Anne Feeney writes

Fellow workers - Utah Phillips and Ani DiFranco, Righteous Babe Records, PO Box 95, Ellicott Station, Buffalo NY 14205, 1-800-ON-HER-OWN. $15 for CD; $10 for tape. Add $1 shipping/handling for each CD/tape.

This second collaboration between Ani DiFranco and Utah Phillips suggests a new interpretation of the title of their first effort The Past Didn't Go Anywhere. In their present effort, Fellow Workers, Ani DiFranco and a very competent group of musicians (the Mensabilly Band) provide the musical platform to launch Phillips' stories and songs well into the future.

While The Past was a fusion of Phillips' archival tapes with DiFranco's studio work, Fellow Workers adds the magic of a live and responsive audience, and it's electric in more ways than one. Fellow Workers was recorded in New Orleans in an ante-bellum mansion with fabulous acoustics.

The recording opens with an instrumental arrangement of "Joe Hill," and closes with a 4/4 arrangement of the Internationale, accordion and all. In between are 16 slices of storytelling and songs that riveted me as well as my two 20-year old visitors.

Ani's voice sails over a compelling "most dangerous woman in America ... 83 years old," as Phillips tells a story about Mary Harris Jones, better known as Mother Jones. Gripping stories about Lucy Parsons, the Everett massacre, the Bread and Roses strike in Lawrence, free speech fights in Spokane are interspersed with hilarious choral work in street-singing Wobbly tradition on tunes like "Preacher and the Slave" (called "Pie in the Sky" on this recording), and "Dump the Bosses Off Your Back." Phillips is in fine vocal form, delivering memorable renditions of "I Will Not Obey," and "Joe Hill."

"What do these old songs and stories mean? Why tell them?" asks Utah Phillips. Like any good storyteller, he answers his own question. "When I was in school I learned the United States history of the ruling class - generals, industrialists, presidents who didn't get caught ... people who own the wealth, but none of the people who created it ... I entered the work force armed with somebody else's class background.

They didn't give me any tools to understand or begin to control the conditions of my labor." In order to get those tools, Phillips says, "I sought out my elders ... and the history I learned was more profound, more beautiful, more powerful and ultimately more useful than any I had been taught at school."

Ani DiFranco has taken to heart Utah Phillips' maxim that "the long memory is the most radical idea in America." She is passing on this long memory to a new audience. Ani joyfully sails uncharted waters, both musically and poetically.

She redefines and expands musical boundaries, finding herself equally welcome at folk festivals and major rock venues. The six point type on the dark orange background made it impossible for me to read Howard Zinn's wonderful liner notes. Luckily, I was listening to the CD with two 20-year olds who could read it to me - a subtle way to bring generations together, no doubt.

- Anne Feeney

Anne Feeney (unionmaid@earthlink.net) is a Pittsburgh folksinger whose recordings have been reviewed in previous issues. She'll be raising hell in Seattle at the WTO demonstrations. She and Phillips performed at the Butte, Mont. Folk Festival this year and at in Pittsburgh on "Bosses' Day."