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Page 11 Talking about picking up historical content for songs from Earl M. Lyman, through work wrapping packages in a warehouse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.

Uhm, I had already met Rosalie Sorrels in the early ‘50s, before I went to Korea, and she was singing Scottish ballads in a high willowy voice, playing the baritone ukulele. And uhm, and changing, though, because her husband Jim was very interested in jazz, and got her ear moving in that direction. And she was, she was collecting songs, they had moved down from Boise, after Jim was injured in an accident working for the phone company, annnd, I, I got back, you know, after riding the trains, and I made up a lot of songs on those trains I will never see again and never hear at all, uhm . . . .

Well, one of them I made up, it's called “Green Rolling Hills of West Virginia,” when I was in West Virginia hitchhiking through during those trips, and, an old woman let me sleep on her sleeping porch up in one of the hollows, one of the hollers there by Pipestem, Clay County, and to thank her for a place to stay I left her the song, on the table in the morning. Uh, she had said to me, I’d said, people down in the city want to leave, they’re tryin’ to get out of there cause there’s no work; she said, Up here, said people don’t seem to want to go anywhere, even though there's—people are impoverished, she said, Well, it’s these hills, they keep you and they won’t let you go. So I made the song out of her words, that’s the way I make songs. Nothing happens in my head, but something happens outside first. Uhm, so it’s all shared, it’s all a shared sort of experience.

Bruce Phillips 08:38 So then I came back and I hooked up with Rosalie again, and by that time she had people coming through town, like, the nascent New Lost City Ramblers, or, uhm, just folk singers, you know, Guy Carawan, and so on, people I’d never heard of. They were singing folk music, I had to be told I was singing folk music, I had no consciousness of what that was at all. Uhm, I had learned a lot of labor songs from my mother, and I had learned a lot more, you know I became an IWW. Well, it’s fifty years ago, and I had, I made, I had those songs but I didn’t know the tunes, you know, like “Bread and Roses"? And um, “We Have Fed You All For a Thousand Years,” so when I did the fiftieth anniversary of the execution of Joe Hill in Utah—I did that at the public library, that landed me a night in jail—I made tunes for those songs and that’s the way I still sing them. Uh, just 'cause I felt they needed to be sung and there was nobody around to teach me the tunes, all I had was The Little Red Songbook and and uh, and it’d mention in there what the tune was, but who knew any of those tunes? They’d been gone for, eighty years.

Time spent with Rosalie Sorrels—who recorded his songs/remarriage and fatherhood/talking about songs “Rock Salt and Nails” and “Faded Roses”

Bruce Phillips 09:47 Well anyway, I hooked up with Rosalie, began to hang out at her place, and on her front porch. I was making songs all the time. Uh, then, making songs about experiences of what I already, I had already done, songs about the railroad, ehm, songs about old broken love, kid songs, you know, and I did marry Diana and then we had Duncan, and she had that, house full of kids, you know, I used to say her playpen looked like a bus stop for midgets, . . .

Polly Stewart 10:16 [chuckles] I remember that!

Bruce Phillips 10:17 And made up tha—you know “I Had a Mule and His Name Was Jack,” and other stuff about the same time that Rosalie wrote “I’m Gonna Tell.” But, I think that I was probably pretty crazy then. I know I shouldn’t have been married, and I, and I didn’t have a clear handle on uh, on reality, I was only able to peg that in recent years. But I wrote these songs, and then Rosalie, who had by that time was collecting songs, and she had an old Webcor recorder, as I recall, that I think the library gave her. To collect songs from the Relief Society ladies. And from the, that family that she used to hang out with up there in uh, in um, Logan, Cache Valley. Where she learned “Lonesome Roving Wolves” and a lot of those great songs.

And but she, she’d, I would be at her, in her house kind of drunk, and sing these songs, and then she’d record ‘em on her, Webcor, and learn 'em, and you know, I only sang “Rock Salt and Nails,” the song I made up that’s been recorded more than any other, I sang it once in her living room. And if she hadn’t recorded it it’d been gone forever. But, that was, it, and I won’t sing it, you know, it’s an angry, mean love song and I don’t feel that way any more. Uhm, besides, that woman is still alive, and it’s just not a kind thing to do. It's not a kind thing to do. Uh,

Polly Stewart 11:46 Could you tell me about “Faded Rose”? It comes from that same general era.

