Thought you might like to see the obituary that appeared in The Irish Times this morning
Jim Carroll

Radical US folk singer who documented counterculture

UTAH PHILLIPS, who has died from heart disease aged 73, will be remem¬bered as an American political songwriter and singer. If that suggests he was dour, it will have ill-served a man of warmth and wit.
To the casual listener, he might seem like a disciple of Woody Guthrie, but there was more to Phil¬lips, just as there was more to Guthrie. Along with their political views and alternative lifestyles, both had an intense love of the American landscape and its people.
"I've got no use for the govern¬ment," Phillips once wrote. "But to the country that gives me a handout from its back door, a barn to sleep in, a drink in exchange for a song, the music of its incompa¬rable language, to that country I am immensely loyal."
Phillips covered a lot of ground free-riding on freight trains, and memorialised the passing of the railroad era in songs like Starlight on the Rails, and Daddy, What's a Train?. He joined a network of migrant workers, career hobos and footloose anarchists, and stayed with the anarchists as a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, or Wobblies.
That aligned him with two forerunners in American music, Harry "Mac" McClintock, whose version of The Big Rock Candy Mountain is heard over the opening credits of the film 0 Brother, Where Art Thou?, and Goebel Reeves, the "Texas Drifter", a radio singer of the 1930s who interspersed his songs and yodels with jokes. Phil¬lips had a penchant for shaggy-dog stories, told with oratorical flour¬ishes, like his saga of cooking for railroad workers. Moose Turd Pie.
He was born in Cleveland, Ohio, the son of labour activists, and spent his teenage years in Utah.
From 1956 to 1959, he served in the US army in Korea, which changed his life. "What happens," he wrote 20 years later, "when you grow up in a good solid family, maybe going to college or working at a good job, and something goes wrong in your head?"
He was also alluding to a per¬sonal crisis. For a while, he was a drifter and alcoholic, from which he rescued himself with the help of anarchist Ammon Henny, who ran a shelter for the homeless in Salt Lake City. He later commemorated Hennacy, "the best man I ever knew", in his song, Old Buddy, Goodnight. In the 1960s, Phillips immersed himself in radical politics and, in 1968, ran unsuccessfully for the US Senate on a peace and freedom platform.
He performed on the folk circuit as U Utah Phillips, an allusion to singer T Texas Tyler.
Phillips' first recording, a 1960 album for Prestige, dissatisfied him, and he did not make another until 1973, titled, from the punchline of the Moose Turd Pie routine. Good Though!. An early release on a new label, Philo Records, it brought him many admirers.
It also alerted the American folk community to a writer who could handle big subjects in colloquial language. Folk singer Rosalie Sor¬rels said: "He took the stories of working people and railroad bums and he put them in language so the people whom the songs and stories were about still owned them."
Among his best-known compositions are Green Rolling Hills, recorded by Emmylou Harris, and Rock, Salt and Nails, which has attracted Joan Baez, John Martyn and many others.
In the 1980s, he settled in Nevada City, California.
Among his albums were a collection of Wobblies' songs and sto¬ries, a concert with Ramblin' Jack Elliott and Spider John Koerner, and collaborations with singer Ani DiFranco, such as Fellow Workers, which received a Grammy nomination in 2000.
In 2004, slowed by chronic heart disease, he reduced his per¬forming, but hosted a radio show and founded a homeless shelter. He is survived by his second wife, Joanna, two sons and a daughter.
Bruce Duncan "Utah" Phillips: born May 15th, 1935; died May 23rd, 2008