UTAH PHILIPS--Farewell Fellow Worker
Click to viewI know most folks will be suprized that I have not posted one of Utah Philips labor songs as here. But I trust you will find them. There are links in the text below.Instead, I picked a hauntinly beautiful song from his first album back in 1973. Going Away strikes me as the perfect song for for an old hobo. Good bye, Fellow Worker.
I was just leaving church yesterday after the Memorial Sunday service when my cell phone went off. It was my old Fellow Worker Penny Pixler from Chicago. No offense to Penny, but it usually isn’t good news to get a phone call from her. It almost always means that one of Wobblies has died. This time it was Bruce Philips, better known to the world as U. Utah Philips, Golden Voice of the Great Southwest.
Utah belongs to that small, select club of those who have been affiliated over their lives with both Unitarian Universalism and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW.) I’m another. Although legendary for his association with the IWW and his seemingly bottomless bag of labor folklore collected from the lips of hobos, agitators, organizers, and home guard heroes and heroines alike, most UU’s were not aware of his long connections. That despite the fact that he must, like any touring folk musician, have performed at scores of UU churches and events over the years and even recorded a live album at a Unitarian Universalists for a Just Ecconomic Community (UUJEC)-Making Speech Free event.
He told me once that some of the first songs he ever wrote were intended for a Unitarian hymnal at the Salt Lake congregation in the 1950’s. He was always good for a hilarious string of Unitarian jokes poking fun at our sometimes wishy-washy liberalism. For the last 14 years he was an active member of the UU Community of the Mountains near his beloved Nevada City, California.
I first met Fellow Worker Philips just about the time he first album came out, the absolutely wonderful Good Though. He came through Chicago on tour and we set up a IWW benefit performance at the old Quite Knight when it was still on Wells Street. I was a wet-behind-the-ears 23 year old General Secretary Treasurer of the One Big Union. I had him over for a stroganoff dinner and we spent hour trading stories-his were more interesting and numerous and songs. I heard him perform many times since then. The last time was at the 100th anniversary concert for the IWW held, fittingly, at People’s Church in 2005.
Penny pointed out that Utah, like the late Carlos Cortez and a handful of others he was one of the few of the generation in between the Old Timer veterans of the union’s tumultuous early days and punks like me emerging from the New Left and the Vietnam protest movement. He was the transmitter of the wisdom from the Old Timers like Herb Edwards, Art Nurse, Frank Cederval and many others first two us and then subsequent generations. I was privileged to have known some of the surviving old timers myself and know what a treasure they were.
A few years ago punk folk artist Ani DiFranco introduced Utah to my daughter Maureen’s generation on the albums The Past Didn't Go Anywhere and Fellow Workers. Utah’s songs and stories have been responcible for influencing generations of rebels, rabble rousers and radicals. He was in the direct tradition of Joe Hill, Woody Guthrie, and Pete Seger. Seger was one of many folk musicians organizing benefits for Utah’s medical expences when Bruce died..
Utah’s family posted his official obituary
To sample Utah’s songs and stories check out his clips on You Tube.
--Brother Broadsword of Enlightenment