Bruce Phillips 11:53 No, no, it doesn’t, I—well, maybe it does. Yes, I, I can’t tell let’s see, the [sings vocables to the tune of “Faded Rose”] Well, my favorite songs were the sentimental songs. They always were, you know, “The Baggage Coach Ahead,” and old Hank Snow records, you know when, when 78's went out and 33's came in around 1950, Cousin Ray’s Record Bar downtown in Salt Lake threw all of his 78's out on tables in the street and sold ‘em for a nickel apiece. Well, I got stacks of those, that’s where f—I h, really heard, besides Yellowstone, my first real music. Lot of old hillbilly music and stuff like that it’s, somewhere in there, is that tune. And then, I made up that, that, set of words, I guess for Diana. You know, when I was thinking about getting married again. See, and it just didn’t seem like a good idea, that’s what that song is about, you know. Can I let go. Uhm, you know, what I’d already felt.

Talking about musical and poetic influences

Bruce Phillips 13:14 Uhm, Well, . . . yaw, the uh, so I was makin up these songs and hangin 'out at Rosalie’s listening to these folk singers, that she would bring through, and they were from the South, and they were—and then of course—well, the important, another important person there that came, used to hang around over there was an older fellow name of Bob Diener. And Bob Diener was a, braided industrial slings, cables, with his hands, these huge monstrous hands? He’d been a cowboy like down on the Dugout Ranch, in, in uh San Juan County? He was real light-fingered on the guitar, though, that nylon-string guitar? But he taught me “Old Dolores.” And he taught me “I Bought a Rock for a Rocky Mountain Gal,” it was an old Wilf Carter, Montana Slim, uh, “Old Dolores” is, is, J—I found out years later James Grafton Rodgers from, from uh, Denver.

And I had the pleasure you know some years later after I left Utah and was on the road as a folksinger playing Denver, and sitting with uhm, old Mag Hayden, up there at the Hayden Ranch that, above Evergreen, way up in the mountains, and she’d known Jim Rodgers, and she taught me how to change those songs so that they were right, you know,

Polly Stewart 14:11 Oh yeah.

Bruce Phillips 14:11 And she knew others too, like the, like the, “Santa Fe [pron. Fee] Trail” and, that’s Jim Rodgers, that was the prettiest verse of any song, of any folk song I ever heard is in the “Santa Fe Trail”:

[recites]

“I seed her ride down the arroyo out onto the Arkansas sand With a smile like an acre of sunflowers and a little brown quirt in her hand She mounted her pony so airy and rode like she carried the mail And her eyes nigh set fire to the prairie, way out on the Santa Fe Trail.”

Ee. My, my. Well you can’t—you can't walk away from lyrics like that, [emotional] just the poetry of that music that I heard people singing. [changed voice, louder] Not the Kingston Trio, which I could hear on the radio, or the Brothers Four, or Peter, Paul and Mary, . . . but the pure poetry of “The Water is Wide.” It’s that organic rhythm Emily Dickinson talked about, and I’d already, knew a great deal about poetry, scansion, scanning American poetry, Mayer, Guest, Abbott, and all the English prosodists from the 1890's, I had their books. And I can hear it, I could hear the organic rhythm of the language.

Uhm, and that’s what I loved about it, and of course it was those verse and tune models became mine, you know, that I’d become the inheritor of those, and those are the ones that I use when I make songs. They’re the most natural. And the—to the language as we speak it, as we use it every day. Uhm,

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

Polly Stewart 15:39 There were two, uh, that I remember, that came, uh, used the technique which you describe of other people saying things, and that becoming the core of a refrain or a song, and one was, uh, “The Scofield Mine Disaster.”

Bruce Phillips 15:54 Oh sure.

Polly Stewart 15:54 And the other was “Jesse’s Corrido.”

Bruce Phillips 15:56 Well, “Scofield Mine Disaster” was going down to, to uh Carbon County, to visit Scofield, I’d heard that the school district closed, and I wanted to see if—this was on its way to becoming a ghost town, and I wanted to see that. Sexton took me through the graveyard, and showed me all the markings for the mine explosion in 1900. In Scofield. And he was the one who remarked to me that there, were, the people who didn’t, weren’t buried there were taken away on a flatcar on the train, they had to send out for coffins ‘cause there weren’t enough. He said he watched that train roll off down through Emery and it was the longest and lonesomest train he ever saw. Well that’s one of those phrases that rings in your ear. The source of what the song comes out of—“Funeral Train.”

