[Add to Cart]    

Starlight on the Rails
A Songbook
Four Discs/61 songs with reflections, 281 minutes, accompanying 12 page booklet.
$38.00

The Songs and Stories of U. Utah Phillips

Special Guest Artists:
Kate Wolf, Rosalie Sorrels, Kate Brislin & Jody Stecher, Finest Kind, Mark Ross, Kendall Morse, and Kuddie.

"Call him a conspicuous enigman; a canny, uncanny blend of Mark Twain and Will Rogers, with a touch of P.T. Barnum and more than a hint of Huck Finn. Utah Phillips is also one of the most important songwriters to be found in North American"
-Rolling Stone

Also:
Please check out
Utah's release
"I've Got to Know"
available at Daemon.

Utah's offical site

Starlight on the Rails is the culmination of a lifetime as it was experienced by Utah Phillips. This four disc box set speaks volumes to the legacy that human beings such as Utah gift to us, the seekers. If you don’t know him by now, Starlight on the Rails is your ticket to ride. Or you can do as Utah did and just jump the train destined for wherever it is you hop off.

Hello,

Many years ago I worked as a warehouseman in Salt Lake City, Utah. My employer, Earl M. Lyman, an older man was the great-grandson of Amasa M. Lyman, one of the apostles of the LDS (Mormon) Church. I worked at a long table where I wrapped boxes for shipping from a great roll of brown butcher’s paper fastened to the end of the counter. When Mr. Lyman was in the mood, he would hoist himself up onto my table, lean his back up against the roll of paper, and yarn about the old Mormon pioneer days: the Nephites, the Morrisites, Mountain Meadows, Big Bill Hickman. As long as Mr. Lyman was camped there on my work table yarning, I couldn’t work. That’s when I learned the value of storytelling. At the end of the day, I made it my practice to stop by the library, the Utah Room, and read up on territorial history so that the next day I would have questions to fuel Mr. Lyman’s excursions onto a past through which his kin had lived. I worked very little, but I learned a lot.

Most of all, I asked questions and listened. Storytelling begins with questioning and listening. That’s what Elder Lyman taught me, and I have learned the same lesson again and again-from stranger and friend, whoever happened to be closest at hand. I’ve sat in the shade of vermillion cliffs and listened to Father Liebler, the padre of the San Juan, tell about the Old Navajo ways and sing the Plainsong using Navajo an Zuni medicine chants. I’ve walked through mud and rain and a sea of ruins to a bombed out auditorium in Korea and listened to them debate the proper Latin translation of "Death Before Employment."

Or again, I have sat listening to Gail I. Gardener, who wrote "Tying Knots in the Devil’s Tail." He was 96 when I saw him last, and his voice was like the wind in the high desert. He talked about horses. In Chicago, I listened to a concert pianist who lost an arm serving in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War-Ed Belchowski. Through his canny madness and explosive rants shone a quiet, compassionate intelligence that you could carry away and learn. I have listened to tramps talk about trains; street revivalists talk about tramps; booming workers talk about camps, the mines, the woods; harvest stiffs (home guards now) talk about old immigrant dreams, old union dreams, recalled with fire and deep passion. "We came so close. So close." For eight years I listened to Ammon Hennacy, anarchist, pacifist, conscientious objector during two world wars, tax refuser, vegetarian, one-man revolution in America (which covers it), who ran a house of hospitality for tramps and migrants in Salt Lake. He was 70 years old when I met him, and he arranged my brain when I got back from Korea in such a way that I could survive the twentieth century and any number of industrial revolutions.

Well, that’s it. I tell stories molded together out of an inheritance of working class lore-comic, tragic, weird-compounded equally of love and violence, handed on to me by my elders because I took the time to ask questions and, most of all, to listen. In turn, they taught me that my life, each of our lives, is a story. The most we can hope for is that in the end it will have been well told. My favorite street rabbi, Ezra the Scribe, wrote this, which lays out pretty much what I’m up to:

He is propped upright
In some last, lost corner of his life
Waiting for the only new things left to see.
He cultivates memories
Rich and brown like gardens.
Hardly eighty, his eyes already inward turning,
He has banished himself to worlds of fine, gray dust.
Tonight, wrapped around a chair,
He rolls another damp cigarette
And sends those blue clouds
On their familiar reach
Into the bag of weathered yarns.
And like some deft and protosplasmic being,
Turns himself inside out
to feed on the silence that is me.
Thanks for listening.

-Utah

Utah on "Yuba City" (MP3)
Yuba City (MP3)

Utah on "Talking N.P.R Blues" (MP3)
Talking N.P.R. Blues (MP3)

Utah on "Old Buddy, Goodnight" (MP3)
Old Buddy, Goodnight (MP3)