I'm transferring this paragraph from the "Performers You Were Lucky To See" thread (or whatever it was). It's my favorite story of Cisco. I may have misremembered the club where Cisco was playing. Frank's quote above leads me to think it might have been the former Cafe Society place, but I saw it as a huge and quite barren barn that was painfully empty that night. Here's the paragraph:

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 - it certainly was not Gerde's Folk City). 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.

That's about it, friends. I'd known him briefly in California, thanks to a concert series at the University in Berkeley in which we each did one. I was thoroughly out of my class, but proud to be included in the series (Jean Ritchie did one of the other concerts, for instance). I think Barry Olivier was responsible for scheduling the series, and he was probably just being kind to a friend.

Sandy