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Our hope is that The Long Memory Project will be the
building block towards establishing a permanent,
non-profit archive for the works of Bruce "Utah" Phillips
that will be easily accessible to the public. Some of the
projects currently underway are the republication of
Utah's original song book "Starlight On The Rails",
making the one hundred episodes of "Loafer's Glory"
available for download and rebroadcast, and a tribute
CD from the artisans and organizers influenced by Utah
from the state that Bruce always considered home,
Utah. All the proceeds from these ongoing projects as
well as donations will be used for this sole purpose. A
portion will also go towards the day to day operations
of the Hospitality House A Community Shelter fo the
Homeless.

From American's Who Tell The Truth

Bruce “Utah” Phillips Biography
Songwriter, Storyteller, Humorist, Philosopher, 1935–2008

“Kids don’t have a little brother working in the coal mine, they don’t have a little sister
coughing her lungs out in the looms of the big mill towns of the Northeast. Why? Because
we organized; we broke the back of the sweatshops in this country; we have child labor
laws. Those were not benevolent gifts from enlightened management. They were fought
for, they were bled for, they were died for by working people, by people like us. Kids ought
to know that. That’s why I sing these songs. That’s why I tell these stories, dammit. No root,
no fruit!”

When Bruce Phillips was released from the U.S. Army in 1959, after the Korean War, he felt
angry, used, and lost. He lived as a hobo for several years, hopping trains and listening to
tales from people who had been “spit out” by industrial society. From them, he says, “I got
a vision of who I really was and where I came from, something I never got in school.”

But Phillips found more than that: In his home state of Utah, he met Ammon Hennacy, who
introduced him to the Catholic Worker movement and to the principles of both nonviolence
and anarchy. As a result, Phillips vowed to lay down “the weapons of privilege” and to
take personal responsibility each day for making the world a better place. And in Saratoga
Springs, New York, he claimed his place in what he calls “the great folk music scare of the
1960s,” adopting “Utah” as his stage name.

Four decades later, slightly slowed by heart disease, Utah Phillips packs cross-generational
audiences into venues across the United States. His songs and stories, edgy with pain and
piercing humor, tell of working-class and homeless folk, of war and peace. His recordings
include I’ve Got to Know (1991); the four-CD Starlight on the Rails: A Songbook (2005); and,
in collaboration with Ani DiFranco, The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere (1996), and Fellow
Worker (1999), nominated for a Grammy Award. A renowned raconteur, Phillips hosted a
weekly National Public Radio program, Loafer’s Glory: The Hobo Jungle of the Mind, until
2002.

Committed to taking individual responsibility instead of assigning it to elected officials,
Phillips reluctantly voted for the first time in 2004—“to stand in for one of the victims of the
kind of brutality that Washington brings to the world.” Then he returned to his own
mission: offering levity to lift our souls, compassion to join our hands, and honesty to help
us see how we must act.

April 3, 2010
We have spent the last couple of weeks in
the Roto Sonic Sound studio working on the
first few tracks of our new tribute CD. Thus
far we have the rough mixes for
" Going Away","Pig Hollow",
" Miner's Lullaby " and
" Scofeild Mine Disaster ". Our plan is to
finish the rough mixes by the end of April,
take a deep breath, listen to it all and start
making plans for overdubs and such. We
hope to begin work on the final mix in the fall.
In the meantime we have been doing house
concerts and small gigs in the coffee shops
around town to raise dough for our little
project. It's all very exciting and the studio
work has been amazing. I am glad we made
the decision to comprise the CD of fresh
studio work. And did I mention that all of the
artists that are playing guitar on their tracks
are using dad's old road worn Guild guitar, it
sounds fantastic. To have the opportunity to
sit in the studios control room and listen to
folks perform dad's songs and playing dad's
guitar is very touching. Check out the CD
project page for some pictures, song list and
a few sound bites.