U. Utah Phillips: Starlight on the Rails: A Songbook

U. Utah Phillips Starlight on the Rails: A Songbook AK 041 / Daemon 19047

Bruce "U. Utah" Phillips has come out with the defining work of his career. Starlight on the Rails is a four-CD collection with a personal introduction by Utah to each track. It's a musical documentary of his life experiences spanning decades, more rich than any American history textbook. I can't imagine any folk fan not having this in their collection. Period.

Utah Phillips has richness beyond measure. He writes of hobo travel, where the leaving of a new song pays for a meal and where longing can drive one traveling for days to locate an old friend. He has the sentiment of cherishing life's opportunities and the eye for making heroes of everyday people. He is a promoter and supporter of unions, laborers, railroads, the Industrial Workers of the World, and laying down the weapons of privilege. He is a storymaker, storyteller, story spreader, historian, anarchist, pacifist, philanthropist, agitator, entertainer, curmudgeon, and producer of this work that he calls a songbook.

On the first cut of CD One, Utah introduces the songbook by saying "This is a Collection of songs I've made. I'm both a song learner and a song maker." He credits those who live the events from which he shapes his songs saying, "Nothing happens inside my head until something happens outside of it." He calls his head his office and says that taking a song out of it and writing it down makes him forget it, adding "I'd rather rely on memory than paper and electricity."

And relying on memory he does. He presents social history with priceless detail. He knows countless names, directions and distances between places, landmarks and patterns of life in small towns in America. We go hitchhiking into Wheeling, West Virginia, travel an Army boat to Adak, Alaska and Fort Devens, Massachusetts, and to the Roper yards in Salt Lake City near Ammon Hennacy's Joe Hill House of Hospitality for Wayward Folks. We visit Spokane, Washington and Decatur, Illinois, head to Butte Montana and Belmont, Chicago (there on North Lincoln), with geographic precision, turning stories like pages of an atlas.

These songs are classics and little known ditties out of the hundreds of songs Utah has made over the years. By his own count he's lost track and asks if anyone has something he left in some town, he'd like to know.

You know these tunes. Maybe over the years, depending on your age you've heard the Flatlanders doing "Going Away" or Uncle Earl singing "Orphan Train." Maybe you know Rosalie Sorrel's version of "If I Could Be the Rain" or Robin and Linda Williams covering his "The Goodnight Loving Trail," or perhaps Molly O'Brien singing "The Green Rolling Hills of west Virginia." CD Three is entirely comprised of other artists covering Phillips' works, among them Kate Wolf, Rosalie Sorrels, Kate Brislin and Jody Stecher. Following the format of the collection, Utah continues to introduce each track.

It is the introductions throughout that make this collection really special. These stories are gifts. They educate, they entertain and they, as Utah says, help adults wake up. The stories are what birthed each song and they are like family heirlooms. We hear the tale of Catholic miners who carried morphine tins to "leave in a painless manner" if they were caught underground facing death. Others teach double-jack mining, or celebrate the value of the worker whose labor creates all wealth. He takes Us with him: protesting the execution of an unfortunate Chicano boy, finding a dead hobo in a boxcar, feeding the hungry, Singing struggles of the downtrodden, the weak, the under-privileged, and less fortunate.

On the release, Utah apologizes to his children for choosing to meander and not be as present as he might have been in their lives. He states, "This is what I've done with my life, kids, wish I'd been with you more. It's one long story and we're all in it. Most we can hope for is that in the end it will be well told."

We should all thank his children for coping with this absence, for we are all so rich because of that life choice, I'm thankful as a parent, a librarian, a folk presenter and DJ. We don't have Woody Guthrie or Joe Hill anymore, but, damn it, we do have Utah Philips.

COPYRIGHT 2006 Sing Out Corporation
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group