Utah Phillips
American Singer
| Date of Birth | : | 15 May, 1935 |
| Date of Death | : | 23 May, 2008 |
| Place of Birth | : | Cleveland, Ohio, United States |
| Profession | : | Singer |
| Nationality | : | American |
Bruce Duncan Phillips, the itinerant folk singer, songwriter, storyteller and social activist who jokingly called himself U. Utah Phillips, “the Golden Voice of the Great Southwest,” died on Friday at his home in Nevada City, Calif. He was 73.
Early Years
Phillips was born in Cleveland to Edwin Deroger Phillips and Frances Kathleen Coates. His father, Edwin Phillips, was a labor organizer, and his parents' activism influenced much of his life's work. Phillips was a card-carrying member of the Industrial Workers of the World (Wobblies), which were headquartered in Chicago. His parents divorced and his mother remarried. Phillips was adopted at the age of five by his stepfather, Syd Cohen, who managed the Hippodrome Theater in Cleveland, one of the last vaudeville houses in the city. Cohen moved the family to Salt Lake City, Utah, where he managed the Lyric Theater, another vaudeville house. Phillips attributes his early exposure to vaudeville through his stepfather as being an important influence on his later career.
Phillips attended East High School in Salt Lake City, where he was involved in the arts and plays. He served in the United States Army for three years in the 1950s. Witnessing the devastation of post-war Korea greatly influenced his social and political thinking. After discharge from the army, Phillips rode the railroads, and wrote songs.
Personal Papers
Archival materials related to Phillips' personal and professional life are open for research at the Walter P. Reuther Library in Detroit, Michigan. The papers include correspondence, interviews, writings, notes, contracts, flyers, publications, articles, clippings, photographs, audiovisual recordings, and other materials.
Death
Phillips died May 23, 2008, in Nevada City, California, from complications of heart disease, eight days after his 73rd birthday,and is buried in Forest View Cemetery in Nevada City.
Quotes
Total 21 Quotes
You are about to be told one more time that you are America's most valuable natural resource. Have you seen what they do to valuable natural resources?! Have you seen a strip mine? Have you seen a clear cut in the forest? Have you seen a polluted river? Don't ever let them call you a valuable natural resource! They're going to strip mine your soul. They're going to clear cut your best thoughts for the sake of profit unless you learn to resist, because the profit system follows the path of least resistance and following the path of least resistance is what makes the river crooked!
The Earth is not dying-it is being killed. And the people who are killing it have names and addresses.
Kids don't have a little brother working in the coal mine, they don't have a little sister coughing her lungs out in the looms of the big mill towns of the Northeast. Why? Because we organized; we broke the back of the sweatshops in this country; we have child labor laws. Those were not benevolent gifts from enlightened management. They were fought for, they were bled for, they were died for by working people, by people like us. Kids ought to know that.
The state can't give you freedom, and the state can't take it away. You're born with it, like your eyes, like your ears. Freedom is something you assume, then you wait for someone to try to take it away. The degree to which you resist is the degree to which you are free.
The degree to which you resist is the degree to which you are free.
Time is an enormous, long river, and I’m standing in it, just as you’re standing in it. My elders are the tributaries, and everything they thought and every struggle they went through and everything they gave their lives to, and every song they created, and every poem that they laid down flows down to me – and if I take the time to ask, and if I take the time to see, and if I take the time to reach out, I can build that bridge between my world and theirs. I can reach down into that river and take out what I need to get through this world
I said, "OK, Ammon [Hennacy], I will try that." He said, "You came into the world armed to the teeth. With an arsenal of weapons, weapons of privilege, economic privilege, sexual privilege, racial privilege. You want to be a pacifist, you're not just going to have to give up guns, knives, clubs, hard, angry words, you are going to have lay down the weapons of privilege and go into the world completely disarmed."
The most un-American thing you can do is to stifle dissent
Every good educator knows that true teaching is to teach kids how to ask the right questions.
Children, be worried when they call you America's most valuable natural resource. Have you seen what they've done to the other natural resources?
