Any copyrighted material on these pages is used in "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s).

CISCO HOUSTON & WOODY GUTHRIE (c. 1944)

BACK IN THE STATES after this trip Cisco Houston, Blind Sonny Terry, and myself went up to the Asch studios. Moe Asch, son of Sholem Asch, took us in, cranked up his machinery and told us to fire away with everything that we had. We yelled and whooped and beat and pounded till Asch had taken down One Hundred and Twenty Some Odd Master sides (sides that might do to release to the public). We tried hilltop and sunny mountain harmonies and wilder yells and whoops of the dead sea deserts, and all of the swampy southland and buggy mud bottom sounds that we could make. We sung to the mossy trees and to the standing moon, and Moe Asch and Marian Distler worked through their plate glass there in the recording studio.

Sonny Terry blew and whipped, beat, fanned and petted his harmonica, cooed to it like a weed hill turtle dove, cried to it like some worried woman come to ease his worried mind. He blew it down two to one and let it down easy, flipped his lip over and across and his tongue sending all of his wind into one hole, straining the reed with too much pressure and making it sound like it had several side tones and tones that dance between. He put the tobacco sheds of North and South Carolina in it and all of the blistered and hurt and hardened hands cheated and left empty, hurt and left crying, robbed and left hungry, pilfered and left starving, beaten and left dreaming. He rolled down the trains that the colored hand cannot drive, only clean and wash down. He blew into the wood holes and the brassy reeds the tale and the wails of Lost John running away from the dogs of the chain gang guards, and the chain gang is the landlord that is never around anywhere.

I talked to Sonny about these things in his art and he tells me that he is blind and that he still knows that his people can see a world where we all vote, eat, work, talk, plan and think together and with all of our smokes and wheels rolling and all of our selves well dressed and well housed and well fed. These are the things that the artist in Blind Sonny Terry knows and sees in his blindness. These are the upland echoes of the things that stir and sing along his big muddies. These are the plans and visions seen in the kiss and whisper of tall tree jack pines falling into the chutes to make your papery pulps. These are the freedoms. These are the samples of the kinds of soul art that the Negro, Indian, Mexican, the Irish, the Jew, the Russian, the Greek, Italian, all of us, have to bring to be seen and heard. These are the thoughts that Asch and Marian and me and Cisco and everybody felt when we made those hundred and twenty some odd record sides. I don't know where there is a more progressive atmosphere amongat artists, performers, and engineers, packers, shippers, owners, and pressers and stampers.

I have made twelve albums of records for Asch and had time to be in three invasions in the Merchant Marines, to get torpedoed twice, to walk all over the British Isles, Canada, Mexico, to see forty-six of our forty-eight States, to get a divorce from one woman and turn right around and marry myself off to another one. My second wife is a dancer and a teacher with the Martha Graham Company, her name is Marjorie Mazia Guthrie and she is twenty-nine, and our daughter is Cathy Ann, I call her Stacky-bones, and she goes to Nursery School and is just past the Three Year line. She sings and laughs and dances to all of the records Asch makes, and says, How did they get you inside the music box, daddy?

After my second torpedo, off the coast of Normandy, Cherbourg, I got pulled back to the port of Southampton, and then spent several weeks ashore on the British Isles, still with my two singing pardners, Cisco Houston and Jimmy Longhi. I got a good look at the real England.