U. Utah Phillips, 1935-2008

May 24, 4:21 PMSF Music ExaminerDerk Richardson

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The Golden Voice of the Great Southwest has been silenced. Bruce U. Utah Phillips, a towering figure of American folk music, died last night at home in Nevada City at the age of 73.

His metaphorically enormous heart had in fact grown enlarged in recent years and weakened to the point where, according to a recent blog by Phillips, it required his wearing a device that pumped medication into his heart round the clock. Read the post here and realize that although Phillips had drastically curtailed his activity, words still came easily. 

The news of Phillips' death came in an email this afternoon. Given his history as a rail-riding Wobbly and a gandy dancer (railroad maintenance worker), the news should have come from a mailbag tossed from a slow-moving freight train.

But at least it was Chris Chandler, a storytelling troubadour very much in the Phillips lineage, which of course goes back to Woody Guthrie and Joe Hill, who started getting the word out through his irregular missive, M.U.S.E. .A.N.D. .W.H.I.R.L.E.D. .R.E.T.O.R.T. Chandler got the news in an email from another rabble-rousing folk singer, Jim Page.  

Although tired at the end, Phillips, born in Cleveland, Ohio, on May 15, 1935, will be celebrated as a tireless champion of the dispossessed. He delivered his message in now plain, now florrid, always eloquent language, in songs and stories that were as funny as they were pointed. His all-too-short-lived weekly radio show, Loafer's Glory: The Hobo Jungle of the Mind, was a masterful, homespun compendium of his wit and wisdom, and the airwaves were poorer for its discontinuation.

Phillips' dear friends and collaborators in the folk song community included Rosalie Sorrels, the late Kate Wolf, and Ani DiFranco, who recorded two albums with him and who, like Chandler and Page, will no doubt carry on the legacy.

Indeed, in the small F.A.Q. section of his Web site, Phillips offered this reply to a question about his readiness to pass the torch:  

"No, I'm not ready to pass the torch, I'm not done with it, and you'll have to go through me to get it. The world does not belong to the young, I was here first. But here is an idea: I'll carry the torch, you carry me."

As his Web site gandy dancer, Chris Dunn, writes on the Utah Phillips home page, "Utah has caught the westbound, and I am at a great loss. There are just no other words I can come up with at the moment to add here, we will leave that for others more eloquent than me soon."

I second that emotion. Share your thoughts about this irreplaceable, irrepressible bard.

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