Phillips, Bruce "U Utah"

PHILLIPS, BRUCE “U UTAH” (1935-2008). A masterful, leftwing musician, song writer, storyteller, and social/labor activist, Phillips had a wide influence on labor culture. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, of two labor organizers who divorced when he was five, Phillips was adopted by his stepfather, Syd Cohen. The family soon moved to Salt Lake City, where his stepfather managed a vaudeville house, a great inspiration to the young boy. He graduated from a local high school and served three years in the Army, 1956-1959, witnessing the postwar destruction in Korea.

Returning home, Phillips hit the bottle and then the rails. He wound up back in Salt Lake City, under the influence of Ammon Hennacy, local head of the Catholic Worker Movement. Working with Hennacy at the Joe Hill Social Service House during the 1960s, he considered himself an anarchist. Nevertheless, he ran for the Senate on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket in 1968 and for president on the Do-Nothing Party slate in 1976, ever a token candidate.

Phillips had adopted the moniker “U Utah” while on the bum, as a member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). He would retain his union affiliation, his identification as a Christian anarchist and pacifist, and also his nickname, throughout his life.

Phillips found his true calling as a musician (guitar player), song writer, and raconteur, traveling the country giving concerts and spreading the IWW’s messages. As he wrote in the notes to his 2005 four-CD compilation, Starlight on the Rails: A Songbook: “The way I see it it is this: if you take most of what you sing from people, sooner or later these songs will help you disappear into the people. . . . Nothing you have given to the people will be owned by anybody but will be owned by everybody. . . Absolutely free.” This sums up his philosophy of life. His songs achieved a unique status within the Left and beyond.

Following the release of his first record album in 1961, Phillips maintained a performing, recording, and politically active life until physical ailments ended his musical career in 2007. His second album did not appear until 1973, but his popularity continued to spread. “Good Though!” captured his love for trains, his hoboing days, and included some of his most iconic songs: “Queen of the Rails,” “Starlight on the Rails,” “Daddy, What’s a Train,” “Phoebe Snow,” and the delightful story “Moose Turd Pie.”

“What is it that puts a man on the road,” his liner notes explained. “Well, sometimes it’s just economics. Not enough jobs. Too many people. Too many machines.” In 2009, he released El Capitan, mostly capturing his love for western history and lore: “The Telling Takes Me Home,” “The Goodnight-Loving Trail,” “I’ve Got a Home Out In Utah,” “Pig Hollow,” and even “Enola Gay,” which switches gears to discuss the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. In her liner notes, Rosalie Sorrels (1933-2017), the prolific musician who had first met Phillips in the late 1950s, comments: “My old friend, Utah Phillips, was not born in this space [the West], but he has taken to it as surely as all those who came here first.”

The album All Used Up: A Scrapbook (1980) includes his own compositions about poverty as well as a number from the IWW song catalog and even Woody Guthrie’s “Pretty Boy Floyd.” His singular creations include “I Remember Loving You,” “Room for the Poor,” and “All Used Up,” while from the IWW he drew “The Preacher and the Slave,” Dump the
Bosses Off Your Back,” and “We Have Fed You All For 1000 Years.” His dedication to the IWW could not be clearer than in his 1983 album We Have Fed You All For A Thousand Years, which encompasses a range of songs and poems: “Joe Hill,” “Hallelujah, I’m A Bum,” “Solidarity Forever,” and “There Is Power In A Union.”

Phillips wore his leftwing politics on his sleeve in his wide range of songs. New albums continued into the twenty-first century, with many reissues in CD packages. He recorded two albums with the punk singer Ani DiFranco, The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere (1996) and Fellow Workers (1999). He shared the album The Long Memory (1996) with Rosalie Sorrels and she also released her own album of only Phillips’s songs, Strangers In Another Country (2008).

Phillips married Joanna Robinson in Nevada City, California, where he lived for the last two decades of his life. He had his own nationally syndicated radio show, “Loafer’s Glory: The Hobo Jungle of the Mind,” from 1997-2001. He also became locally involved with a homeless shelter, Hospitality House, as well as The Peace and Justice Center. Once on the road to social activism with the Catholic Worker Movement in Salt Lake City, Phillips never wavered from his life of creative musical entertainment and social justice.

Phillips, U Utah. Starlight on the Rails and Other Songs. Dream Garden Press, 2011