Bruce Phillips 16:42 Uhm, [louder, animated] “Jesse’s Corrido,” well now see that ties into the, an other, great influence, you say it’s, talking about influence, be what’s happening on Rosalie’s porch in her house, was these people coming through, uh, and then Bob Diener, the Joe Hill House, with Ammon Hennacy, came to Salt Lake from the Catholic Worker in New York, Dorothy Day’s people, to start the Joe Hill House of Hospitality. Well I already knew a lot of those Joe Hill songs, see, 'cause I was a Wobbly. And my mother was a, uh, a radical, and she knew labor songs, you know, and I knew learned, had, had learned from her. And, um, so I was, I spent a lot of time, of eight years there, with Ammon Hennacy at the Joe Hill House.

Well every Friday night, in the Catholic Worker tradition, there’s a, uh, where people talk about, it’s—it’s an educational thing. Part of the Catholic Worker process is these round- table discussions every Friday night. Ammon would talk about people he knew, like Clarence Darrow and Eugene V. Debs, and, when he was in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary as a conscientious objector during the First World War, and then we’d sing. Well there were singers there. You know, young fellow, a Cajun fellow from Pointe au Chien, the Dog’s Leg, in Louisiana? Conscientious objector, Catholic Worker, he’d come out from New York,

Polly Stewart 18:01 Murphy.

Bruce Phillips 18:01 Murphy! Murphy Douowis [rhymes with “wowie”]. And he played, and made up songs, made up some good songs, you know, “That There River,” and uh, “Little Ernesto,” and um, and we, we made songs for the Joe Hill House. And I made, that’s when I made um, the uhm, euh, the, “Pig Hollow.” You know, burn—when they burned down the jungle up in Pig Hollow, made that up for the Joe Hill House.

Well Ammon, of course, I met him when he was first sitting under the bushes there in front of the Post Office, takin' a breather from picketing marathon against war taxes. And Ammon was the one who taught me why I needed to be a pacifist. To deal with my anger, and I still have to and I still am. Say, he said it’s exactly the same as an alcoholic has to give up booze, or it’ll kill him. He said, You’ve gotta for—give up your capacity for violence or you’re not going to last much longer. So, I was very angry.

Polly Stewart 18:57 You were just a kid, too.

Bruce Phillips 18:58 Yeah. Well, I was twenty-two or twenty-three, right around twenty-two years old. And um, and why I needed to be an anarchist, cause he said, You know you love the country, you just can’t stand the government. Quoted Mark Twain: “Loyalty to the country always, loyalty to the government when it deserves it.” [coughs]

Polly Stewart 19:15 [chuckles]

Bruce Phillips 19:15 I haven’t found that instance, but . . . So I am an anarchist and I understand what that means, and I am a pacifist. And I work at that. So we have all those songs, well Ammon, his big crusade was against capital punishment, and that was the case of uh Jesse Garcia, who was put in jail, sixteen years old, on a murder rap, and uh, prison scandal, with drugs and sex and, and Jesse was the patsy. And he was convicted, and uh, sentenced to death with Frank Merrill Rivenburgh and uh, James Warner Bohn. And Bohn was the Mormon boy and he was reprieved, and later pardoned and Rivenburgh committed suicide in his cell.

Jesse, well I talked to his sister and, and she's the one who gave me the phrases that I needed for “Jesse’s Corrido.” Uhm, and then, uh, I used a, a tune, I think I must have heard it from Diener, or, old Rocky Rockwell down on, down on the Navajo Reservation, I needed, I needed a Mexican tune and, and it was in my head, so it, I know it came from one of those places. You match it together, you match it together, so that it, so that it, works.

And you know, I, I should say I work inside my head. My head’s my office. I don’t write things down, and when I write, if I write something down I’ll forget it, and then I have to learn it patiently like I would from a book. So, and I’ll carry parts of songs in my head for years and years. Uhm, the most I get out of a creative process is when I know a song is done. And I play it in my head. And I know it’s done, that’s the most I’ll get out of it. Externalizing it is a whole separate order of business. Completely different, you know. Uhm, I’ve gotten what I want just knowing that it’s finished.

Uhm, so yeah, so “Jesse’s Corrido” came out, and then another one, “Only His Sister Hears,” uh, which, I saw, and it was on one of the flyers we put out for the Justice for Garcia Committee. And, you know, on and on, of course Ammon kept up that crusade until—I left Utah in 1969, and then he was on his way up in nine—all the way up the State Street hill in Salt Lake in 1970, in the case of Lance and Killback, again capital punishment, that’s when he had his stroke.

Polly Stewart 21:38 Yeah.

Bruce Phillips 21:38 And perished. It’s when he sent that message to me in Sartatoga Springs, New York, to stay out of politics.

Polly Stewart 21:47 Ammon sent you that?

Bruce Phillips 21:47 Yaw. It was his last words to me.

Polly Stewart 21:51 I see.

