Utah Phillips

Folksinger, songwriter and bard of the last days of the US railroad

Utah Phillips, who has died from heart disease aged 73, will be remembered as an American political songwriter and singer. If that suggests he was dour, it will have ill served a man of great warmth and wit.

To the casual listener he might seem like a disciple of Woody Guthrie, a propagandist with a guitar. But there was more to Phillips, just as there was more to Guthrie: along with their political views and alternative lifestyles, both had an intense love of the American landscape and its people. "I've got no use for the government," Phillips wrote once. "But to the country that gives me a handout from its back door, a barn to sleep in, a drink in exchange for a song, the music of its incomparable language, to that country I am immensely loyal."

Phillips was a bard of the railroad. He covered a lot of ground free-riding on freight trains, and he memorialised the passing of the railroad era in songs like Starlight on the Rails, inspired by a phrase of Thomas Wolfe, and Daddy, What's a Train?, written for his son, Duncan. He joined a network of migrant workers, career hobos and footloose anarchists, and he stayed with the anarchists as a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, or Wobblies.

That aligned him with two notable forerunners in American music, Harry "Mac" McClintock, whose version of The Big Rock Candy Mountain is heard over the opening credits of the film O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and Goebel Reeves, the "Texas Drifter", a radio singer of the 30s who interspersed his hobo songs and yodels with jokes. Phillips had a penchant for old shaggy-dog stories, told with fine oratorical flourishes, such as his saga of cooking for railroad workers, Moose Turd Pie.

Bruce Phillips was born in Cleveland, Ohio, the son of labour activists, and spent his teenage years in Utah. From 1956-59 he served in the US army in Korea, which changed his life. "What happens," he wrote 20 years later, "when you grow up in a good solid family, maybe going to college or working at a good job, and something goes wrong in your head?"

While musing about what turns men into hobos, he was also alluding to a personal crisis. For a while he was a drifter and a drunk, from which he rescued himself with the help of the anarchist Ammon Hennacy, who ran the Joe Hill House, a shelter for the homeless in Salt Lake City. He later commemorated Hennacy, "the best man I ever knew", in his song Old Buddy, Goodnight.

In the 1960s Phillips immersed himself in radical politics, and in 1968 ran unsuccessfully for the US Senate on a peace and freedom platform. He performed on the folk circuit as U Utah Phillips, an allusion to the country singer T Texas Tyler. His first recording, a 1960 album for Prestige, dissatisfied him, and he did not make another until 1973, titled, from the punchline of the Moose Turd Pie routine, Good Though! An early release on a new label, Philo Records, it brought him many admirers.

It also alerted the American folk community to a writer who could handle big subjects in colloquial, and singable, language. According to the folksinger Rosalie Sorrels: "He took the stories of working people and railroad bums and he put them in language so the people whom the songs and stories were about still owned them. He didn't believe in stealing culture." Among his best-known compositions are Green Rolling Hills, recorded by Emmylou Harris and recently by Kathy Mattea, and Rock, Salt and Nails, which has attracted Joan Baez, John Martyn and many others.

In the late 60s Phillips moved to Saratoga Springs, New York, where a folk music community clustered round the club Caffé Lena. In the 80s he settled in Nevada City, California. Among his many albums were a collection of Wobblies' songs and stories, We Have Fed You All a Thousand Years; a concert with Ramblin' Jack Elliott and Spider John Koerner; and collaborations with the singer Ani DiFranco, such as Fellow Workers, which received a Grammy nomination in 2000 for best contemporary folk recording. In 2004, slowed by chronic heart disease, he reduced his public performing, but hosted a folk music show on the local station KVMR and founded a shelter for the homeless.

He is survived by his second wife Joanna, two sons and a daughter.

· Bruce Duncan "Utah" Phillips, folk singer and writer, born May 15 1935; died May 23 2008