Jack Kerouac Was the Beat Pilgrim on the Road

                                Jack Kerouac hanging out.

In 1957 Viking Press published a book that may be one of the most significant American cultural artifacts of the 20th Century—On the Road by Jack Kerouac.   It has been compared to Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass—a fresh look at America though entirely self-conscious eyes and presented in a revolutionary literary form.  It was hailed as “the Bible of the Beat Generation.”  But Truman Capote haughtily dismissed it—“That’s not writing, that's typing.”

Jack Kerouac was born to French Canadian parents in the old mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts on March 12, 1922.  The working class family spoke Joual, a rough dialect of Québécois Creole, at home and Ti Jean (Little John), as he was called, spoke no English until he was 6.  Later some of Kerouac’s first writing was done in Joual.

Ti Jean was very close to his mother, Gabrielle-Ange, a devout Catholic who imbued him in the faith.  Catholicism, particular its mystical side, would inform Kerouac’s writings even during his most intensely Buddhist period.  In his last years, living with and caring for his ill and aged mother, he returned to regular Catholic observance.

Kerouac first encountered New York on a trip to the city with his father Leo in 1935 at the age of 15 which would become the inspirations for his unpublished Joual novella Sur le Chemin (On the road), later translated as Old bull in the Bowery.  His connection to the city was visceral from the beginning.  When his skills as a high school football player earned him scholarship offers from Boston College, Notre Dame, and other prestigious schools, he opted for Columbia University because it was in the city.

Kerouac looked every inch the football player at Columbia until a broken leg and clash with his coarch ended his playing days and college career.

Both his football and academic careers were cut short when he broke his leg in freshman year and when his instinctive resistance to authority brought him into conflict with his coach, who kept him on the bench.  Kerouac dropped out after a year and drifted along, although he took some classes at the New School. While living on the West Side he encountered some of the circle of Bohemians he would make famous Allen Ginsberg, John Clellon Holmes, Herbert Huncke, and William S. Burroughs.

                               Kerouac in the Merchant Marine.

In 1942 Kerouac joined the Merchant Marine and thereafter often referred to himself as a sailor, although his career was brief.  The following year he enlisted in the Navy but went on sick call after little more than a week and was soon honorably discharged because of disability with a diagnosis of schizoid personality. 

Returning to New York, he drifted from job to job and settled into a life revolving around his friends.  Chief among them was Lucien Carr, the brilliant and handsome scion of an influential St. Louis family who introduced him to Ginsberg, Burroughs—another wealthy St. Louis native several years older than the rest of the group—and others.  Kerouac and Carr hoped to ship out to France together on a freighter and then somehow walk across the war torn country disguised as a French peasant (Kerouac) and a deaf mute (Carr) to be in Paris when the city was liberated by the allies.  They got as far as spending one night on a ship before being thrown off of the crew for some reason.

Allen Ginsberg, Lucien Carr, and William S. Burroughs.  The heart of Kerouac's social circle in New York was shattered when Carr murdered a stalker and involved him and Burroughs in a cover-up of the crime.

Carr had been stalked for years by a former teacher and friend of Burroughs, David Kammerer.  The infatuated man quit his job and moved to New York in an attempt to start a relationship.  Carr alternately ignored him or tolerated his presence on the fringe of their social circle.  One night after drinking Kammerer allegedly assaulted Carr in Central Park after the younger man again rebuffed his advances.  Carr stabbed him to death with his Boy Scout pocketknife, bound his hands and feet, and threw him in the river.  He went first to Burroughs and then to Kerouac for help.  Kerouac allegedly helped him dispose of some of the evidence.  But Carr eventually turned himself in and both Burroughs and Kerouac were arrested as material witnesses in the case.  After a sensational trial with lurid suggestions of predatory homosexuality, Carr was found guilty of manslaughter and served two years in prison. 

Kerouac was guilt stricken and the social circle nearly shattered.  He would draw on the experience in two books, his well-reviewed but little read first novel The Town and the City published in 1950 and again in the last novel he published before his death, Vanity of Duluoz. 

