#utah philips

[misterzapata]

We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old

[pyro-hairedguy]

So @theiceandbones​ tagged me to post the first 10 songs from my spotify on shuffle, but because I’m a dinosaur and my spotify only has a playlist of very specific tracks, you get my phone library on shuffle.

1: Spanish Moss - Gordon Lightfoot

2: Working on the Highway - Bruce Springsteen

3: Why Don’t a Tow Truck Haul Toes? - Larry Penn

4: My Hometown - Bruce Springsteen

5: Casey Jones - Pete Seeger

6: Wabash Cannonball - The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band

7: The Maple on the Hill - Norman Blake

8: The Idiot - Musical Cast Recording from Stan Rogers: A Matter of Heart Musical Revue

9: Reuben You Can Play Your Banjo - Mark Dvorak

10: Zack, The Mormon Engineer - Art Theime

Bonus, because The Boss appeared twice: 11: Song of the Candle - Stan Rogers (Recorded from a live performance at the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago, Illinois)

I dunno, @pahrak-the-sinnoh-slizer @autisticmight @naturallyaspirated @saccharine-catherine, y’all like these, right?

[weil-weil-lautre]

Utah Phillips - There is Power In The Union

[radiodark]

I've been thinking a lot about a slice of this album from 1983 I grew up with, Seasons of Change, from Priscilla Herdman (who did a lot of folk covers), which had three songs in succession that are haunting me right now-

Written by Canadian satirist Nancy White, who subtitled it "A LAMENT FOR THE DISAPPEARED PEOPLE OF ARGENTINA, EL SALVADOR, CHILE, URUGUAY, GUATEMALA, ETC" and printed in the liner notes:

"This song was written in 1978 when Toronto’s Chilean community staged a hunger strike to pressure the junta in Santiago to release information about Chile’s 2500 “desaparecidos” (disappeared ones), some of whom had been missing since the coup in ‘73. These people were abducted, jailed, probably tortured and possibly killed; their families live year after year with the horror and the grief, and no answers come."

(Herdman's website lists the songwriter as Utah Phillips/Priscilla Herdman, but I suspect it's a Utah Phillips song and the credit reflects the level of arrangement she did for her version. ) On one of his albums he talks about writing it:

I had been listening to the reports from Nicaragua in the waning days of Somoza's dictatorship, and the news was full of stories about people disappeared, about kids disapeared, that just vanished from the lives of their parents, were carried off by the military. I was working out in my garden up there in Spokane and I was listening to the sound of my children playing in the front yard. And I wondered- what would it be like, if suddenly I heard their playing stop, and I went out to see what was the matter and they were gone, and I had to realize I would never see them again. Gary Cristall from Toronto was down there during the rebellion, during the revolution, and he was visiting the Liberated Areas, and I said to him, "Gary, what is a Liberated Area? What happens in a Liberated Area?" And he said, "Near as I can tell, it's the peasants just tear up the coffee plants and plant rice and beans."

Deportees (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos) is, much more famously, Woodie Guthrie's lament for the loss of 28 migrant farm workers (a mix of folks being deported and folks returning to Mexico at the termination of their contracts as part of the Bracero Guest Worker Program) who died in 1948 when their plane crashed near Los Gatos Canyon in California, with initial news reports listing only the pilot, first officer, stewardess, and immigration guard on the plane and the remainder simply described as "deportees", their bodies placed in a mass grave and labeled only as "Mexican Nationals".

Guthrie wrote it as a poem, which was put to music a decade later by a schoolteacher named Martin Hoffman, and then popularized by Pete Seeger. Guthrie himself never put out a recording, though the Smithsonian recently announced that a reel-to-reel home recording of his from the 50s has been "restored through the use of AI" and can be listened to here- they don't provide the original for comparison though, so it's hard to tell if the tech was 100% corrective or if it could have hallucinated any tonal differences when filling in the gaps of the original.

It seems unneccessary and inadequate to reflect on why these songs resonate today, so I shan't, but I hope you enjoy. Herdman's tunes were by and large my first entry into adult folk music, having graduated from her cassettes for kids, and while she's not so known for her own activism or songwriting chops her curation of covers and traditional tunes and the dialogues she'd create between songs on an album still anchor me.

[commodorebuzzkill]

They use up the oil, they use trees, they use up the air and they use up the seas, but what about you, friend and what about me? What’s left when we’re all used up?

[youthincare]

[meta-child]

I spent my whole life making somebody rich I busted my ass for that son of a bitch He left me to die like a dog in a ditch And told me I'm all used up He used up my labor, he used up my time He plundered my body and squandered my mind Then he gave me a pension, some handouts and wine And told me I'm all used up My kids are in hock to a god you call Work Slaving their lives out for some other jerk And my youngest in 'Frisco just made shipping-clerk He don't know I'm all used up Some young people reach out for power and gold And they don't have respect for anything old For pennies they're bought, for promises sold Someday they'll be used up They use up the oil, they use up the trees They use up the air and they use up the seas But how about you, friend, and how about me What's left, when we're all used up

[voltairine-kropotkin]

"You are about to be told one more time that you are America's most valuable natural resource. Have you seen what they do to valuable natural resources?! Have you seen a strip mine? Have you seen a clear cut in the forest? Have you seen a polluted river? Don't ever let them call you a valuable natural resource! They're going to strip mine your soul. They're going to clear cut your best thoughts for the sake of profit unless you learn to resist, because the profit system follows the path of least resistance and following the path of least resistance is what makes the river crooked!" -Utah Phillips