Author: Daniel Bachman

Daniel Bachman is an artist and independent scholar primarily interested in the folk histories of Virginia. He currently lives in Madison County.
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Texas Gladden (1895–1966)

Texas Gladden was a folk singer from Smyth County known for her renditions of traditional English ballads and other folk songs. She was born Texas Anna Smith on March 14, 1895, in Saltville. She was surrounded by a large musical family who gathered around the hearth at night to play music and sing songs handed down for generations. She eloped with her husband, Jim Gladden, in 1912, when she was seventeen. The couple settled near Salem in Roanoke County and would have nine children, seven of whom lived to adulthood. In 1916, Gladden met Alfreda Peel, a schoolteacher in Salem who was collecting old English ballads for the Virginia Folklore Society, marking the beginning of a decades-long collaboration that brought Gladden to the attention of local, regional, and national folklorists. She was first recorded singing the traditional ballads for which she became known by the Virginia Folklore Society in 1932. She performed at the White Top Folk Festival throughout the 1930s and was recorded by Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress’s Archive of American Folk Song. Her performances of folk tunes such as “The Devil’s Nine Questions” and “Mary Hamilton” are considered the standard of Appalachian ballad singing and were influential in the mid-century folk-music revival and continue to be so today. Gladden died on May 23, 1966, at Shenandoah Hospital in Roanoke County and is buried in Sherwood Memorial Park in Salem.

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The Virginia Folklore Society

The Virginia Folklore Society (VFS) was a pioneering folklore-collecting organization that was active from 1913 until the early 2000s. It was one of the first state folklore societies in the United States, and it created some of the first records of folklore and folk song in Virginia. From an early focus on collecting traditional English ballads in the isolated communities of the Appalachian Mountain region, the organization’s focus later expanded to include other folk songs, fiddle tunes, guitar, spirituals and other religious songs, Civil War and American history songs, and miscellaneous folklore. The VFS began recording traditional performers in 1932, and the 325 aluminum-disc phonograph recordings that it made during this period are among the earliest grooved-disc recordings of Anglo-American folk songs in the United States, as well as some of the earliest known field recordings of African American folk music in Virginia. The earliest material of folk singers Texas Gladden and Horton Barker are documented in the recordings. The VFS archive includes two collections of folk song material, one index, and approximately 700 field recordings, papers, and other miscellaneous folklore materials. The work of the VFS preceded and directly informed the formation of the Virginia Folklife Program at Virginia Humanities.

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