Bruce Phillips 21:51 “Tell Bruce to stay out of politics.” 'Cause you see I had run for the senate in 1968. On the Peace and Freedom ticket—

Polly Stewart 21:59 Peace and Freedom, yeah.

Talking about picking up historical content for songs from Earl M. Lyman, through work wrapping packages in a warehouse

Bruce Phillips 21:59 Yeah. And um—well, let’s back up a good before that, because besides, besides Rosalie and Bob Diener and, and Ammon Hennacy and the Joe Hill House, and all these stories like Pig Hollow coming in that, that needed to be songs, uhm, I needed extra money. And I was working at first at the warehouse down there at uh, down there at Western Movie Supply at Ninth South and um, . . . I guess Second East, I guess, uhm, that’s where uhm, that uhm—what was his name?—the fellow that Joe Hill killed. That they—

Polly Stewart 22:40 Morrison?

Bruce Phillips 22:40 —said Joe Hill killed, Morrison, it has Morrison’s Automotive on that corner.

Polly Stewart 22:44 Not really.

Bruce Phillips 22:44 And they were relatives, you know, of uh, of Joe Hill [he means Morrison] and so if I went to ask them questions, they would throw me out, you know.

Polly Stewart 22:50 Oh man!

Bruce Phillips 22:50 I worked right next door, and of course my boss there, in the warehouse, in '60, '61, was Earl M. Lyman, the great-grandson of Amasa M. Lyman, he’s the one—Earl M. Lyman, he loved to tell stories. Of the old Mormon days, and he would come in and I had a long table with a roll of butcher paper, that I wrapped packages? To take to the Post Office— that’s where I met Ammon, ‘s taking packages to the Post Office—but Earl would come in, and heave himself up on my table and lean up against a big roll of butcher paper, and tell stories. And he, and that’s where he told me about, um, my, the his—the family story of the Mountain Meadow Massacre, and then I—that’s when I made the song. Uh, “John D. Lee.” Uhm, he told me about uh, Jean Baptiste, who was busted for robbing graves, up there in the old Salt Lake Cemetery and that, so that, made a song out of that. Uh, tale. But also, I would go to the library and read up on old Mormon stories so I’d have questions to ask him, because if I could get him up there on my table telling stories I didn’t have to work. That’s when I learned the value of storytelling. Uh, work avoidance!

Polly Stewart 23:58 [laughing]

Teaching “ear music” technique of playing guitar/”teaching without teaching” history through music

Bruce Phillips 23:58 So Earl fit in there very strongly. But then . . . this all comes together, now that I think about it, I was um, uhm, needed extra money, and the Folk Reviv—Revival, was in full steam, and every kid wanted to learn to play the guitar or the banjo, so that they could be around the campfire in Boy Scouts or, wherever, and play, these uh Kingston Trio songs and all that. So I got hired by Roy Pia [?] at the Utah Music Academy down on Ninth South, uh, sorta over by um, Roosevelt Junior High. And, I wasn’t very good, I was playing a plain arpeggio style of guitar and then I was using what Woody called a “church lick”—you know, bass-scratch, bass-scratch. And um, I knew all the keys by then; I knew a lot of songs.

So I taught these kids how to play simply and how to sing, and I didn’t teach em how to read music, I don’t know how to read music, I said, “I’m gonna teach you ear music, you wanna learn to read music, I’ll teach you what I can and I’ll send you to somebody else, but I want you to be able to, listen to a tune and know when the chords change. Just let your ears do it, you’re equipped to do that, you’re equipped to do that. Say, eh, a note sounds, a note is sung that sounds good, and a chord is a bunch of notes that sound good together, and a key is a bunch of chords that sound good together. And your ear’ll tell you when it doesn’t sound good, so you’ll know you’ve done something wrong, so try another chord. That’s, you don’t have to do, this is not rocket science, you know.” And so I got 'em playing, and, and got 'em singing, and I got 'em making songs too. Uhm, as lessons.

But boy, see, what I learned . . . ‘cause then I moved to Southeast Music, and I had maybe up to 200 students a week I was teaching group lessons? That with what I was getting, see then, I saw—they were getting Sing Out! magazine there, and that was when Irwin Silber had it, so it was a good collection of folk songs but also radical songs. 'Cause Irwin Silber was a Maoist at that time, and uhm, I could get songs from there, or songs I already knew, or songs that I was learning or making, and I could use those to teach.

