Best of the Vanguard Years
If the track listing for this compilation suggests that Cisco Houston was a one-manWoody Guthriecover band, that's because, quite simply, he was. Houston met Guthrie in California in 1938, and the two former hoboes crossed paths time and time again, frequently recording and performing together, up until Guthrie's diagnosis with Huntington's Chorea. As an interpreter, Houston's pure and easy baritone sometimes lent affecting charm to Guthrie's songs (as on the playful version of "Hard Traveling"), sometimes an eerie solemnity (as on his operatic,Gene Autry-esque interpretation of "Nine Hundred Miles"). Still, there's no escaping that Houston's refined singing shared more with Broadway musicals than with the cowboys, drifters, and workers of which he sang. His gentile, noble approach hasn't aged well, even if his voice did much to popularize these folk songs in the '50s and '60s. His music, however, while only intermittently successful, remains indispensable to understanding the folk revival as a whole.--Roy Kasten