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Not Just Telling Stories: Songwriter Utah Phillips

Discusses Labour, Education, and the Right to Creativity

 

Utah photo by Andrew Marchand

findrew Marchand
OP Contributor

“| believe that people are born good, and that chil-
dren abandoned to institutions over which they have no
control wind-up becoming warped images of what they
might have been, had they been left alone. | believe
that we struggle, that part of an anarchist’s struggle is

* to help people get back to what we were before a lot of
bad choices were made for us, to grow down and then
grow a different way.”

You might |not believe that these are the words of a
storyteller and folksinger, but beneath Utah Phillips’s
words lives a philosophy and intelligence that sepa-
rates him from most storytellers and folksingers you'll
ever, meet. Through con oe song, Utah Phillips has
carried on a tradition that he found living across the
United States and Canada for the greater part of the
last century. |

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Phillips quickly developed a
distaste for the adult world he saw around him. “I
looked at grown ups when | was little,” he said, “and

/they were flying combat airplanes and running banks
“and | thought ‘I don't want to turn out that way: So |

“a ih
:

decided to grow out, or through, or by, or around, or
under, but God help me, not up.”

So after moving to Salt Lake City in 1947 and com-
pleting his high school, Phillips left to begin his life as
a tramp looking for work and inspiration on the freight
trains. He joined the army, was sent to Korea, came
home, and after three more years on the trains,
returned to Salt Lake City as a Wobbly, a member of
the Industrial Workers of the World.

During this time, Phillips began to meet some of the
people that would have a profound effect on his
philosophies and his life. He met a man named Amon
Hennacy who ran the Joe Hill house of hospitality for
tramps and migrants in Salt Lake City, a man he
describes as an “anarchist, pacifist, conscientious
objector during two world wars, tax refuser, vegetarian,
[and] one-man revolution in America.”

Phillips joined the labour movement, fought for sev-
eral causes, and in 1968 tried to reach the US Senate
with the Peace and Freedom Party. As a consequence,
he said, he was blacklisted, lost his job as a state
archivist and couldn’t get work anywhere in Utah. After
a suggestion from a friend, Phillips hit the road with an
old VW bus and $75 in his pocket and started making
his way around the continent singing his songs and
telling his stories.

For the last 30 years, Phillips has continued that jour-
ney. With his charismatic storytelling and singing he
has shared his philosophies with many people across
the United States and Canada. At the core of his belief
lives a deep aversion to the effects that capitalism has
on the people in our society, the meditated manipula-
tion that has too often left men and women without
hope, creativity, and a sense of worth.

THE INTERVIEW:

What advice can you give to today’s college stu-
dents?

Phillips: There are a lot of things that aren’t taught in
the curriculum. One of them is how to control your
labour when you leave school. At least down in the
States we’re not taught that we have the right of col-
lective bargaining, that we have the right to form and
join a union. We’re not taught what a scab is and why
not to be one. We have to find out the hard way. | had
to learn that from my elders; | never got any school. |
had to learn it from people who had lived and died on
the picket lines from the 1900s on up. Most of my great
teachers were born in the late 1800s, been through
coal mine struggles in southern Colorado and mill

struggles in Massachusetts. Most of those people lived
extraordinary lives that can’t be lived again, lives that
were embattled against the most serious kinds of odds.

It was Jack Miller who | met in Seattle. Jack Miller
worked in logging and was an organizer. That was the
time when there were no bunkhouses, so people just
slept out in the open with their clothes piled next to the
fire. Jack Miller described one May Day, 1917, May 1.
In order to force the bosses to put in bunkhouses and
give them blankets, they took everything they owned—
these tramps came into the railroad yard from Spocan
and Seattle and all over the North West—and that May
Day they piled it up in a huge pile, poured kerosene on
it and burned up everything they owned. They couldn’t
work. They forced the bosses. That’s called direct
action. That’s one of the things that | learned from my
elders: That direct action gets the goods.

Jack Miller ran a senior citizens center down in
Seattle. | talked to him there once and he said, “You
know, we didn’t go to school. Most people that worked
in logging didn’t speak English. We had no intellectual
life—many couldn’t read—but we lived in our emotions.
We had very strong emotional lives. We were comfort-
able in that emotional landscape because it was there
that we made commitments to struggle to change the
way we work. Commitment is in our emotions.
Commitment for which there is no words. Those com-
mitments carried us through 60 years of struggle. But if
you show me people who make those commitments
intellectually, | don’t know where we’d be next week.”

One thing that Jack Miller laid on my head as a kid
was: Can | make those commitments? Where does
that come from? He also said, “Armed only with our
sense of degradation, as human beings we came
together and changed the condition of our labour.” He
looked at me square and said, “You young people, with
all you got, why can’t you do that?” Now that’s really
hard to take, isn’t it?

It was Bob Scribner, the old Wobbly down in Santa
Cruz, California. There’s a life-size statue of him play-
ing the saw. He made a bare living on the streets play-
ing the musical saw because he never got a pension,
he never got social security, because he was a red, you
see, an organizer. He said to me, “You young people,
you got it a whole lot harder than we did.”

| said, “Come on Utah, you just told me stories about
having logs rolled over you, and how when the log
squeezed your intestines out, they had to poke them
back in or you wouldn't be alive today.”

He stopped and said, “Well, what | mean is, we
assign blame in our own best interest. If we assign
blame in our own best interest then blame is relative. If

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