“Golden Voice Of The Great Southwest” Is Gone To The Coffeehouse In The Sky
by Daniel P. Dern ©2008
If, any of a few times a year during the 70s, 80s or 90s, you were in Harvard Square (in Cambridge, Mass.), and went around the back of the Harvard Coop (pronounced “coop” as in “chicken coop,” although it is short for “Co-operative”) to one end of one-lane alley 47 Palmer Street, where a half-flight of stairs led down to the door of the Passim Coffeeshop, you might have encounted a man who looked like a cross between Kris Kringle and a cowboy, wearing a largish hat, sporting a full curly white beard, making deep-voice duck-quack noises (“a base canard,” he would note) and warning would-be buyers to avoid the upcoming performer. In election years, he might have been stumping for president, as candidate for the “Do-Nothing” party — “If elected, I will do nothing.” Or he might simply have been greeting friends in the line.
That would, of course, have been the late folksinger, songwriter, storyteller, humorist and historian Bruce “U.Utah” Phillips, “the Golden Voice of the Great Southwest, America’s most-feared folksinger,” in town for another of his always entertaining, thought-provoking, educational, historical shows.
