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Utah Urban Pioneers Project Bruce Phillips Interviewed by Polly

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Utah Urban Pioneers Project Bruce Phillips Interviewed by Polly Utah Urban Pioneers Project Bruce Phillips Interviewed by Polly Stewart Nevada City, California Tuesday, November 30, 2004 TRANSCRIPT Transcribed by Polly Stewart February 17, 2005 Copy-edited by Laura R. Marcus, June 5, 2009 TAPE 1 OF 2 SIDE A Page 2 Polly Stewart explains project/Bruce Phillips talks about his entrée into music through the ukulele Page 3 Working at Yosemite, learning to play guitar, learning folk songs, starting to write his own songs/meeting Father Baxter Liebler of St. Christopher’s Mission (Bluff, Utah) Page 4 Military service in Korea, new musical growth/break-up of marriage Page 5 Roaming the country/becoming part of the Salt Lake City folk music scene/talking about song-writing technique (story of his song, “Green Rolling Hills of West Virginia” Page 6 Time spent with Rosalie Sorrels—who recorded his songs/remarriage and fatherhood/talking about songs “Rock Salt and Nails” and “Faded Roses” Page 7 Talking about musical and poetic influences Page 8 Talking about songs, “The Scofield Mine Disaster” and “Jesse’s Corrido”/talking about involvement with, impact of Ammon Hannecy and Joe Hill House, being a pacifist and an anarchist Page 11 Talking about picking up historical content for songs from Earl M. Lyman, through work wrapping packages in a warehouse Page 12 Teaching “ear music” technique of playing guitar/”teaching without teaching” history through music Page 14 Developing consciousness as folk singer/friendship with folklorist Kenny Goldstein/beginning of recording and music publishing career Page 15 Getting into bluegrass/The Utah Valley Boys, Tut Taylor/songs getting into circulation Page 16 Running for the U.S. Senate on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket Page 17 Factors in Phillips’s departure from Utah/beginning of new trade as a folk singer and story teller Page 19 Reflections on the Urban Folk Music Revival/genuine folk vs. commercial folk Bruce Phillips 00:03 Uhmmm . “This is the fightin’ five five solid drive, you call, we haul that’s all you all know combat mission, please, may I help you.” Umm, “This is P.F.C. O’Toole, playin’ it cool in the motor pool, I got two-by’s, four-by’s, six-by’s, the big muthas that bend in the middle and go chchchw, may I help you.” Ways of answering the phone. Polly Stewart explains project/Bruce Phillips talks about his entrée into music through the ukulele Polly Stewart 00:24 Okay. [tape recorder turned off, then on.] Well here it is, uh . just . I think it’s best just to leave it in one place cause every time you move it, it makes a big thundering sound. Bruce Phillips 00:35 [sound of assent] Polly Stewart 00:35 So, this is uh, Tuesday, November 30th of uh 2004, and I’m in Nevada City, California, at the home of Bruce Utah Phillips. And um, my old colleague from, many days ago. Uhm, my purpose in being here today is to uh ask uh Bruce to help me remember some stuff about the, thing that was called the Urban Folk Music Revival. Uhm, the impetus for this, Bruce, as I explained, was this big huge uh research project called Utah— Folklore in Utah, had nothing—virtually nothing—about that very important time, and uh so I’ve taken it on myself, literally, to uh just uh try to gather some documentary material and uhm, you might wonder what my aims are. I don’t really, know, exactly, what, will come of this, except I think that uh, there is a good likelihood that I’ll write an article for something like the Utah Historical Quarterly— Bruce Phillips 01:41 Uh hm. Polly Stewart 01:41 Or something like that. But it, it’s really, uh, just to, to have the material available, Bruce Phillips 01:47 M hm. Polly Stewart 01:47 To archive for future, for, for—as you used to say—posterior. Bruce Phillips 01:53 Oh. Well that’s true, you know, what I think probably the best thing to do is just to let me start talking. Polly Stewart 02:00 Okay. Bruce Phillips 02:00 And I’ll go, I’ll go through from start to finish, and then you make notes of questions you want to ask or fill in, you know? I could tell it better as a story than I could as, as a “Q and A,” as they call it in the media. Uhm, I can start by saying that I have no musical background; there was no music in my family that anybody can remember, uh, I’m not even sure that I listened to or liked music very much when I was a kid. In the late 1940s after we moved to