Dance your dance
Tell your story
I will Listen and remember"
---------------Utah Phillips
Just posted about my on going remembrance and appreciation of Utah Phillips. I wanted to touch upon his relationship with folk singer and activist Ani Difranco.
I first learned of Utah Phillips in 1996 when Ani Difranco put out an album of Utah's work (with her background accompaniment or as her website puts it "she took a box of his monologues into a studio and cooked up a mess of folk-hop and grandpappy rap to accompany 'em") called The Past Didn't Go Anywhere. Ever since then I was hooked. Utah has fed me with his intimate storytelling and rumbling singing voice. Anyone who knows me knows that I love a good storyteller!
Utah Phillips & Ani Difranco 1999
"I have a good friend in the East, who comes to my shows and says, you sing a lot about the past, you can't live in the past, you know. I say to him, I can go outside and pick up a rock that's older than the oldest song you know, and bring it back in here and drop it on your foot. Now the past didn't go anywhere, did it? It's right here, right now.
I always thought that anybody who told me I couldn't live in the past was trying to get me to forget something that if I remembered it it would get them serious trouble. No, that 50s, 60s, 70s, 90s stuff, that whole idea of decade packaging, things don't happen that way. The Vietnam War heated up in 1965 and ended in 1975-- what's that got to do with decades? No, that packaging of time is a journalist convenience that they use to trivialize and to dismiss important events and important ideas. I defy that."
-----------------------Utah Phillips
Direct Action - Utah Phillips & Ani Difranco collaboration from the 1999 album Fellow Workers
Thought I'd post Utah doing what he does best, on his own..
Utah Phillips tells a story and sings a classic labor movement song from the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World)
Dump the Bosses Off Your Back
Are you poor, forlorn and hungry?
Are there lots of things you lack ?
Is your life made up of misery?
Then dump the bosses off your back.
Are your clothes all patched and tattered ?
Are you living in a shack ?
Would you have your troubles scattered ?
Then dump the bosses off your back.
Are you almost split asunder?
Loaded like a long-eared jack?
Boob - why don't you buck like thunder,
And dump the bosses off your back ?
All the agonies you suffer
You can end with one good whack
Stiffen up, you orn'ry duffer
And dump the bosses off your back.
(source)
Utah Phillips & Ani Difranco in 2004
Here's Ani doing what she does best, and on her own..
Ani Difranco sings Out of Range at an Australian ABC TV Show Studio 22 from 2000
This is simply a post of appreciation. To be honest I never really expect many others to be all too excited about folk music and storytelling. But it's a big wide world out there and I figure someone might.
"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..."
----------------Utah Phillips
In 1997 The Folk Alliance honored Utah Phillips with a Lifetime Achievement Award. Shortly before the ceremony he sat down with Ani DiFranco to chat about everything from politics, folksinging, growing up, and their new (at the time) project together The Past Didnt Go Anywhere.
Ani Difranco & Utah Phillips speak about what folk music means to them
"No matter how new age you get...old age is gonna kick your ass!"
------------------Utah Phillips
Ani Difranco & Utah Phillips speak about bumpersticker politics
"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”
----------------------Utah Phillips
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