requests memorial donations to Hospitality House, P.O. Box 3223, Grass Valley, California 95945 (530) 271-7144

Tributes: at the blog his son maintained for him.

Phillips' 1974 album Good Though! at CD Baby, with clips.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 10:35 AM | Permalink

Comments

Posted by: John Gall on May 26, 2008 3:27 PM