SOUTH KINGSTOWN — With songs, stories and sing-alongs, folksinger icons Utah Phillips, 71, and Faith Petric, 91, treated the audience at the University of Rhode Island’s Edwards Hall to two hours of what Petric described as “music down where people live.”

The program was part of the semester-long colloquium series titled “Songs of Social Justice: The Rhetoric of Music,” and the subject was music of the American labor movement, particularly focusing on the early 20th century.

Both singers’ voices were in good shape, but this wasn’t a show about technical virtuosity. The point of the music, for both of them, was a simple message, simply sung, with little adornment but the force of morality. Both singers also told the stories behind the songs, the stories of the people who created them and the stories of what effects the songs had.

So Petric spoke and sang about Harry Bridges, an Australian organizer who unionized longshoremen in San Francisco in spite of murderous policemen. Phillips spoke and sang about the labor leader Herb Edwards, who participated in the free-speech riots in Spokane, Wash., in 1910, where a law against speaking in the street drew so many people to do just that that the jails couldn’t feed them all and the law had to be changed.

“It didn’t take a ballot box,” said Phillips, who described himself as an anarchist, “and it didn’t take political parties. It’s called direct action.”

Along the way, the audience found out the origins of “skid row” (a logging term describing the wooden road that logs were dragged out on) from Phillips and “longshoremen” (men who worked along the shore) from Petric. They also got practical organizing advice from Phillips, handed down from his predecessors: stick up your stickers and posters with corn-starch paste; it never comes off. And “you want to organize, do it in the can — the boss has his own fancy one.”

While most of the songs in the early going were written in the first decade or so of the 20th century — Phillips described a songwriter who would “steal the [tunes of] hymns ’cause they were pretty, and change the words so they made sense” — about halfway through, Petric made a point of mentioning that “there are thousands of great songs being written today,” and proved her point with the contemporary Elliott Keenan song “You Ain’t Been Doing Nothin’ If You Ain’t Been Called a Red.” Phillips later countered with his own “All Used Up,” written from the defiant point of view of an old man who’s been tossed aside after years of backbreaking work.

In both singers’ songs and stories, the importance of taking direct action to change one’s state was emphasized.

Phillips told the story of the agitator Mother Jones (called “the most dangerous woman in America” at age 83 by President Theodore Roosevelt) taking a group of children who had been injured by hard labor to President Herbert Hoover’s lawn. “Did Mother Jones write to a congressman? Sign a petition? Go to the Democratic Party? No.”

Petric agreed in song, singing “If you’ve been to jail for justice, you’re in good company,” citing Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi and others, adding “laws are made by people, and people can be wrong.”

During the question-and-answer session, both singers were asked to comment on the hits that unionism has taken over the past 25 or so years. Phillips responded by noting that World War I and violence such as the Palmer Raids led to mine-safety and child-labor laws; that the Depression led to Social Security and unemployment insurance; and that McCarthyism led to the civil-rights movement.

“We’re going to get through what we’re going through and come back stronger,” he said, comparing social-justice work with building a ship that one may never sail on oneself, but creates a structure for future generations.

Phillips also saw hope for the future in communication technology, remembering that the 1910-era sentiment that “world labor needs a world union” is closer today than ever.

To those despairing of the state of unionism and direct action, he pointed out the work that had been done in his Utah hometown, saying “they fight with money; we resist with time. And they’ll run out of money before we run out of time.”