Utah Phillips on the Catholic Worker, Polarization, and Songwriting

author : Fast Rattler

"There are a lot of people who are just inches away from where the homeless are today. They Are Us!"

An interview conducted by Fast Rattler

Q: This show coming up is a benefit for Bread and Roses and the Catholic Worker. Could you talk a little bit about your personal history with the Catholic Worker?

When I got back from being a soldier in Korea, I was very angry and frightened by what I'd seen and what I had done there. I got on the freight trains and I rode for quite a while to try to sort myself out. I think I was drunk most of the time and I just rode and thought and made up songs during those long travels, especially around those western railroads. Those songs I will never find, never recover. I decided to go back to Salt Lake and make my stand, try to pull myself back together. It was there that I met an old man named Ammon Hennessey. Parenthetically, Ammon Hennessey, when I met him, was the same age I am now, 70, so to me he was an old man then. He was picketing alone in front of the post office, picketing against war taxes. That was Ammon Hennessey. He had been sent west by Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker movement, to start the Joe Hill House, a house of hospitality for transients, migrants, derelicts, people down on their luck. Ammon took over my life at that point and I spent the next eight years of my life working in and around the Joe Hill House. It was Ammon who taught me what these Christians meant by an anarchist. The Catholic Workers are Catholic Anarchists. Ammon Hennessey was an anarchist long before he became a Catholic; he was a war tax resister and did time before the First World War for refusing the draft. So . . . he taught me what it means to be an anarchist and why I needed to be one since I had a very deep visceral war with the state at that point. He taught me what Mark Twain said, "Loyalty to the country always, loyalty to the government when it deserves it." I have a very deep and abiding love for the country and I have no use for the government. He also taught me why I needed to become a pacifist and I have been working at that ever since.

When I left Utah in 1969, on the lam, after I had been blacklisted and couldn't find work there, I headed east to become a traveling folksinger and storyteller and the first thing I did when I got to New York was to visit Dorothy Day. She was quit elderly then and I took Ammon's greetings and I talked with Dorothy Day. I met her any number of times when I was traveling in the east and through New York City and was instructed [in Catholic worker thought] that way too. That changed my whole world-view, exposure to the Catholic Workers, these people who live in voluntary poverty and practice the works of mercy. Wherever I've traveled since, when I have the chance, I work with the Catholic Worker movement. There will be a big Catholic Worker conference later this year in Desmoines, Iowa of a lot of the houses coming together and sharing their ideas and plans. I plan on going to that and participating in that. I wrote a lot of songs about the Catholic workers. I wrote a lot of songs in the Joe Hill house that are a direct result of the Catholic Worker movement. And ya know . . . it's well to point out that I am not a Catholic. As a matter of fact I am not a Christian. That doesn't matter. I don't care what people believe, it's how they behave that concerns me, and Catholic Workers behave in such a way as to bring compassion and joy to the world around them.

Q: So I understand that you have helped to put together a shelter project in your home of Nevada City, California. Describe how your experiences with the Catholic Worker helped shape this project, and could you give us a little progress report on how it's panning out?

I think that when, originally, we sat down to talk about creating a hospitality house, and you may notice a similarity between hospitality house and house of hospitality (dead giveaway), we talked about the works of mercy, we talked about compassion, not the social service model, not the social worker model of working with clients and case loads and stuff like that, but of real hospitality. The Catholic Worker model didn't involve a shelter model at all, instead, it was the Catholic Workers renting an old house, "rehabbing" it to make it livable and then living in it. Then the people who come in, the homeless people, are their guests. And that's a big difference; that way you're not being hassled all the time about codes and things like that, you're just having house guests. We decided that we couldn't do that; instead, we were going to involve the whole church community. The church communities have the space, you see, they have the sleeping space - the churches themselves. And that's what we did. We mobilized a bunch of churches who were willing to provide an evening meal and a snack in the morning for breakfast and sleeping space and occasionally some entertainment. We have the welcome center where homeless people come and go through an intake process, TB tests and things like that, and then we sit and talk and hang out and then we have a school bus from the school bus system that comes and picks up all of our guests and takes them to the participating church where then they have the meal and they can play cards or what have you. I take my guitar over and sing songs now and then. We provide overnight monitors for troubleshooting and so on. Gradually this will grow into a program where we will be able to keep the welcome center open all day long instead of just the evening for intake. And operate year round so that we can begin to address social work problems and problems of joblessness. We can have a rye board were everybody has a telephone number so that when you're going out to find a job and the application asks for a telephone number what do you put down if your homeless? So, we can provide that and also a mailing address, a wider range of services to our guests. Notice we say "guests" not "clients" - that's the main attitude that comes out of the Catholic Worker, not a social worker/client attitude, but a relationship of hospitality. We have a thorough understanding of working with our own people. These aren't, for the most part, people who come from someplace else, and that's one of the reasons we like working with the churches because the people who are in the churches helping with the service, creating the food, now have to sit down and have dinner with the homeless people. They pretty soon learn that these people have pretty deep roots within the community, that they're not the "other", that they haven't come from someplace else. The question when we got into this was, "Who are these people and where do they come from and why do they come here?" Well, that question is beginning to vanish as we realize that these folks have very deep roots here and that many of them are employed but, given the nature of growth in this end of Nevada County, can't find affordable housing. We have single mothers with kids who are employed and can't find a place to live as things stand around here now. So the need is obviously here and we're here to fill it, and ya know, if it hadn't been for the Catholic Worker and my exposure to the Catholic Workers I don't know what the chances would be that I would become involved in an effort like this.

