Stacy Phillips
Stacy Phillips (1944–2018) was a Dobro player and fiddler who came up in the New York acoustic scene of the 1970s with Breakfast Special and spent more than three decades as a performer and teacher in New Haven, Connecticut. He was one of the featured players on The Great Dobro Sessions, which won the 1995 Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album, and he wrote instruction books for both of his instruments.
He was born Melvyn Marshall on 29 September 1944 and did not come from a musical family. He was studying chemistry at the Polytechnic Institute in New York, during the folk revival, when a friend taught himself guitar, and Marshall took one up too. The fiddler Kenny Kosek heard him play at a party and asked him to play with him, and that led him to learn the fiddle as well. The name Stacy Phillips began as a joke, when bandmates introduced him on stage as heir to the Phillips Milk of Magnesia fortune and the Village Voice printed it the next day.
Through Kosek he joined Breakfast Special, a New York band with Tony Trischka on banjo and pedal steel and Andy Statman on mandolin and saxophone, which played gospel, country, jazz, New Orleans rock and roll and klezmer as well as bluegrass. On the band’s Rounder album Phillips played Dobro, with Kosek on fiddle, Jim Tolles on guitar, Roger Mason on bass and Richard Crooks on drums. His first solo album, All Old Friends (Revonah, 1975), brought in Trischka, Statman, Kosek, Russ Barenberg and Barry Mitterhoff and opened with the Hawaiian song “Na Lei O Hawaii.” In 1976 he played Dobro with Kosek and Mason on Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard’s Rounder album, on “Working Girl Blues,” “West Virginia My Home” and “Ramblin’ Woman,” recorded at House of Music in West Orange, New Jersey. Oak Publications issued his The Dobro Book, followed by Hot Licks for Bluegrass Fiddle (1984) and Bluegrass Fiddle Styles, written with Kosek.
Shanachie released his Dobro album Hey Mister, Get the Ball in 1986, with Statman, Trischka, Kosek, Matt Glaser, Jon Sholle and others; it ranged from Hawaiian pieces such as “Opihi Moemoe” to his own compositions. By then he had settled in the New Haven area, where he became a regular at clubs and outdoor concerts and made his living from gigs, teaching and writing. In 1994 he was one of the ten Dobro players on Sugar Hill’s The Great Dobro Sessions, produced by Jerry Douglas and Tut Taylor, playing his own “The Last Rose of Autumn” with David Grier, Alison Brown, Ronnie McCoury, Stuart Duncan and Mark Schatz. The album won the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album in 1995. Mel Bay published his The Phillips Collection of American Fiddle Tunes in 1994 and Twin Fiddling, a book of fiddle arrangements for more than one player, in 1996.
He released From the Inside on his own Archduke Combine label in 2000 and Neo-Urban Traditions with Paul Howard in 2006. In New Haven he led Stacy Phillips and His Bluegrass Characters, a loose group of regulars that played monthly at Best Video and the Outer Space and gave an annual Christmas Eve concert, and he was a founding member of the Afro-Semitic Experience, with the bassist David Chevan and the pianist Warren Byrd, in which Black and Jewish musicians play gospel and Jewish liturgical music. His Dobro opens the group’s recording of “Ani S’filosi” on Days of Awe. He also helped Chevan found Nu Haven Kapelye, a klezmer community orchestra, for which he transcribed old Eastern European melodies and wrote arrangements for its youngest players. At the end of his life he was also playing in a duo with Paul Howard, the Hawaiian trio Three Finger Poi, the Heroes of Tradition, an Irish duo with Joe Gerhard and the contra dance band the Fascinating Swivets, and he taught many students, Yale undergraduates among them. In 2016 Statman and Trischka came to New Haven for a reunion show with him at the Outer Space.
On 3 June 2018 he played a concert with the Afro-Semitic Experience at Emanuel Synagogue in West Hartford and was taken ill while driving to a second gig. He died at St. Francis Hospital in Hartford on 5 June 2018, at the age of 73.