Just exactly what I do now. You know, teach without teaching. Uhm, if I taught 'em “Railroad Bill,” and began to teach em to finger-pick “Railroad Bill,” I could say, Well now this is the first, this is the only Black train robber we know about, and I could tell them the story of Railroad Bill. Uhm, any of the labor songs, tell them the story of the Ludlow Massacre or, or, teach 'em, euh, “Asheville Junction, Swannanoa Tunnel” and tell ‘em about the convicts being shot as they tried to escape the tunnel after the cave-in. Gee that’s a, that was a grand way to do it, you know, and that’s when Hal Cannon came in, and I taught him that way, and that’s, kind of the way he found his way into it, you know, eh, music and history. Uhm, it um, that was, that was very, that was hard, but it was very inspiring to me.

Polly Stewart 27:05 Could I ask—

Bruce Phillips 27:06 I had a little gum-roll hectograph from the, with a tray of jello, kind of, and you used a spirit master and you’d write on it or type on it, peel it off, lay it down on that jello, sponge it down and peel it off, and then you could lay sheets on there and pull off eight or ten copies. And uh, real primitive, and that’s what I, what I made, made my songs sheets of that I gave to my students. And they, god, they were, there were a lot of them, they still come up to me occasionally, as I’m traveling around the country, and remind me that they took guitar lessons at Southeast Music. But what they talked about mainly was the sense of history that they learned. You know, even though they weren’t playing any more. So . . . .

Polly Stewart 27:47 Did they see themselves as having been radicalized?

Bruce Phillips 27:52 I don’t know if, I don’t know if they’d have used the word, you know, I—I, I was careful of their parents, uh, for sure,

Polly Stewart 27:59 Mm hmm.

Developing consciousness as folk singer/friendship with folklorist Kenny Goldstein/beginning of recording and music publishing career

Bruce Phillips 28:00 Um, and I wasn’t consciously trying to radicalize them, I was trying to get them to think. And get them to, to disseminate a feeling of curiosity, I felt like, curiosity was what was absent. In, uh, in most of the people around me. Uhm, and then, and then uhm, and then a couple of things happened, um, Kenny Goldstein came to town. And Kenny was invited by Rosalie to a folklore conference with Dr. Greenway, John Greenway from Boulder. And uhm, I loved to listen to Greenway, he knew these old Australian songs, which I had heard up in Heber, when I was in high school, baggin’, uhm, uh, shee—uh, baggin’, you know, you’re a bagger for when they shear the sheep. And there were Aussies up there, because the shearers had gone off to war here. And they were singin’, um, “Nine Miles from Gundagai,” and that’s where I learned “Louie Brink,” and there was Greenway singin’ these songs, you know, I still sing them now and then. Murray Moon, Slim Dusty’s, I found—Slim Dusty made a lot of old songs, that I found out years later.

[pause] Well, that all flowed into the pot, uh, too, well Kenny got out there to the conference and, I was home from the warehouse, livin' up on Second Avenue—no, livin' on Fourth Avenue, over by the corner of the City Cemetery. 'Member it well, because every time it rained these bones’d fetch down in the drains, at the foot of the hill there, where the kids went to catch the school bus. They’d come, you know, running back, Diana had the two kids, and then we had, we had Duncan. And I’d come home from the warehouse, and sittin' on the porch to sing to the kids. And um, Kenny was out standing with Rosalie, walkin' around the block, and they were just standing there listening to me. And he said, “You’re singing folk music.” “Beats me.”

But he said, he went and got that, big—big—rented that big recorder and took the room at Kingsbury Hall, where the radio station was? And recorded that record called No One Knows Me. For Prestige, and he took that back east and had that released, terrible record. Just dreadful record. It was mainly songs I’d made up, it was all songs I’d made up. Most of which I don’t know any more. But. It was a field recording. But. Kenny took a bunch of those songs to The Richmond Organization, T.R.O., which was Woody’s publisher. And they, they published some of them, you know, so wound up with the Limelighters recording “I Had a Mule,” which I’d written at Rosalie’s house for the kids.

Getting into bluegrass/The Utah Valley Boys, Tut Taylor/songs getting into circulation

And um, so they had some of it, and then uh, and then—then—then we started the Utah Valley Boys, we were meeting down in B. W. Cummings’ clothing store, that old brownstone there,

Polly Stewart 30:56 I remember that.

Bruce Phillips 30:56 Yeah, by the, that was where the Montgomery Ward was, that became the Church genealogical society? And, we were in there, we, we, wanted, we were tryin' to play bluegrass. And there were no models except records. So we put an ad in the paper saying, Anybody wants to play bluegrass, you know, give us a call, well Church General Conference came along, and here come the bishop, the Mormon bishop from Milledgeville, Georgia, Tut Taylor.

