Fathers and Fatherhood: Daddy, What’s a Train?

Utah Phillips: Daddy, What‘s a Train?

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I wasn’t expecting to get to post the transitional tune this week, but here it is.

I am 43 years older than my son, (now 5). So I grew up on another planet. This was a world where TV signals came through the air, and were caught by something called an antenna. After a storm or a windy day, my father would go up on the roof, and turn the antenna back to its optimal position. A computer was a machine that took up an entire room, and only institutional users had them.

And, in the next town over, there was a railroad track. I always felt lucky when we happened to go through that town as one of those impossibly long freight trains came through.

A few years ago. they shut down that line. They pulled up the tracks, they even took out all of the railroad trestles. Now, if you didn’t know where the tracks used to be, you could never tell. Going back before my time, I imagine this happened a lot. Air freight came in, and it must have seemed like all freight shipping by train would become a thing of the past. And that would be around the time that Utah Phillips wrote this song.

In Memoriam: Utah Phillips

To properly represent the career of Utah Phillips, I feel that I should present a train song, a story, and a political or union song. The last two are here. For train song, follow the link later in this post.

Utah Phillips: Moose Turd Pie

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Utah Phillips: There is Power in the Union

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I never met Utah Phillips, or even saw him perform. But, as I was starting to learn about folk music, his name would come up from time to time. A friend would say that this was somebody I would probably like. A song would come on the radio on a folk show, and it would be him, but by the time the show ended, his would one of a crowd of names I would try to remember. So how did I get to the point of writing a tribute to him?

It happened because I needed a snow song a few weeks ago. and I found the song “Phoebe Snow“. At that point, I learned that Utah Phillips was not only a musician I should have known about sooner, he was also a man I would have loved to hang out with.

Think about that. How many times have you heard a musician, loved what they did, but found out that they were the worst company imaginable? Not Phillips. He was a storyteller. He told tales of hobos in his songs with obvious affection. And, personally, I would have felt right at home talking politics with him. This is important, because the subject would certainly have come up.

What tied all of this together was Phillips’ belief that a man had the right to live by his own rules. Whether it was the hobo, who chose his route and answered to no one, or the union worker, who organized and struck when necessary, rather than submit to the whims of the bosses, these were the people Phillips sang and told of. These were the people he championed and fought for all his life. And now, the fight is left for others to continue. Perhaps to the tune of one of Phillips’ songs.

Winter Wonderland: Phoebe Snow

Utah Phillips: Intro to Phoebe Snow

Utah Phillips: Phoebe Snow

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I kind of cheated in posting this for this week’s theme; not a single flake of snow appears in this song, and it even seems likely that the action occurs in summer. But, before you totally panic, I did not use a song by an artist with snow in her name, and the word does appear in the song title. In fact both the song and the singer took their name from the same source; Phoebe Snow was a character created for an ad campaign by the Delaware Lackawanna Railroad in the early 1900s. Ads such as the one shown above were still found on railcars well into the second half of the twentieth century, and were known to both the singer Phoebe Snow, who took her stage name from them, and to Utah Phillips.

Back in Heaven week, I managed the trick of posting songs about hobos without mentioning Utah Phillips even once. Phillips had been a hobo and a union organizer at different times in his early life, and these influences informed his songwriting once he became a musician. Phillips championed the downtrodden and the workers in his work, and his political views informed many of his songs. His hobo songs, such as this one, tend to be less overtly political than the rest of his material.

Many people had their introduction to the work of Utah Phillips when Ani DiFranco released an album of remixes of his songs on her Righteous Babe label; the album was made with Phillips’ full consent and cooperation. But what you hear here is a better representation of his work. Phillips died earlier this year, and I offer this post as a small tribute to him.