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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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