Polly Stewart 31:25 Tut Taylor, yeah. Mm hmm.

Bruce Phillips 31:26 And Tut played with us, and he heard these songs I’d made up, and he took a bunch of them on a little tape recorder back, and pretty soon here came a contract—Popular Songwriter’s Agreement—and I was as green as corn, I didn’t know what the hell it was. I just signed it, it was uhm, from Flatt and Scruggs Publishing Company, Louise Scruggs. And so they, they, they got “Rock Salt and Nails,” and, and um, “Starlight on the Rails,” . . . well, Earl, and, and Lester Flatt and the uh, and the Bluegrass Boys, they made um, a record with five of my songs on it. And called it The Versatile Flatt and Scruggs and then those songs began to spread out, you know, here and there. By that time Rosalie had left Utah, and was in the east workin' a good bit, and singing those songs too.

So by the time I had to leave Utah, those songs were being, well-enough known, that you know, it was eas—it was like jump-starting a career there, 'cause I was green as corn, I didn’t know what I was doing or where I was going, uhm, so yeah, so Tut Taylor and, and Kenny, were the ones who, who started getting that music around. I was singin' on the picket lines a lot, for the Utah Migrant Council, the whole anti-war movement, I made a lot—I took “Lonesome Roving Wolves” that Rosalie had and made “Killing Ground,” I used to sing at the rallies, um, took old “East Virginia Blues” and made uhm, uh, oh what the hell was the name of that? “The Judas Ram,”

Polly Stewart 33:01 Oh I remember that one, yeah.

Running for the U.S. Senate on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket

Bruce Phillips 33:02 And uhm, would sing those, so that was a whole other, other part, uhm, and then, course, uh, came, came Peace and Freedom, back at the Peace and Freedom Convention in, took a leave of absence from the State by that time I was one of the State Archivists. In the basement of the State Capitol. And uh, I got nominated by the state convention of Peace and Freedom, see I had, I had already started the Poor People’s Party down in Central City. Uhm, a party built entirely on the needs of children, figurin' if you satisfied those the rest would soon follow.

And these faculty people came from the University, and asked if I would merge that with the Peace and Freedom, which they were petitioning to get on the ballot. And it did get on the ballot in twenty-seven states. Um, so we went to the convention in Ann Arbor, and our presidential candidate was Eldredge Cleaver. We came back to Utah and we were on the ballot, so I took a leave of absence after I was nominated for the U. S. Senate, and we sang, sang our way through that. Hard campaign, campaigned in all twenty-seven counties. And uh we took 6,000 votes, you know. Problem was that Eugene McCarthy was gonna run for president. He was the peace candidate. Senator McCarthy.

Polly Stewart 34:22 Yeah.

Bruce Phillips 34:23 And so every Democratic party in the country, every state Democratic party, had a Eugene McCarthy caucus. We had one in Utah. And Dr. Woback [?] headed that one up. And so when McCarthy decided not to run, they had a choice of, of, of endorsing the Democratic party candidate, Milt Weilenmann, or endorsing Peace and Freedom, well they endorsed Peace and Freedom. So, that’s why we took 6,000 votes. Well, we had a Democratic governor, Cal Rampton, the Archives functioned under the governor: no job. I couldn’t get my job, I couldn’t get a job with the state. I think it was Clyde Miller, the Secretary of State, somebody’d always called ahead wherever I tried to get work and said don’t hire this guy.

Polly Stewart 35:05 Why did, I don’t understand why Rampton, uh,

Bruce Phillips 35:10 Okay, because, the Democrats lost that election. His margin of victory was in our, column.

Polly Stewart 35:14 I see what you’re saying, yeah, okay.

Bruce Phillips 35:16 Okay, so we screwed the Democratic Party.

Polly Stewart 35:17 Okay, all right, yeah.

Factors in Phillips’s departure from Utah/beginning of new trade as a folk singer and storyteller

Bruce Phillips 35:19 And, they were pissed, and so, you know, I couldn’t get work. And that was . . . I don’t know how much I want to talk about that. [pause] But it is germane to why I left. Um, I, couldn’t get my job back, I didn’t have any money, I wound up on a cot in the back of the Cosmic Airplane, down by the U.P. depot. Everybody else on the campaign committee went back to work. You know, up on—up at the University. And I was just out on this, limb, and, and it got sawed off, so. And I felt terrible about that, I was trying to keep this draft resistance office open, down there, and uhm, by that time we were getting deserters into Canada—not, not draft refusers. We were getting people who had been wounded and didn’t want to be sent back to Viet Nam. So we were getting ‘em, you know across the border into Canada. That was all filmed by the FBI, it turned out, I got pulled in when I left Utah and hit Saratoga. Pulled in a number of times by the FBI.