He and Burroughs began collaboration in 1945 on a novel entitled And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, which was published for the first time in its entirety in November 2008. 

Neil Cassady and Jack Kerouac.

In 1947 Ginsberg introduced Kerouac to Neal Cassady, a charismatic drifter and ex-con from California.  That same year the two set out on the adventures that Kerouac would chronicle in On the Road.

The book is thinly disguised autobiography.  The original manuscript, the legendary scroll—120 feet of thin tracing paper taped together and fed through Kerouac’s portable manual typewriter as he wrote in a frenzy of creativity in a few weeks of April 1951—contained the real names of the characters and a lot of detail—much of it sexual, that was left out of the published version for fear of obscenity laws.  The book described the bohemian circle of friends he had in New York, especially young Allen Ginsberg, and encountering the outlaw/saint/hero with whom he embarked on a series of cross country trips, separating and reuniting at intervals as the writer becomes increasingly alienated from the free spirited wander.  The trips began in 1947 and continued to early 1950.  All the while Kerouac kept a series of detailed notebooks on which based the manuscript.

Kerouac and the scroll manuscript of On the Road.

Over the next six years Kerouac revised the text of the scroll substantially, including changing the names of the characters transforming a memoir into a novel.  He became Sal Paradise, Cassady Dean Moriarty, and Ginsberg Carlo Marx.  So although the original manuscript reflected Kerouac’s passion for “spontaneous writing,” it had roots in the notebooks, from which large passages were lifted nearly intact, and was subject to considerable revision and editing. 

Kerouac’s first novel had been influenced by another stream of consciousness writer with a penchant for vivid descriptive passages—Thomas Wolfe and was a sprawling multi-generational epic.  On the Road was a major departure.  Kerouac consciously drew on the phrasing, rhythms, and riffing of bebop jazz for stylistic inspiration. 

Publishers were confused and put off.  Kerouac struggled for six years to find a publisher, re-editing his manuscript several times before Viking picked it up and scrubbed of much of the rawest sexual content.

When released, the book created a sensation—and sensational reviews.  The New York Times was almost over the top in effusive praise, “its publication is a historic occasion in so far as the exposure of an authentic work of art is of any great moment in an age in which the attention is fragmented and the sensibilities are blunted by the superlatives of fashion.”  Most other reviews were equally enthusiastic, although the book found conservative critics for its portrayal of sex, drug use, and sympathetic treatment of Reds and minorities. 

And it gave a name to a restless, rebellious generation—The Beat Generation.  As much as chronicling them, it created them as the young of artistic bent across the country strove to become Sal Paradise, Dean Moriarty, and friends.  It continues to influence generations of writers, poets, musicians, artists of all kinds, and dreamy misfits.

Kerouac was uncomfortable with his new fame, although it created a market for some of his unpublished manuscripts including Visions of Cody, Dr. Sax, Maggie Cassidy, The Subterraneans, Tristessa, and eventually Visions of Gerard created as he spent the next several years wandering America and Mexico. 

The Buddhist connection--Gary Snyder with Kerouac in California.

In California he came under the influence of the mystic nature poet Gary Snyder, with whom he lived and studied Buddhism, and which he recounted in Dharma Bums, his second most famous novel.  He continued to drink heavily, use drugs, and have intense failed relationships with women—he married three times but said his mother was the only woman he truly loved.  He would settle for a time in places from rural Minnesota to Orlando, Florida, to North Port, New York to write.  There were frequent extended visits with friends in the Beat scenes in New York and San Francisco.

After 1958 he lived mainly with his third wife, Stella Sampas and his ailing mother, who influenced his return to Catholicism.  His later works include Lonesome Traveler, Big Sur, and Vanity of Duluoz.

