Early Life
Gladden was born Texas Anna Smith on March 14, 1895, the third of eight children born to Alexander King Smith and Sarah Louvenia Smith near the Henrytown neighborhood of Saltville in Smyth County. Her family had been in Virginia for seven generations and included many talented musicians, including her mother, who Gladden remembered was “a very beautiful singer,” and her father, who would “start on these old pieces and play the banjo for hours.” She recalled evenings crowded around the hearth with her family and nearby cousins, aunts, and uncles, playing music and singing hymns and old love songs. “I made it my business, when I was just a child, to try to sing those songs just as perfect as I could. I wanted to make them sound really pretty, to my own ears,” she said. From an early age, she only had to hear a song once to remember both the tune and the lyrics.
Texas began working at Saltville’s Mathieson Alkali Works, the major employer in town, in 1909 at age fourteen, where she learned songs from the other girls and women who worked there. In a 1946 interview with Alan Lomax, she recalled, “Every evening when I went home from work, I had a new song to sing.” She was also exposed to African American musical traditions from Black workers in the area and traveling blues musicians. In 1913, the famous blues singer “Blind Lemon” Jefferson came through Saltville and performed.
Texas met her husband, Jim Gladden, in 1912, when she was seventeen and he was twenty-six and visiting Saltville. They “fell desperately in love with each other,” she remembered. They decided to elope after a brief courtship, knowing that Texas’s father, who did not want any of his daughters to marry, would not approve of their union. She packed her bags and took a train bound for the nearby community of Glade Spring, where she planned to meet Gladden, but was stopped and arrested by the police at the request of her father. She escaped by climbing out a bathroom window. She reunited with Jim Gladden, and after a journey that included carriages, trains, and disguises, the two married in Bristol, Virginia, on December 28, 1912. Shortly thereafter, the couple relocated to the Salem area, where they would spend the rest of their lives. Texas and Jim Gladden were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and raised their family in the church. In Salem, Gladden also found a new source of songs in her neighbors and her English-born father-in-law, who introduced her to British music hall songs.
Life as a Performer
In 1916, Gladden met Alfreda Peel, a schoolteacher in Salem who was traveling through the area documenting old English ballads for the Virginia Folklore Society. Peel took down eleven songs from Gladden, beginning with “The Blind Girl.” This marked the beginning of a fruitful, decades-long relationship and friendship between Gladden and Peel. Gladden became one of Peel’s most reliable sources for folk-song material, and she facilitated Gladden’s inclusion in folk festivals and other folk song events.
Peel taught Gladden some of her best-known and most influential songs, including “The Devil’s Nine Questions,” which Peel learned from a sawmill cook in Giles County, and “Mary Hamilton,” which she learned from a woman in Salem. Gladden would record both tunes for the famed folk-song collector Alan Lomax in 1941.
Gladden made her first recordings in 1932, when Peel came to Salem with Virginia Folklore Society archivist Arthur Kyle Davis Jr. to record Gladden for the society’s archives. She recorded six songs, including “Barbara Allen.”
Around this time, Gladden began singing in public, appearing at local events and winning ballad contests as her reputation grew. In 1933, she performed at the White Top Folk Festival in Grayson County for 20,000 people, including First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Her success, however, alienated some of her neighbors, who, Peel reported, “have grown bitterly jealous of her and when they have ‘conventions’ they won’t have ballad singing because they are afraid she’ll sing.” It also did little to better her large family’s financial prospects in the teeth of the Great Depression. “I found my wonderful Tex Gladden way out in the county in a hovel with eight children,” Peel wrote in 1932. “She is a real pauper but the best singer you ever heard, intelligent and not at all bashful.”
In 1938, Gladden and her brother Hobart Smith, who was an accomplished fiddle and banjo player, were invited to the National Folk Festival in Washington, D.C., where she performed “The Devil and the Farmer’s Wife” among other songs she had become known for. Organizer Sarah Gertrude Knott reported to Peel that while Gladden “lived up and surpassed the expectations of the audiences,” she was difficult to manage, arriving with four family members and refusing to wait around for her designated rehearsal time in favor of exploring the city.
Texas Gladden Sings Blue Ridge Ballads
In 1941, after being introduced by Peel, Alan Lomax recorded fifteen of Gladden’s songs for the Library of Congress’s Archive of American Folk Songs. She became one of Lomax’s regular contributors. In 1946, Lomax invited Gladden and Hobart Smith to New York City to perform in a concert at Columbia University’s McMillan Theater. They also recorded material that was released in 1948 as a four-record compilation, Texas Gladden Sings Blue Ridge Ballads, for Moses Asch’s Disc label. Lomax made a final trip to Virginia in 1959 to interview Gladden and record songs for the Southern Journeys collection. Gladden also appeared in Lomax’s 1947 documentary about American folk music To Hear Your Banjo Play.
Lomax considered Gladden “one of the best American ballad singers ever recorded,” able to put what she called “little grace notes”—unexpected twists—in her renditions of songs. “I felt like that I could do something else with the song that no one else could do. And that I cannot explain. I just knew I could do something with that song that the person who was singing wasn’t doing,” she told Lomax.
Gladden died on May 23, 1966, at Shenandoah Hospital in Roanoke County and was buried in Sherwood Memorial Park in Salem.
Legacy
Gladden received limited acclaim in her lifetime. By her own admission, she was busier raising her nine children than pursuing a folk career. But the recordings of her delicate, haunting renditions of traditional Appalachian ballads were essential to the mid-twentieth-century folk revival. Folk singers Paul Clayton and Joan Baez each recorded performances of “Mary Hamilton” that drew from Gladden’s version. Her performance of “The Devil’s Nine Questions” is the reference point for contemporary Virginia folk singers such as Elizabeth LaPrelle, demonstrating the timelessness of her work. As Lomax noted, “Texas sings her antique ballads in the fashion of ballad singers from time immemorial.”
Texas Gladden Discography
- Gladden, Texas, et al. Folk Music Of The United States: Album 1: Anglo-American Ballads: from the Archive of American Folk Song. Library of Congress, 1942. Vinyl, 10”, 78 RPM.
- Gladden, Texas, and Horton Barker. “The House Carpenter / The Farmer’s Curst Wife.” Library of Congress, 1942. Vinyl, 10″, 78 RPM.
- Gladden, Texas, et al. Folk Music of the United States: Album 7: Anglo-American Ballads from the Archive of American Folk Song. Library of Congress, 1943. Vinyl, 12”, 78 RPM.
- Gladden, Texas. Texas Gladden Sings Blue Ridge Ballads. Disc Records, 1948. Shellac, 10”, 78 RPM.
- Gladden, Texas. Ballad Legacy. Rounder Records, 2001. Compact disc.
