Texas Gladden Sings Blue Ridge Ballads

This album cover features a line drawing by artist Ben Shahn of a man seated in a rocking chair with crossed legs, smoking a cigarette. A baby, seated next to him in a different rocking chair, looks up at him. Ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax produced the album, Texas Gladden Sings Blue Ridge Ballads, and recorded it with folk singer Texas Gladden and her brother Hobart Smith in 1946. Lomax’s liner notes describe the four-disc record as “the purest and finest folk song strain of this song-rich country in terms of the music of two members of a very musical mountain family.”