Houston Stackhouse  Cryin' Won't Help You GCD 9904 Buy this CD for $14.00

Songlist: 1. Kind Hearted Woman Blues 2. Bricks In My Pillow  3. Bye Bye Blues  4. My Babe  5. Sweet Black Angel Blues  6. Pony Blues  7. Cry On! Cry On!  8. Sweet Home Chicago 9. Cryin' Won't Help You  10. I Got Something 11. Maggie Campbell Blues 12. I'm Gettin' Tired  13. Big Road Blues

Houston Stackhouse was born September 28, 1910, in Wesson, MS. He died September 23, 1980, in Helena, AR, where the Acoustic Stage at the world-famous King Biscuit Blues Festival is named in his honor.

Publicity photographs made in the mid-40s of the cast of the King Biscuit Time radio show (KFFA, Helena, AR) feature a beefy young guitarist with a wide friendly smile. Houston Stackhouse was born to his trade, a cousin to Robert Nighthawk and, according to his son, Stack Jr., to the virtuoso Chatmon clan of string and jug band fame. That he never parlayed this natural talent into recorded fame before the mid 60s is due to the quiet life he chose to live, remaining in the Mississippi and Arkansas Delta, rather than following opportunities as did friends like Sonny Boy Williamson, Robert Lockwood, Jr. and Pinetop Perkins. There was even a rumor floating around Chicago that he had become a Seventh Day Adventist and given up guitar playing, or so Honeyboy Edwards told the Adelphi Records crew in 1969. But as Jim O'Neal pointed out in his Living Blues tribute to Stack, '...if ever there lived a true believer in the blues, it was Houston Stackhouse.'

During an early 70s gig in New York, Stackhouse and playing partner Hacksaw Harney were houseguests of (then) macrobiotic diet practitioners and blues guitarists Roy Book Binder and Woody Mann. Roy tells some delightful stories from this visit, several of which feature the Mississippi natives' responses to rice and raw vegetables, but a favorite memory concerns Stack--the tourist. During a phone call home, an agitated Stackhouse approached Roy with a dilemma: 'My sister doesn't believe I'm in New York City.' Roy saved the day, however, when he said, 'Tell her you saw the Empire State Building today.' And that did the trick.

Stack & Hack chowing down on "real food" at a Memphis diner (fall '69)

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