Great memories of many, of course. I've been working this side of the street for a long time. F'rintance: Horton Barker, blind, 74-year-old ballad singer from Chilhowie, Virginia, standing alone in the center of the stage at Newport (1963?) singing "I once was lost, but now I'm found; was blind but now I see," to that huge audience.

Cisco Houston, in New York for those Vanguard sessions that proved to be his last (stomach cancer), helping to pay his way by gigging at the Village Gate (I think it was). Immense, empty barn of a place; about fifteen kids sitting around the stage to hear him, probably the ones I'd overheard at Izzy Young's Folklore Center asking, "Cisco Houston! My God, is he still alive?" Cisco joined me between sets (I'd gotten to know him in California) and, as we sat there, he shook his head and looked around the empty room. "Sandy," he said, "I don't know what I'm doing in a place like this. I'm just a bare-assed ballad singer. I don't belong here." That was the last time I saw him. Another man done gone.

Sandy