Legendary: The non-Cisco CD

Mark Eastman

Found this CD on e-bay. As a lover of Cisco Houston, who is sadly underrepresented on CD, I thought this would be a collection of hidden gems. So I bought it. And was hugely disappointed. It is a fraud.

As you can see from the attached images,

Front	Back
Click for larger view

kindly supplied by someone on e-bay selling this piece of turkeyshit, it appears as if these two men are the performers on these "great" tracks.

The Truth

Tradition TR 1047 is an album entitled "Heather and Glen". It was recorded and edited by Alan Lomax in Scotland. Side 1 collects songs from the Northeast of Scotland. Side 2 collects Songs of the Herbides. The first 10 songs on this CD are taken from side 2: Lament for William Chisholm through Pipe Imitations. The back of the Tradition album provides detailed liner notes about all of the recordings, made by various folk musicians in the field. Cisco Houston fans have no reason to give a damn about these recordings.

There is one interesting exchange, when Lomax, a city boy who probably never made his own soap or canned any of his own butter beans, bewails the loss of the old-time ways. The women shoot him down.

"Oh no, it's much better now!"

There! I just saved you ten bucks!

The last 6 songs on this CD most likely feature Woody Guthrie singing lead accompanied by Cisco and on one or more Sonny Terry. These songs were recorded in the early 1940's, before the Folkways recordings, and have been p.d. for years. That's why they show up on a variety of budget label Woody Guthrie (and Cisco Houston) CDs and albums, under various titles and in various combinations.

With the shortage of real Cisco material on CD, fans are likely to be desperate (or foolish!) I was. But if you are contemplating getting this, be warned of its real contents, and bid accordingly. Feel free to send the vendor this link--they should know what dreck they're selling.

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