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Texas Gladden, right, and her husband James Thomas Gladden.
A collection of writing by Texas Gladden.
Jimmy Gladden’s grandmother achieved a measure of fame in her lifetime. One indication was a story in which she appeared was featured in a music magazine marketed in Great Britain.
International recognition, the right kind of course, is always nice, especially when your story is featured in a publication of substance. The edition of the magazine with Gladden’s grandmother in it had Mick Jagger and Keith Richards on the cover.
“I said to myself this kind of checks a couple of boxes for me,” Gladden said. “Had my grandmother inside and the Rolling Stones on the front.”
Grandmother Texas Gladden never drew a Stones-sized crowd during her lifetime but nevertheless was considered a folk singer of the highest stature. A smidgen of the Saltville-born Gladden’s story was included in a column here a while back about prolific folk music and story collector Alfreda Peel, Gladden’s Salem friend and collaborator.
Gladden raised a family out beyond the Salem city limits in west Roanoke County. Some of the family still live nearby, Jimmy Gladden being one. Peel taught school in Roanoke for many years when she wasn’t somewhere in the outback of Southwest Virginia hunting down old songs and their singers. She was credited with the cataloguing of some 2,500 songs.
“I was a student at Virginia Heights Elementary School,” Richard Wertz wrote upon reading the column, “and Alfreda Marion Peel was our fifth grade teacher. I remember her well. She often read to us from Booth Tarkington’s book ‘Penrod,’ which we loved.”
Gladden and Peel often met to sing and talk music. Peel was not the only scholar to take an interest in old American folk songs and ballads and thus came to meet Texas Gladden.
The story in the British music magazine MOJO centered on the work the late Alan Lomax had done furthering his father John’s pioneering folk music collecting field work. The younger Lomax, retracing the song prospecting path he and his father had made many years before, returned to Salem to see Gladden in 1959.
“I remember that,” Jimmy Gladden said. “I was 11.”
As noted in the cutline of a picture of her and Lomax included with the magazine story, she served her guests ice cream and cake that day.
Lomax believed Gladden was “ one of the best ballad singers ever recorded,” Mike Yates wrote in 2001.
Most of Gladden’s singing was at home. Occasionally, she found wider audiences. She and her brother Hobart Smith performed at Columbia University in 1946 in a concert Alan Lomax had helped arrange.
“She played in front of Eleanor Roosevelt and at Constitution Hall,” her grandson said.
Some of Texas Gladden’s recordings collected by the Lomaxes and others have been released commercially. A CD collection of her recordings is gathered at Rounder Records No. 11661-1800-2 “Ballad Legacy” released 21 years ago.
Her commercial exposure was limited by her circumstances.
“Having nine kids, she didn’t get to tour a whole lot, I’ll put it that way,” Jimmy Gladden said.
Music and poetic language run in the family, going back through Texas Gladden and way before her probably. To this day her great-grandson Jay plays bass in multiple local bands with substantial followings. Late grandson Jerry, Jimmy’s brother who died recently, played bass for fondly recalled 1970s rockers Trucker’s Delight. Before that Jimmy and his late cousin Chris Gladden, the beloved former writer for this paper, played for another iconic local band, the Grievous Angels.
“I’m very proud of Jay,” Jimmy texted. “My cousin Ervin is a burn a— guitar picker, too. Jerry and Jay both played in bands with him.”
When Texas died in 1966, University of Virginia professor Arthur Kyle Davis Jr., a leader of the Virginia Folklore Society, wrote a letter to the editor in praise of her and Peel, with whom he had worked closely.
In part he wrote that “we living Virginians are greatly in the debt of these women who, in their respective ways, have contributed so much to the perpetuation and preservation of these traditions of folksong and folklore which are the priceless heritage of all of us.”
In addition to an unforgettable singing voice, Texas Anna Smith Gladden had a way with words. A sample from her “When You’re Hurt:”
… You can laugh if you’re glad,
You can cry if you’re sad;
If you’re jealous you can go out and flirt.
You can find a cure for most anything,
But what can you do when you’re hurt?
When it came to singing, she often stayed clear of the feel-good stuff. Here’s the first verse of “A Morning in May” from the CD:
When I was a young girl I used to see pleasure
When I was a young girl I used to drink ale
Out of the alehouse and into the jailhouse
Right out of a bar-room and down to my grave.
Alan Lomax died in 2002, but were he around now he’d no doubt sing the praises of her cake and ice cream.
If you’ve been wondering about something, call “What’s on Your Mind?” at 777-6476 or send an email to whatsonyourmind@roanoke.com. Don’t forget to provide your full name (and its proper spelling if by phone) and hometown.
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The hunter and his buddy were keeping an eye out for deer in the Nobusineess Creek sliver of Giles County when the first man saw something tha…
Texas Gladden, right, and her husband James Thomas Gladden.
A collection of writing by Texas Gladden.
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