Uh, well, there was that, you know, being left out on a limb, not being able to get a job, worked for the Migrant Council, a little bit, Migrant Council got these Mexican- American Youth Organization, MAYO guys up from—militants, from Texas, they were organizing camp councils. They were mobile, with the stream as it came through Utah, so you wouldn’t have to rely on, on social services in town. And some of those, uh, radicals burned down some migrant housing, up in Davis County, on the theory that if it was rebuilt, you could supervise it, make sure it was up to code. Well, Rampton said he wasn’t going to sign the biennial appropriation unless the organizers left the state, you know, beat it.

And then we opened the Joe H—so that was me, and then we opened the Joe Hill House again, Ammon had left to retire in Phoenix, and me and Hal Nokes, fine poet, we reopened the Joe Hill House, this was right after the campaign, '69, and it was down in Central City, and um, two runaways came—kids—and I was out setting up a switchboard for one of them you know we had this switchboard eh system where we’d plug them back in to their parents? And our volunteer cook got 'em conked on this weird dope and one of them went to the hospital. And then Harry Patrick, police intelligence, who had always protected the Joe Hill House, came and said we can’t protect you any more, you know, so.

So, there it was, one two, three, you know, everything, there were no moves left, the family had fallen apart, so, there was Carl Sparkman under my old VW bus, the motorcycle king, at midnight in the rain, replacing the trans-axle, and I had seventy-five bucks, Cal [?Hal] Nokes, crazy John Shananagh [?] from the Utah Free Press, you know, the, the French Communist who ran this socialist newspaper, and a, and a, absolutely crazed Viet Nam vet, Larry, who didn’t know where he was at, at all, anyway crammed into my VW bus and we headed across the, out of, out of Utah, with seventy-five bucks, in early November 1969, and the . . . and that’s why I’m sitting here.

You know, that's when I—hit New York, with all these songs I’d made up, I was gonna sell 'em for $5,000 and go back and fight 'em. And, and I had all these, these old songs that I all, that I’d known, from Bob Diener, from Rockwell, from all these people, and all this stuff in my head, and I found out people wanted it, that there was this whole folk music family. And they knew nothing about in Utah, all over the country. San Francisco Folk Music Club, Faith Petric, knew Lena at Caffé Lena, where everybody played, and Pastine's in Boston, and all over, and Lena’s the one who showed me, convinced me that I was now in a new trade, I was no longer an unemployed organizer, I was now a folk singer. And storyteller.

And I started growing into the trade and asking questions and learning the business of it and learning the booking and, and then, realizing that I had to travel transcontinentally if I was going to make a living at it, and then Canada too. So I’ve been at it thirty-five years now. Two hundred cities, maybe 212 cities on an average year. Until ten years ago, when I got diagnosed with the congestive heart failure and now I only leave town once or twice a month.

And I’m still making up songs, and uh, I guess, most or a lot of the stuff I finally recorded in 1973 or started recording at Philo, up in North Ferrisburg, Vermont, and um, and uhm but I discovered this marvelous, family, folk music family, this trade, and I work at a trade level, I work at a sub-industrial level. I have nothing to do with the music industry. Folk music societies and small clubs. Make a living and not a killing. And I own what I do. I don’t have to give any up, any of it up to the Home Office. I don’t do commercial radio, I don’t do commercial—I don’t do television at all. And I, and I make it through, I make it through. I do okay. I’m well-known but I’m not famous.

Polly Stewart 40:36 Mm hmm. Hmm.

Bruce Phillips 40:37 And I like that, it suits me, that suits me fine, because it’s something you earn. And that’s the story to this point.

Reflections on the Urban Folk Music Revival/genuine folk vs. commercial folk

Polly Stewart 40:44 Mm hmm. Let me go back and um, ask you a couple of things about, there were some, points that I wanted to ask about, about this concept of—in my notes here—Urban is in quotes, and Folk song is in quotes, and Revival is in quotes, ‘cause all three of those terms are uh, probably meaning different things to different people.

Bruce Phillips 41:07 [blows out through cheeks] I guess, I think they’re real things,

Polly Stewart 41:12 Mm hmm.

Bruce Phillips 41:12 Urban is re, a real thing and uh, and uh, the commercial revival became an urban phenomenon because that’s where the people were who would buy the records. The people who were, at that time, who were in the rural areas were still makin’ their own music. See. So, it was that part, the commercial revival was an urban phenomenon. Let’s see, Urban, and what’s the other, quotes?