Unlike his friends Ginsburg, Burroughs, Snyder, Gregory Corso, and Cassady, who became an icon to a new generation as the driver of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters bus Further in Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Ade Acid Test, Kerouac did not embrace the counterculture of the Sixties who looked to him as inspiration.  Always more politically conservative than Ginsberg, who he dubbed Carlo Marx in On the Road, he became more so late in life.  He even became uncomfortable being identified with the Beat Generation he had named.  “I’m not a beatnik,” he declared, “I’m a Catholic.”

Kerouac died on October 21, 1969 at the age of 47 of internal bleeding caused by advanced cirrhosis of the liver.  He was living in St. Petersburg, Florida at the time with his wife and mother.  He was buried near his father back in Lowell, Massachusetts.   

Jack Kerouac—A Beat Pilgrim on the Road

Jack Kerouac hanging out.

In 1957 Viking Press published a book that may be one of the most significant American cultural artifacts of the 20th Century—On the Road by Jack Kerouac.   It has been compared to Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass—a fresh look at America though entirely self-conscious eyes and presented in a revolutionary literary form.  It was hailed as “the Bible of the Beat Generation.”  But Truman Capote haughtily dismissed it—“That’s not writing, that's typing.”

Jack Kerouac was born to French Canadian parents in the old mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts on March 12, 1922.  The working class family spoke Joual, a rough dialect of Québécois Creole, at home and Ti Jean (Little John), as he was called, spoke no English until he was 6.  Later some of Kerouac’s first writing was done in Joual.

Ti Jean was very close to his mother, Gabrielle-Ange, a devout Catholic who imbued him in the faith.  Catholicism, particular its mystical side, would inform Kerouac’s writings even during his most intensely Buddhist period.  In his last years, living with and caring for his ill and aged mother, he returned to regular Catholic observance.

Kerouac first encountered New York on a trip to the city with his father Leo in 1935 at the age of 15 which would become the inspirations for his unpublished Joual novella Sur le Chemin (On the road), later translated as Old bull in the Bowery.  His connection to the city was visceral from the beginning.  When his skills as a high school football player earned him scholarship offers from Boston College, Notre Dame, and other prestigious schools, he opted for Columbia University because it was in the city.

Kerouac looked every inch the football player at Columbia until a broken leg and clash with his coarch ended his playing days and college career.

Both his football and academic careers were cut short when he broke his leg freshman year and when his instinctive resistance to authority brought him into conflict with his coach, who kept him on the bench.  Kerouac dropped out after a year and drifted along, although he took some classes at the New School. While living on the West Side he encountered some of the circle of Bohemians he would make famous Allen Ginsberg, John Clellon Holmes, Herbert Huncke, and William S. Burroughs.

Kerouac in the Merchant Marine.

In 1942 Kerouac joined the Merchant Marine and thereafter often referred to himself as a sailor, although his career was brief.  The following year he enlisted in the Navy but went on sick call after little more than a week and was soon honorably discharged because of disability with a diagnosis of schizoid personality. 

Returning to New York, he drifted from job to job and settled into a life revolving around his friends.  Chief among them was Lucien Carr, the brilliant and handsome scion of an influential St. Louis family who introduced him to Ginsberg, Burroughs—another wealthy St. Louis native several years older than the rest of the group—and others.  Kerouac and Carr hoped to ship out to France together on a freighter and then somehow walk across the war torn country disguised as a French peasant (Kerouac) and a deaf mute (Carr) to be in Paris when the city was liberated by the allies.  They got as far as spending one night on a ship before being thrown off of the crew for some reason.

Allen Ginsberg, Lucien Carr, and William S. Burroughs.  The heart of Kerouac's social circle in New York was shattered when Carr murdered a stalker and involved he and Burroughs in a cover-up of the crime.

Carr had been stalked for years by a former teacher and friend of Burroughs, David Kammerer.  The infatuated man quit his job and moved to New York in an attempt to start a relationship.  Carr alternately ignored him or tolerated his presence on the fringe of their social circle.  One night after drinking Kammerer allegedly assaulted Carr in Central Park after the younger man again rebuffed his advances.  Carr stabbed him to death with his Boy Scout pocket knife, bound his hands and feet, and threw him in the river.  He went first to Burroughs and then to Kerouac for help.  Kerouac allegedly helped him dispose of some of the evidence.  But Carr eventually turned himself in and both Burroughs and Kerouac were arrested as material witnesses in the case.  After a sensational trial with lurid suggestions of predatory homosexuality, Carr was found guilty of manslaughter and served two years in prison. 

