Cisco Houston Web Site

LPs

Passing Through

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1965

Passing Through--Cisco Houston

Track Listing:

Side 1:
  1. It Takes A Worried Man
  2. Stewball
  3. Red River Valley
  4. Barbara Allen
  5. Down In The Valley
  6. Children Go Where I Send Thee
  7. The Cat Came Back
Side 2:
  1. East Virginia #2
  2. Little Dogie #2
  3. Mole In The Ground
  4. Old Blue
  5. John Henry
  6. Trouble In Mind
  7. Passing Through

Liner Notes, as printed

CISCO HOUSTON WAS A BALLADEER AND FOLKSINGER WHOSE LIFE AND SONGS BRIDGED THE GENERATIONS. GUITAR IN HAND, HE TRAVELED ALL OVER AMERICA, ABSORBING THE SOUNDS OF HIS TIME, TRANSLATING THOSE SOUNDS INTO FOLKSONGS.

IN 1961, AT THE AGE OF 42, CISCO'S LIFE WAS CUT SHORT BY CANCER. BUT THE TRAGEDY OF CISCO'S DEATH MADE MANY PEOPLE REALIZE HOW FINE A SINGER THIS TROUBLED MAN FROM COLORADO REALLY WAS.

THE SONGS I SING

by Cisco Houston

A folk song is a way of singing out the news---of a wedding, a murder, good times or bad times, good people or bad people. It is one way of making a record of memorable things that happened. In the days before newspapers, and among people who could not have read them even if they had existed, the folk song was a kind of chronicle and running commentary on the times. Many folk songs have lived for hundreds of years, while nothing is more dead than yesterday's newspapers. The folk songs and story ballads were not the most accurate kind of history, of course, because once the event, whatever it was, had been recorded, generations of singers went on elaborating and changing the song - smoothing it out, or shaping it up to suit their own ideas of how the event might have happened. Often, the event which started the song was blurred or lost as time went on. The song then took on its own independent life. Aristotle said in his poetics, that art is truer than history because it shows what should have happened, rather than simply what did happen. It is true to its own inner necessity rather than to the accidental historical event. In this sense, the song is certainly true, because however much the actual event which inspired the song might be changed, the song was always a true record of the attitudes and feelings of the generations.

Review

Jim Clark

Somehow, several years after Cisco's death, Folkways scraped together a few unreleased tracks on wildly varying quality and put them inside a package with the ugliest LP cover of all time. With this was a bizarre biographical paragraph (Colorado???) and a short piece of Cisco's prose taken (and slightly modified) from The Cisco Songbook.

Well, Dr. Logsdon took three tracks from this LP for his Folkways Years CD, and I would certainly agree they are the best. But there are a couple of other interesting performances as well, that show a very tender Cisco. His performances of the old-time American folk songs of Down In The Valley, Barbara Allen and Red River Valley are wonderful. Spare, simple, with a quiet guitar to keep time, they sound as they would have been sung next to a campfire.

Unfortunately, the LP is padded with duplications of material Cisco recorded on other LPs, and in most cases the performances are essentially indistinguishable from the earlier versions. The guy must have recorded hundreds of songs, why two versions of Git Along Little Dogies?

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