Polly Stewart 41:33 Well, Urban folk music revival—

Bruce Phillips 41:35 Mm hmm.

Polly Stewart 41:36 The three terms get put together in that way.

Bruce Phillips 41:38 Well, folk music, now folk music is a bit more problematic. In that um, in that, we, we caved into and accepted for that ten- or twelve-year period a media-driven definition of folk music. Uhm, which for me bore full fruit when I played the Kerrville Festival for the first time, uh down in South Texas, and asked the driver who was driving me into town from the airport if they sang folk songs at this festival, he said, Everybody does. And it turned out that what they meant by folk song was that, you wrote it. They had no concept of cooperative ownership of a song, they had none. I’d sing an old song and they’d say, When did you write that?

Polly Stewart 42:20 [chuckles]

Bruce Phillips 42:20 And none, oh, man. Uh, so we, we—we adopted a, a commercial, you know, driven, a capitalist-driven notion of, of folk song. Uhm, plumbers define plumbing, carpenters define carpentry, the fellow doing the carpentry out front, he knows his tools, and so he has the ax, he can define what that is. I’m a folk singer, so I define it, thank you. You know. I mean, never abdicated that to, to non-folk singers. Uhm, folk song isn’t owned by anybody, it’s owned by everybody. It has nobody’s name on it. It shows evidence of oral transmission, it exists in different versions, and um, that, that, that’s pretty close. Also, my, I have a thorough understanding that there is no Republican folk music.

Polly Stewart 43:14 [chuckles]

Bruce Phillips 43:14 And that’s—Kenny Goldstein said the same thing, he said, Any, any conservative folklorist from the North who go into the Southern mountains during the Great Depression to do field collecting, if he doesn’t come out a radical, he’s blind or stupid. See. So, that’s true. That’s what, the direction the music took. So folk music in the context of, of what was happening then, no, that wasn’t folk music. What I was learning, I was learning folk music, I was learning from all these people. You know, and I was learning by ear,

Polly Stewart 43:49 Mm hmm.

Bruce Phillips 43:49 Uh, not—not by book or by record. Uhm, revival, um, are you familiar with The Radical Roots of the Folk Revival [Songs for Political Action: Folk Music, Topical Songs, and the Left,1926-1953], Bear [Family] Records, it’s a ten CD set, all original sources.

Polly Stewart 44:06 Really?

Bruce Phillips 44:06 Yeah, starting in the 1930s and all the way up through Almanac Singers, the People’s Songs Movement, um, uhh, People’s Songs in California, Mario Cassetta [?], Vern Partlow, “Talking Atomic Blues,” Cannery Bill—all original sources, a great photo book of essays, the whole thing. That whole thing—[pause] the, the commercial folk music revival may be one of the, one of the successes of the American Communist Party. Uhm, the CIO labor camps, the labor singing in the 1930s, the Communist Party labor singing camps, you know, summer camps that the kids went to, People’s Songs, it was fl—, literally flourishing all over the country after the Second World War, uhm, the singing cavalcades that were organized by the meat packers’ union after the Second World War, I’ve got tapes of those shows, uh, on and on—those—those people who did that, like in Philadelphia, People’s Songs came together and formed the Philadelphia Folk Festival— Folks—that’s where it comes from. They don’t know those radical roots any more, they have to tell ‘em, see.

Those, those roots go really really deep, so there was a whole lot in place. When this commercial thing hit. The commercial thing, near as I could dope out when I got back there, was, uhm, hard times, money was tight, costs a lot of money to send a rock and roll band around in a bus, you know, to do tour support for a new record, it was a whole lot easier to send one person with a guitar. You know, cost effective. And so, that’s, that's where we came into it, you know, that’s what we came into it. Uh, it would have all been Peter, Paul and Mary, and it would have all been the Rooftop Singers, except that we had a civil rights movement. That was a singing movement, and we had people going to, to Mississippi and coming back with these songs, you know, I learned 'em, uhm, you know, the song about the back of the bus and all of them, uh, they came into it, and they, because, because that was so high-profile those civil-rights songs were a part of that commercial revival. You could hear some of those song through Peter, Paul and Mary. Um, and others.

And then, and then, when uhm, the voter registration stopped, the civil rights cycle was past, it didn’t work, Southern uh, “Snick” [SNCC], um, voted out—threw out its white supporters, uh, 'cause they went militant, and they had all this experience and all this music, and they, there was the, anti-war movement, right there, in 1965, the Viet Nam Day Committee, the first—

END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A