Kerouac was guilt stricken and the social circle nearly shattered.  He would draw on the experience in two books, his well-reviewed but little read first novel The Town and the City published in 1950 and again in the last novel he published before his death, Vanity of Duluoz. 

He and Burroughs began collaboration in 1945 on a novel entitled And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, which was published for the first time in its entirety in November 2008.  

Neil Cassady and Jack Kerrouac.

In 1947 Ginsberg introduced Kerouac to Neal Cassady, a charismatic drifter and ex-con from California.  That same year the two set out on the adventures that Kerouac would chronicle in On the Road.

The book is thinly disguised autobiography.  The original manuscript, the legendary scroll—120 feet of thin tracing paper taped together and fed through Kerouac’s portable manual typewriter as he wrote in a frenzy of creativity in a few weeks of April 1951—contained the real names of the characters and a lot of detail—much of it sexual, that was left out of the published version for fear of obscenity laws.  The book described the bohemian circle of friends he had in New York, especially young Allen Ginsberg, and encountering the outlaw/saint/hero with whom he embarked on a series of cross country trips, separating and reuniting at intervals as the writer becomes increasingly alienated from the free spirited wander.  The trips began in 1947 and continued to early 1950.  All the while Kerouac kept a series of detailed notebooks on which based the manuscript. 

Kerouac and the scroll manuscript of On the Road.

Over the next six years Kerouac revised the text of the scroll substantially, including changing the names of the characters transforming a memoir into a novel.  He became Sal Paradise, Cassady Dean Moriarty, and Ginsberg Carlo Marx.  So although the original manuscript reflected Kerouac’s passion for “spontaneous writing,” it had roots in the notebooks, from which large passages were lifted nearly intact, and was subject to considerable revision and editing. 

Kerouac’s first novel had been influenced by another stream of consciousness writer with a penchant for vivid descriptive passages—Thomas Wolfe and was a sprawling multi-generational epic.  On the Road was a major departure.  Kerouac consciously drew on the phrasing, rhythms, and riffing of bebop jazz for stylistic inspiration. 

Publishers were confused and put off.  Kerouac struggled for six years to find publisher, re-editing his manuscript several times before Viking picked it up and scrubbed of much of the rawest sexual content.

When released, the book created a sensation—and sensational reviews.  The New York Times Was almost over the top in effusive praise, “its publication is a historic occasion in so far as the exposure of an authentic work of art is of any great moment in an age in which the attention is fragmented and the sensibilities are blunted by the superlatives of fashion.”  Most other reviews were equally enthusiastic, although the book found conservative critics for its portrayal of sex, drug use, and sympathetic treatment of Reds and minorities. 

And it gave a name to a restless, rebellious generation—The Beat Generation.  As much as chronicling them, it created them as the young of artistic bent across the country strove to become Sal Paradise, Dean Moriarty, and friends.  It continues to influence generations of writers, poets, musicians, artists of all kinds, and dreamy misfits.

Kerouac was uncomfortable with his new fame, although it created a market for some of his unpublished manuscripts including Visions of Cody, Dr. Sax, Maggie Cassidy, The Subterraneans, Tristessa, and eventually Visions of Gerard created as he spent the next several years wandering America and Mexico. 

The Buddhist connection--Gary Snyder with Kerouac in California

In California he came under the influence of the mystic nature poet Gary Snyder, with whom he lived and studied Buddhism, and which he recounted in Dharma Bums, his second most famous novel.  He continued to drink heavily, use drugs, and have intense failed relationships with women—he married three times but said his mother was the only woman he truly loved.  He would settle for a time in places from rural Minnesota to Orlando, Florida, to North Port, New York to write.  There were frequent extended visits with friends in the Beat scenes in New York and San Francisco.

