We just received this email from Red House Records, and thought you all should know:
It is with great regret that Red House Records mourns the loss of our friend Bruce "Utah" Phillips who passed away Friday the 23rd at his home in Nevada City, California. In a time when words like "icon" and "legend" are bandied about
too freely, Utah was the real deal: a consummate songwriter, labor
historian, humorist and towering figure in American Folk Music. A true
original, we will not see his like again and it was our great privilege
to have been able to partner with him on a number of record releases.
Our deepest condolences go out to Utah’s family and many friends and the countless fans who will profoundly feel his absence. His family requests memorial donations to Hospitality House, P.O. Box 3223, Grass Valley, California 95945 (530) 271-7144.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. 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.