Q: What a great project! Of course, all communities are different and those differences require us to look for community-specific ways to solve issues like homelessness and poverty. But we can all learn from other examples and incorporate aspects of each other's solutions. That said, I wondered if you could offer some advice, culled from your years of experiences organizing and participating with organizations like the Catholic Worker.

There is no love lost between me and the Bush administration. Those people up there are not looking out for us. We got to start looking out for each other a whole lot better than we have been. Now, it's the Bush administration that coined this phrase "faith-based initiative" and because we don't like Bush, because we despise the man, we tend to dismiss that idea as sort of a back door approach to proselytizing. We can't do that. We have to turn our eyes inward toward our own community and away from that kind of rhetoric and mobilize that faith-based community. Why? Because they have the facilities, they have the will, they have the kitchens, they have the ability to get the food. Now, if you turn on your media, your radio, whether it's Fox news or Amy Goodman, either way you're going to get more and more media-generated polarization. Right and left, us and them, conservative and liberal, more and more polar, that's what media does. It can only deal with polarity. As we become more and more involved with these faith communities those lines begin to fuzz until they finally vanish. Those barriers break down because we are all involved in the same tasks in our own town, creating something that's positive and contributes to the community, that's compassionate and helps them to carry out their mission as Christians or Jews. Those liberal/conservative lines begin to vanish; at least they're never brought up. We're involved in something far more fundamental, that is, caring for the needy in our community. And also a little bit more thorough of an understanding that they are us. How many people, wage workers, through downsizing or through their skill or trade vanishing completely, because of technology, wind up down on the street, wind up in the alley, or in the doorway. There are a lot of people who are just inches away from where the homeless are today. They are us.

Q: Switching subjects just a little, Fast Rattler is interested in understanding a little more about your songwriting and how it has developed over the years. I suppose "what do you do and how do you do it" is a bit broad. But maybe you could talk a little about how you see your songs and stories and your evolution as a songwriter and storyteller.

I will give you this . . . I am a folk singer which I will define to you. A true folk singer sings old songs, old songs that belong to everybody, common property, like the national forest, have no owner, no author. A folk singer, besides singing old songs, sings other people's songs, songs that people around him are making up about their take on reality. Then, a folk singer also makes up songs of his own. Those three things: singing the old songs, singing other people's songs, and then songs that you make up. I do all three. That's why I love being a folk singer. I know an enormous amount of old time music, old mining songs, cowboy songs, what have you, songs of our people. But the pressure of our times, these are our times, we are in them and what are we gonna do about it, what can I do about it? Well, I can bring what I know, through the songs and through the stories to bear on mitigating the horror of our times. In other words, I had never wanted to be typed, to be catalogued, pigeonholed as a political singer. I've seen too many political singers in small clubs or concert halls singing to people who agree with them. I've always wanted to be a folk singer, working with the folk societies, the folk music clubs, because I get a general audience. A general folk music audience tends to be middle of the road, sometimes a little bit to the right. I want to use songs and history to get people to think. But more and more in recent times I have been sort of pushed, nudged, then pushed toward being more of a political singer, more of a message, sell my birth right for a pot of messages [laughs]. I got to say, I can understand the reason, I don't resent it, I just feel a strong pull of nostalgia for being a folk singer. I wish that these times would sort themselves out to the point were I could go back to being a folk singer but for right now I guess I got to say that there are things that I want to get to through songs and through stories that I am gonna get to when I do a show these days that might be a good bit more pointed than, say, they were a few years ago.

Q: Fast Rattler has gone back into some of your old songs, dusted them off, and given them new life. Kind of the first and second part of your definition of what a folk singer does. One sixth of Fast Rattler is your son. What's that like, having your son and his friends play some of your old songs . . . ?

You put a song into the air and it takes on a life of its own, it goes were it wants. I'm absolutely delighted. I mention to my friends, I say, "My son is going to be opening the program up there in Olympia" and they say, "Well how do you feel?" and I say, "I feel great!" and they say "great, congratulations!" and pump my hand vigorously. I'm delighted that Fast Rattler found those songs. I'm delighted that you found value in those songs, that you saw things in them. Very often people see things in song that I've made that I didn't put there and that's great, that's the way it ought to be. So, you know, you reach out and take possession of those songs and do with them as you will. I want to see how it works; I'm delighted about it.