After 1958 he lived mainly with his third wife, Stella Sampas and his ailing mother, who influenced his return to Catholicism.  His later works include Lonesome Traveler, Big Sur, and Vanity of Duluoz.

Unlike his friends Ginsburg, Burroughs, Snyder, Gregory Corso, and Cassady, who became an icon to a new generation as the driver of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters bus Further in Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Ade Acid Test, Kerouac did not embrace the counter-culture of the Sixties who looked to him as inspiration.  Always more politically conservative that Ginsberg, who he dubbed Carlo Marx in On the Road, he became more so late in life.  He even became uncomfortable being identified with the Beat Generation he had named.  “I’m not a beatnik,” he declared, “I’m a Catholic.”

Kerouac died on October 21, 1969 at the age of 47 of internal bleeding caused by advanced cirrhosis of the liver.  He was living in St. Petersburg, Florida at the time with his wife and mother.  He was buried near his father back in Lowell, Massachusetts.   

The Matinee Idol in Woody Guthrie’s Shadow—Cisco Houston

Cisco Houston in a professional head shot glossy from the 1950's/

He should have been way more famous.  Instead Cisco Houston is known only among the hardest core of older folk music devotees and as an historical footnote—Woody Guthrie’s closest friend and running buddy.  But Houston not only had a phenomenally wide and varied repertoire of folk songs that documented the American experience and working life and a rich baritone that some folks thought was too good for folk music, but he was movie star handsome.  Maybe his early death at age 42 in 1961 just as the second folk revival was gathering steam deprived him of the opportunity to shine for the legions of younger fans.

Gilbert Vandine Houston was born on August 18, 1918 in Wilmington, Delaware where his father was a tin knocker—a sheet metal worker.  He was the second of four children.  He was still in school when the family moved across country and took up residence in Eagle Rock, a Los Angeles suburb.

Young Gil was recognized as a very bright student despite a serious disability—nystagmus or dancing eyes, a condition of rapid involuntary movement of the eyes which reduced his vision and made him rely mostly on his peripheral vision which greatly affected his ability to read.  He still got top grades by keenly paying attention to class room discussion and absorbing it.  It made him an audial learner, a perfect skill set for a man who became noted for being able to absorb songs like a sponge.

His supportive family may have read to him, because he gained a school reputation for being exceptionally well read.  Eventually he trained himself to use his limited vision to the best of his ability and did become a devoted reader.

Gil also picked up the guitar and a love of singing from his family from whom he also learned many folk songs.

The Great Depression hit the family hard.  After extended unemployment, his father left the family in pursuit of a job and virtually disappeared.  Young Gil was forced to quit school and find what work he could to support the family.  From 1932 at the age of 14 he took whatever he could find. 

A couple of years later he and his brother Slim hit the road themselves becoming part of a generation of young men forced into the Hobo jungles and the constant chase after the mere rumor of work.  They roamed the Western states hopping freights or hitch hiking until they got separated.  He worked in migrant farm camps, on construction projects, as a pearl diver—dishwasher, day laborer, and even despite his vision problems as a cowboy.

Gil traveled with a battered guitar strapped to his back and entertained his fellow wanderers around camp fires and picked up spare change busking or by plopping down in a corner of a saloon or café and starting to sing.  He also picked up scores, maybe hundreds, of songs on his travels, especially cowboy and hobo tunes. 

It was during these years that he picked up the nickname Cisco.  It came not, as would later be reported, from San Francisco or because of his supposed resemblance to the Cisco Kid with his dark brown hair and the pencil moustache that he grew.  He acquired it from some adventure or misadventure in the small town of Cisco, California near the Nevada border in the old Placer County mining district.

By the late 30’s Houston’s music began to become a more reliable source of income that casual labor.  He began to pick up bookings for pay at saloons and clubs riding the popularity of cowboy music.  In 1938 at age 20 with years of hard traveling already behind him, Houston returned to Los Angeles to seriously pursue a career as a performer.

