Ani Difranco & Utah Phillips – Fellow Workers
The most radical thing known to humankind, according to folk-revolutionary raconteur Utah Phillips, is a long memory.
On Fellow Workers, Phillips’ second collaboration with indie icon Ani DiFranco, the duo haven’t so much released an album as they have created a living souvenir, a capsule of long memory. Phillips and DiFranco’s previous effort, the unlikely trip-hop/folk/word-jazz union The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere (1996), was a strange and luscious endeavor, somehow locating uncharted common ground between rap group Public Enemy’s beat-savvy manifestos and Alan Lomax-like chronicles of Dust Bowl folk and oral history.
Fellow Workers transforms that record’s studio noodling (Phillips previously only contributed tapes of his storytelling and left DiFranco to weave the musical carpet his work would stand on) into a hootenanny of radical politics, labor history and funky country-folk accompaniment. The end result is an infectious mixture, leading one to wonder why the conjunction of folk music with folk musings is so rarely attempted.
Phillips and DiFranco bring it all back home. As he expounds in “The Long Memory”: “When I went to high school I got the history of the people who owned the wealth of the country, but none of the history of the people who created it.” The fact that his songs lay out names and events all wage-earners should know (Mother Jones, the Haymarket Strike, the Industrial Workers of the World) is a bonus.
Phillips’ and DiFranco’s history is straight bread and roses. The staff of fabled memory meets the manna of the backbeat.