Salt Lake City I decided I wanted to learn to play the ukulele. So my mother bought, my mother and stepfather bought me a ukulele—it was a Martin baritone ukulele, and I got pretty good at it, playing ersatz Hawaiian music—Johnny Noble, King Kamehameha, “Lovely Hula Hands,” and things of that, of that sort, I was playing ukulele solos, you know, where there was a chord for every note. Working at Yosemite, learning to play guitar, learning folk songs, starting to write his own songs/meeting Father Baxter Liebler of St. Christopher’s Mission (Bluff, Utah) Bruce Phillips 03:04 Uhm, I went up to Yellowstone to work in the summer while I was in high school, and uhm, those people workin’ on the road crews, ah, mainly a lot of old alcoholics that moved as a crew from, from one park to the other in the season, and all they could be, were able to do was shovel gravel, uhm, we lived in these clapboard shanties, and they had had a fire at night, and some of them had guitars and they sang these old songs that I’d never heard. Uh, Gene Autry and Jimmie Rodgers and Goebel Reeves, and just others that had no—no author, just as songs. And they showed me how to turn my ukulele chords, which were four strings, into guitar chords, which were five strings. And I had, um, an old Washburn guitar, then, that I got, and I remember going up to, listening to those song—see what they were singing about was very very close to the way that I was living and that I was doing at that time. Very close. Uh, so mu[ch]—a whole lot closer than the Hawaiian music. So, I took to it, and that’s fi—, when I finally, there at the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone about 1953, sat down and wr—made my first song, and it was in that mold, it was in the style that I was hearing. Uh, these guys singin’ these old songs. Uhm, from there I guess the next sojourn out of town was when I sort of ran away from Salt Lake down to the St. Christopher’s Mission of the Navajo Indians, met my first true elder, Father Baxter Liebler, the Padre of the San Juan. And he was, he had two sung masses a day in that little log church he built out there in the desert by the San Juan River, but he didn’t use the plainsong, he used plainsong words but he used Navajo and Zuni medicine chants. Which I can still sing, and I was fascinated by that. Uhm, the old Washburn held up pretty good, there was a guy named Rocky Rockwood down there, an oil boomer from the Aneth Strip, who knew old songs. And un, I learned some cowboy songs and, and others from him. Military service in Korea, new musical growth/break-up of marriage Bruce Phillips 05:12 Got back, and then I, I joined the Army and went to Korea, um, and in Korea, either you were up north, gettin’ shot at, or you figured out a way not to be up north getting shot at, and the way I figured out was, to have a little band, that would play for the officers’ clubs in these quonset huts, they call ‘em officers’ clubs out in the mud, We had one called the Rice-Paddy Ramblers. And that’s when Mack McCormick, uh, a kid from Santa Rosa California, showed me the key of E; I was enchanted. With me it had been C, C, C, all the way, you know, key of C—C, F, and G-seventh, that was it. Uhm, I learned the key of E and then others, and we had a steel guitar player, but we played in the, in the, officers’ quonsets, and eh they gave us plenty to drink, and I, I learned to play m—, to play the guitar more, you know, learned a lot more about playin’ the guitar, and makin’ up songs, making up songs about Don’t go home, and, 'cause so many of us were gettin’ Dear Johnned over there, I was married when I went to Korea and I wasn’t when I got back, cause she had gone off with somebody else. Uhm, 'member one song, uh, “I know the sun is shining on my mountain valley home,” I could remember it if I stretched my brain. Roaming the country/becoming part of the Salt Lake City folk music scene/talking about song-writing technique (story of his song, “Green Rolling Hills of West Virginia” Bruce Phillips 06:33 Eh, so then I got back from Korea and I rode around on the trains for a little while, 'cause I was so mad and pissed off and half crazy, and didn’t know what I was coming back to in Salt Lake, I finally came back 1960, and then the folk music, eh, the Great Folk-Music Scare had begun—um, I coined that term, many years ago, you, playing off of the Great Red Scare, it was a commercial revival, and uhm, you, know if you saw TV shows like Hootenanny that it was a god damn terrible dreadful scare.
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