Utah Phillips: Working-class singer, labor activist

Bruce “Utah” Duncan Phillips, a labor organizer, Grammy-nominated folk singer and storyteller, died of heart failure in his Nevada City, Calif., home on May 23.

Phillips first rose to prominence with the album “Good Though!” which included the single “Moose Turd Pie,” which told about serving moose feces to fellow workers when Utah worked as a cook on a railroad crew.

His career spanned four decades, with recent work including a collaboration with Ani DiFranco on the 1999 album “Fellow Workers,” a Grammy nominee for best contemporary folk album. Leaving behind a rich working-class musical tradition, his songs have also been recorded by Emmylou Harris and Tom Waits.

The son of labor activists, Phillips was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1935. He served in the Army during the Korean War, an event that he later said was a turning point in his life. He said, “Being a soldier in Korea taught me that I will never again do what I’m told. I almost lost my moral compass. I had to fight like hell to get it back.”

After witnessing the horrors of war, he returned to the U.S., where he rode the rails, eventually finding his way to Salt Lake City, Utah. He wound up at the Joe Hill House, a homeless shelter operated by Ammon Hennacy, an anarchist and member of the Catholic Worker movement. Hennacy helped provide him with a political framework that later shaped his music and storytelling.

Phillips took a job in the 1960’s as an archivist, where he learned the methods of historical research, a skill that he would later apply to his songwriting. Brad Wrenn, who co–produced “The Ballad of Joe Hill,” said of Phillips’ music, “He’s such an incredible source of knowledge that doesn’t get catalogued in the United States, stuff that doesn’t get taught in history classes—the story of the underclass.”

In 1968, he ran for the U.S. Senate on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket. Following his loss to the Republican candidate, he also lost his job with the State of Utah, in what he described as “blacklisting.”

In 1973, with “Moose Turd Pie” receiving extensive airplay, Phillips began a career in music and storytelling that took him to cities throughout the U.S., Canada, and Europe. He became a legend on the folk music circuit.

His performing partner Rosalie Sorrels said: “He was like an alchemist. 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.”

A card-carrying member of the Industrial Workers of the World (“the Wobblies”), Phillips sang songs about the struggles of the working class, the homeless, and the poor.

Phillips, also a member of the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers, the Traveling Musician’s Union-AFM Local 1000 and Veterans for Peace, never voted. His son, Duncan, said: “He said he cast a vote every day he went out in the world and did something. If you want to make change, go out and actually do it yourself. He didn’t need to hand over any responsibility to politicians who aren’t beholden to the working class.”

For the last 21 years of his life, Phillips resided in Nevada City, where he helped start the Hospitality House, a local homeless shelter, and the Peace and Justice Center. On March 20, 2003, he was arrested, along with his partner Joanna Robinson and 40 others, for blocking a road and unlawful assembly as a protest against the U.S. invasion of Iraq.