Not only did Houston pick up fairly steady work in area clubs, but he was encouraged to use his good looks to explore acting.  He picked up extra work and uncredited walk-ons and non-speaking parts, mostly at the poverty row studios that specialized in two-reel oaters.  He was befriended by an older actor and folk singer named Will Geer.  Geer was also a committed radical and drew Houston into his circle of union organizers, rabble rousers, and Communists.  Given Houston’s working class background and life experiences, he became an eager recruit.

One day Geer brought Houston with him to visit another friend, Woody Guthrie, at the KFVD studio of his cowboy music radio show Woody and Lefty Lou.  The connection was almost immediate.  Guthrie took to the younger man.  Their personalities were different, but complimentary.  Guthrie was often effusive and animated nearly to the point mania, always eager to sing for anyone, anywhere at the drop of a hat, but also sometimes moody and subject to black depressions.  Cisco was quiet and reserved, more than a little shy.  Always more of a listener than a talker.  But he had a natural cheerfulness and open good nature that no amount of the many curve balls life had thrown at him could discourage.

Soon the three of them, Geer, Guthrie, and Houston were playing shows at migrant camps, rallies, and at union hall benefits.  They performed a mix of cowboy and hillbilly music, Guthrie’s Dust Bowl songs, and pointed, topical ballads including rousing union songs.  When Guthrie lost his radio show, he and Houston went even farther afield.  They parted ways for a while when Guthrie briefly returned to Texas to be re-united with his wife and children.

Then Geer famously invited both of them to join him in New York.  Both men dropped what they were doing—which wasn’t much—and made a bee line east.  Guthrie held up in Geer’s apartment and Houston found accommodations, eventually with Huddie Leadbetter—Leadbelly—and his wife.  From there things would start percolating.

Singing with the Almanacs--Bess Lomax Hawes, Cisco, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and Sis Cunningham. 

Once again Geer introduced his friends to his wide circle of activist and performing friends.  After informal living-room gatherings some of them began to perform together as the Almanac Singers mostly at union halls and at events and benefits for various left organizations.  The Almanac were less a well defined group than a loose collective of singers which presented themselves in various combinations depending on who was available.  Core members included Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, Millard Lampell, Bess Lomax, and Sis Cunningham.  In addition to Houston others who occasionally performed with the Almanacs included Burl Ives, Sonny Terry, and Josh White among others.

The Almanac repertoire included a number of union songs and pacifist songs by Guthrie and Seeger which reflected the Communist line after the Hitler-Stalin Pact.  They were just getting established when Houston signed on with the Merchant Marine in 1940, disguising his visions problems that should have disqualified him.  That meant he missed the recording sessions for the Almanac’s 78 rpm album Meet John Doe which featured anti-war and anti-draft songs. 

But just as the album came out in June of 1941 Hitler attacked the Soviet Union and there was a mad scramble to recall the records and destroy the undistributed copies.  Seeger and Guthrie went into overtime writing new songs urging entry into the fight against fascism including Guthrie’s The Good Ruben James, a ballad about the sinking of an American merchant ship by a German U-boat which also spurred enlistment in the Merchant Marine.

Shipmates Cisco Houston, Woody Guthrie, and Jim Longhi sing for their fellow seamen at the National Maritime Union Hall in New York.

Meanwhile Houston was already at sea daring the horrific losses of the Battle of the Atlantic.  He had already survived the sinking of one ship when he came ashore in New York and resumed singing with the Almanacs between voyages.  When the Almanacs broke up in 1943, Houston and his friend Jim Longhi convinced Guthrie to join the Merchant marine with them while Seeger was drafted and entered the Army.  The three shipped out together three times in convoys on the SS William B. Travis, SS William Floyd, and SS Sea Porpoise.  The Travis struck a mine in the Mediterranean Sea and managed to limp to port at Bizerte, Tunisia. 

