Bruce "Utah" Phillips is a touring folk singer, but he's also much more than that. He's an American troubadour who carries stories of the labor movement, train hopping, the war in Korea and just about everything else he's picked up along the way.
At 68, Phillips has a huge body of music and storytelling under his belt in addition to an impressive history of activism.
Most recently he added collaborations with Ani Difranco, The Past Didn't Go Anywhere and Fellow Workers, to his list of achievements that also includes appearances on 73 audio anthologies.
Phillips will be performing at the El Rey Theatre Saturday at 8 p.m. In an interview with the Daily Lobo, he shared his thoughts on folk music, memory and activism.
Daily Lobo: Why folk music?
Utah Phillips: Well, why not? First of all, you have to decide what folk music is. Folk music is music that belongs to everybody - it doesn't have anybody's name on it. It's like the postal service or the national parks. It's the common treasury of song.
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As time passes, old songs become forgotten, or they no longer have any meaning to people. So that well of people's tradition would run dry, except that new songs are put in at the top. Now that's what songwriters do right now. They make new songs and then play them for a lot of people.
Occasionally, one of those songs, one out of a thousand or more, is going to be taken by the people into their common treasury and they use it in their lives and then it becomes a folk song. But it has to lose the person's name who made it.
Many of the songs I learned traveling around and bumming around when I was young. They came from people who didn't know where they came from, but they were still songs that had a lot of meaning in my life as I was living it at the time.
DL: How would you define anarchism?
UP: Anarchy is, well, I'll probably talk about that some when I get there. An anarchist is anybody who doesn't need a cop to tell him what to do. Anarchy is learning how to make true choices, learning how to make voluntary combinations. Learning how to become truly self-governing.
I think I would like people to understand I'm not purely a political figure; I'm a folk singer. I'm not going to stand there and just preach. I want people to sing together and laugh together. There are a few things I want to get at - and I will - but I'm not going to beat anybody over the head.
I'm there to make friends and have an easy time together and hopefully leave behind something people can use. But I'm not a preacher; I'm a folk singer.
DL: How is music part of your activism?
UP: It's just an organic part. The two go together. I grew up with a mother who worked as a labor organizer. I've been in my union, the Industrial Workers of the World; this is probably my 50th year. I got of a lot of my songs from the labor movement, and I started to make up songs and mix them in together.
Songs have been part of every struggle. There were protest songs back in the time of Spartacus. You can have love songs like that too. You can have songs for children that do that too.
One thing that's important to me about the old songs about past struggles is that they help us not to forget, they help us to remember. There was a Czech writer that said, "The struggle of people against tyranny is the struggle of memory against forgetting." The long memory is the most radical idea in America.
DL: Who are some of your influences?
UP: Probably everybody I ever ran into. Generally, my elders are my greatest influences, because they have stories that I can either tell or make into songs.
The greatest influence on my life was a man named Ammon Hennacy, who taught me what it is to be an anarchist and a pacifist. And the other great influence is Ani DiFranco. She taught me that these old stories and songs that I sing are of great value to young people.
