RIP: Utah Phillips

In her latest, Amy Goodman reports the legendary folksinger and activist has died:

Utah Phillips was a living bridge, keeping the rich history of labor struggles alive. He told me: “The long memory is the most radical idea in America. That long memory has been taken away from us. You haven’t gotten it in your schools. You’re not getting it on your television. You’re being leapfrogged from one crisis to the next. Mass media contributed to that by taking the great movements that we’ve been through and trivializing important events. No, our people’s history is like one long river. It flows down from way over there. And everything that those people did and everything they lived flows down to me, and I can reach down and take out what I need, if I have the courage to go out and ask questions.” On his radio show “Loafer’s Glory,” he once said, work on this planet has been to remember.”

A week before he died, Utah Phillips wrote in a public letter to his family and friends: “The future? I don’t know. Through all of it, up and down, it’s the song. It’s always been the song.”

More at his site.

I first heard Phillips through his work with Ani Difranco in the 90s, but my favorite moment of his is in the 1979 documentary "The Wobblies" in which he leads a group of surviving 80+-year-old IWW members in a sing-a-long of Joe Hill's labor anthems.

Audio, video and a transcript of an old segment with him from Amy Goodman's show can be found here.

Photo: Wikipedia