On all three of their voyages together Houston and Guthrie regularly entertained their shipmates and played for other crews in port.  On their final voyage in 1944 the Sea Porpoise was carrying 3,000 Troops for the invasion of Normandy.  The pair frequently played more formal deck concerts for the men on the long and dangerous voyage.  The ship was torpedoed by a U-Boat off of Normandy on June 5.  She managed to make it back to England to be repaired at Newcastle-upon-Tyne before sailing back to the States.

It turned out to be Guthrie’s last voyage—his seaman’s papers were suddenly yanked for his Communist connections.  Houston stayed in the Merchant Marine but used this time ashore with Guthrie to do his first recordings.  At the same famous 1944 recording sessions by Moses “Moe” Asch with Guthrie and Sonny Terry where Woody laid down many of his most famous songs, including many of the Dust Bowl ballads, Houston sat in as an accompanist and was also recorded on his own. 

Cisco and Woody recording for Moe Asch in 1944--classic sessions that would be repackaged many times by Folkways and other labels.

In the post-war period Houston worked steadily as a musician, studied acting, and began to get stage parts.  Most notably he appeared in the 1948 revival of Mark Blitzstein’s ground breaking radical musical The Cradle Will Rock in a cast that included Will Geer, Alfred Drake, Vivian Vance, and Jack Albertson directed by Howard Da Silva.  Despite the stellar company the revival only ran 34 performances amid revived charges that it was Communist propaganda.

Asch went on to found Folkways records and in 1948 material from the sessions began to be released, helping to spur the post-war or first folk revival.  Houston was featured on two of the first releases, including one as Guthrie’s side man and a collection of children’s song on Folkway’s Cub Records label, Nursery Rhymes Sung and Played by Cisco Houston.  Folkways would go on to release several more records over the next decade or so often re-using the same recordings in different packages.  In addition to frequently appearing on Guthrie recordings and with Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee and others some of his solo recordings included. Cowboy Ballads (1952), 500 Miles and other Railroad Songs (1953), Traditional Songs of the Old West (Stintson, 1954), Hard Travelin’ (1954), and Cisco Sings (1958.)

Houston's 1954 Folkways album.

These recording introduced or popularized many songs that became staples of folk music including the children’s ditty The Cat Came Back and the bluesy, haunting ballad Five Hundred Miles.  These recordings were for a specialized, limited market of hard core folk music fans and never made Houston much money.  But they did raise his visibility as a performer and helped him get work. 

Through most of the late ‘40’s and ‘50’s Houston toured as a journeyman musician, making a living but not much more.  He never rose to the fame of old pals Guthrie, Seeger, Hayes, Josh White, Burl Ives, and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee although he often shared the stage with all of them at clubs or concert bookings.  He crisscrossed the country dozens of times on improvised, self-organized tours.  He also made occasional radio appearances.

In some ways the lack of recognition insulated Houston from the Red Scare era black balling that nearly destroyed the careers of Seeger, Hayes and the members of The Weavers.  Also, he had never taken a CP party card.  That is, he thought he had escaped the worst until just when it looked like his career might take off.

In 1954 Houston was hired to host a radio folk music program based in Denver, Colorado which was syndicated to more than 50 stations by the Mutual Broadcasting System.  It was billed as the Gil Houston Show under his original name.  This was likely a ploy by the station to obscure his identity as Cisco and his known associations.  If so, the ruse might not have worked.  Despite good ratings the show was abruptly cancelled after less than a year on the air.  Houston and his friends suspected the Black List might have caught up to him.

Houston was briefly married twice.  Virtually nothing is known about either spouse and he had no known children.  But his good looks and quiet charm appealed to many women and he was known to have had many, usually brief, affairs.

After the failure of the radio show, Houston shifted his base of operations back to California, from which he had been mostly absent for almost 20 years.  He continued to record for Folkways and for other small labels and appeared where he could in clubs, on college campuses, and even church basement coffee houses. 

Then, starting in 1958 his long years of struggle seemed to be turning around with the rise of the second Folk Revival.  He was signed to a new, commercial label Vanguard which released his successful LP The Cisco Special and a follow-up, Songs of Woody Guthrie.  He rapidly gained the reputation as the leading interpreter of his old friend’s songs just as the ailing Guthrie, no longer able to perform, was becoming an icon of the new folk scene. 

