The Musical Desk

What you are looking at is a modern, custom-crafted violin known as the "Tri-Violin" (or sometimes referred to as a clover or tripartite violin).

It was created in 2003 by a talented French luthier (violin maker) named Gildas Lassaye, who is based in Mirecourt, France—a town famous for its rich history of violin making.

Bruce Duncan Phillips was the son of labor organizers and grew up in Salt Lake City. He served in the Army during the Korean War and came home broken by what he had seen, drifting the rails and the highways until he washed up at the Joe Hill House in Salt Lake City, a Catholic Worker shelter run by the old anarchist Ammon Hennacy. Hennacy took him in, dried him out, and pointed him toward a life of song and witness. Phillips spent the next fifty years on the road telling the stories of working people, hobos, miners, and railroad men, writing songs that became American standards including Rock Salt and Nails, The Goodnight-Loving Trail, Green Rolling Hills of West Virginia, and Starlight on the Rails. He recorded two acclaimed albums with Ani DiFranco, The Past Didn't Go Anywhere (1996) and Fellow Workers (1998), introducing his stories to a younger generation. In 2004, living in Nevada City, California, he sat down with Joanna Robinson, Cindy Maple, Reverend Don Lee, and Margaret Little to plan a homeless shelter for their community, the way Joe Hill House had once sheltered him. Hospitality House opened in 2005, and when it moved into a permanent building in 2013, five years after Phillips died of heart failure on May 23, 2008, they named it Utah's Place. It still shelters up to 69 people a night.