The Telling Takes Me Home by Utah Phillips
Let me sing to you all those songs I know
Of the wild, windy places locked in timeless snow,
And the wide, crimson deserts where the muddy rivers
flow.
It's sad, but the telling takes me home.
Come along with me to some places that I've been
Where people all look back and they still remember
when,
And the quicksilver legends, like sunlight, turn and
bend
It's sad, but the telling takes me home.
Walk along some wagon road, down the iron rail,
Past the rusty Cadillacs that mark the boom town trail,
Where dreamers never win and doers never fail,
It's sad, but the telling takes me home.
I'll tell you all some lies, just made up for fun,
And the loudest, meanest brag, it can beat the fastest
gun.
I'll show you all some graves that tell where the West
was
won.
It's sad, but the telling takes me home.
I'll sing of my amigos, come from down below,
Whisper in their loving tongue the songs of Mexico.
They work their stolen Eden, lost so long ago.
It's sad, but the telling takes me home.
And I'll sing about an emptiness the East has never
known,
Where coyotes don't pay taxes and a man can live alone,
And you've got to walk forever just to find a
telephone.
It's sad, but the telling takes me home.
Let me sing to you all those songs I know
Of the wild, windy places locked in timeless snow,
And the wide, crimson deserts where the muddy rivers
flow.
It's sad, but the telling takes me home.
The Telling Takes Me Home
Once there was a kingdom, Deseret, built in the tops of
the mountains and surrounded by largely unexplored
wilderness. The Kingdom of God encompassed vast wealth
in water, land and minerals, and the children of Zion
labored patiently to make the desert blossom as the
rose. The faith upon which the kingdom was built
emerged from that fit of religious madness which, in
the early 1800s, turned unlettered farmers into
prophets and visionaries overnight. They in turn led
the faithful out of that larger madness in which
prophecy succumbs to politics and prophets to
assassination. The frontier was real then and all
beyond it unknown and mysterious save for the stories
of a handful of wanderers who had journeyed through the
wilderness and returned. In 1847, their prophet
murdered and their city in ashes, the Mormon pioneers
crossed that wilderness, placing between them and their
enemies the high mountains of the West. The building of
Deseret is not a new story but probably as old as the
migrations of man. Perhaps Deseret's counterparts can
be found in the Indus Valley or in the Land Between the
Rivers where mud and time swallowed the city states of
Sumer.
Today, the kingdom exists only in shadow. A series of
unavoidable mistakes over the past century have drawn
this small madness back into the larger, and the
fanatic's dream has become merely another submerged in
the rowdy clamor of other men's dreams. In 1896 the
Utah Territory became a state, from which date we
number the years of its gradual decline into anonymity.
A romantic notion, I suppose, for someone who shares
neither the faith nor the history of the Saints. In
fact I have spent much of my adult life opposed to the
theocratic policies of those who control the economic
and political life of Utah. But I must say that the
Mormons are splendid adversaries, shrewd, intelligent,
and adept in even the most subtle abuses of power. I am
reminded here of Jomo Kenyatta's introduction to his
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