Although he was getting better bookings at larger venues, Houston was beginning to rub up against the reverse snobbery of the folk music community.  Some critics charged that his rich baritone voice was too polished to be authentic—a holy term often used to denote raw and off-key screeching.  Houston complained to an interviewer:

There’s always a form of theater that things take; even back in the Ozarks, as far as you want to go. People gravitate to the best singer...We have people today who go just the other way, and I don't agree with them. Some of our folksong exponents seem to think you have to go way back in the hills and drag out the worst singer in the world before it’s authentic. Now, this is nonsense...Just because he’s old and got three arthritic fingers and two strings left on the banjo doesn’t prove anything.

A new crop of younger performers, however, were taking note of Houston and he became, at barely 40 years old himself, a mentor and inspiration to several of them. 

The Black List was fading rapidly.  So fast that in 1959 the State Department asked Houston along with Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee to do a tour of India.  On the way back Houston stopped to play, and even to record some sides, in Paris, and sing in England.

Cisco Houston with Molly Scott on the CBS TV special Folk Song, USA  before his terminal cancer had been diagnosed. 

On his return in 1960 CBS TV made him the host of a special, Folk Song, USA which featured Joan Baez, John Lee Hooker, Flatt and Scruggs, and others.  He got great reviews as a warm and authoritative host.  The early summer special was a pilot of sorts for a folk music series.  That same summer Houston headlined, at the invitation of co-founder Pete Seeger, at the Newport Jazz Festival.

Folk music, and it seemed Houston himself, were poised to take off and become the next big thing in American culture.  But shortly after the Newport appearance Houston was diagnosed with stomach cancer.  It had already metastasized and he was told that it was fatal.

Knowing that he had only a few months to live, Houston chose to keep doing what he loved and what gave meaning to his life—performing despite, toward the end, being in constant pain.  The illness took a toll on the once strapping and robust body of a man who had spent much of his life doing hard physical labor.

Houston also returned to the studio to record one last album for Vanguard.  He completed the final sessions of Ain’t Got No Home weeks before he died. 

In a letter quoted in a memorial article in the folk music magazine Come For to Sing by Lee Hays, Houston wrote:

If you know my situation, which is a matter of weeks, of months at the outside, before the wheel runs off... well, nobody likes to run out of time. But it’s not nearly the tragedy of Hiroshima or the millions of people blown to hell in the war, that could have been avoided. These are real tragedies.....

Houston died in San Bernardino, California on April 28, 1961 at the age of only 42.

He was widely mourned in the tight knit community of fold performers even if still not widely known to the public.  Tributes poured in.  Tom Paxton, Peter LaFarge, and Tom McGrath all wrote songs in tribute.  Bob Dylan could not fail to mention him in his Song to Woody just as Peter Yarrow did in his salute to Josh White, Goodbye Josh. 

Smithsonian/Folkways has re-packaged much of Houston’s work on Folkways and also issued a complete multi-CD edition of the Ache Sessions with Woody Guthrie.  There is also a compilation of his Vanguard recordings but Cisco Houston Sings the Songs of Woody Guthrie is the only one of his several LP’s now available on CD.  He also crops up on recordings with Leadbelly and with Sonny Terry as well as several folk anthologies. 

No known film footage has ever been found of Houston performing and even still photos are somewhat scarce.  But mostly he lives on as a semi-legendary character in a semi-mythical version of Woody Guthrie’s life.  Woody himself made Cisco Houston one of the few characters identified by his real name in his highly fictionalized autobiography Bound for Glory.  Their Merchant Marine pal Jim Longhi wrote about their experiences in his memoirs Woody, Cisco and Me: Seamen Three in the Merchant Marine.  And Houston shows up in several plays and musical reviews about Woody.  In the mind’s eye, they are always singing together in some seedy saloon, killing time before catching a fast freight together for some distant job.