Appalachian History

Please welcome guest blogger Cindy Gladden Tuttle of Salem, VA. She is the granddaughter of Texas Gladden (1895-1967), an American folk singer best known for her traditional Appalachian ballad style of singing.


A black and white log house. Red shuttered windows. Beds ablaze in summer with a multitude of blossoms of all kinds. Seven white pines, their boughs heavy laden with snow in winter. No furnace, but a wood cookstove and a stone fireplace. Spring water by gravity. Washtubs, washboards, and clotheslines. An unfinished attic bedroom, the presumed home of Rawhide & Bloody Bones and the Hairy Teeth Man. The sweet aroma of fried apples. Afternoon Bible stories sitting on the floor round Granny’s rocker.

These are some of my richest and warmest memories I have of childhood. The memories of the statuesque woman known affectionately to us as Granny, to others as Mom, and to the rest of the world as Texas Gladden. She possessed a literate style of speech accompanied by a gentle laugh and a radiant smile. She was a lady devout in her Mormon faith and devoted to her family of husband James, nine children, and twenty-eight grandchildren. Her countenance and manner belied the treasure she carried within herself.

Born in 1895 in Smyth County, VA, Texas Gladden had a repertoire of over 200 old time mountain ballads. These are songs that traveled to these mountains with the early settlers and were handed down through the generations. They are of Anglo-Saxon/Celtic origin and contain the remnants of the European ideals of female subjugation. These old ballads also gave expression to the wishes, desires, and fantasies of the women like Granny who cultivated them. Some of these ideas are easily illustrated in ballads such as The House Carpenter ---the tale of a woman lured away from her loving husband and babies only to discover her ill-fated mistake.

Granny always said that these songs should be sung by an uneducated voice as the ballads themselves were uneducated. She stylized these songs through the use of odd phrasings and grace notes. She defined grace notes, which she learned from her mother, as unexpected twists on a note. She never thought that people who sang operettas should tinker around with mountain music. An hour or so of immersion into the music of the mountains allows the listener to understand that Granny was correct in her thinking on this concept.

Most of Granny's singing was done at home and she modestly claimed she didn’t sing anything but lullabies. Raising nine children during the Great Depression certainly left her with little time to do much else. Her public appearances were rather sparse. She sang on occasion at community events at the old Fort Lewis School and at the festivals at Whitetop Mountain during the 1930s. She and her brother, Hobart Smith, performed at the White House in 1933 at the request of Eleanor Roosevelt. Her only other known public appearance came in 1941 at the request of Alan Lomax.

In 1959, as part of his Southern Journey project, Lomax visited Granny at home and recorded a number of her songs. These can be found on Ballad Legacy: Texas Gladden (Rounder CD 1800). This CD also contains snippets of Lomax' interview with my Granny. Listening, one can hear warm gentility. She says during these interviews that she always had a perfect mental picture of the story in the song. Listening to her rendition of 'Mary Hamilton,' one can see the tragic picture she paints, both for the audience and in her mind, as she sings:

Word has come from the kitchen
And word has come to me,
That Mary Hamilton drowned her babe,
And throwed him into the sea.

Down came the old Queen,
Gold tassels around her head
Oh Mary Hamilton, where’s your babe,
That was sleeping in your bed?

I think that perhaps I inherited some of Granny's visualization when it comes to music. There is an old mountain lullaby she used to sing to me. Every time I hear it, I have the most wonderful vision of all those pretty little horses.

Go to sleep, go to sleep,
Go to sleep little baby,
When you wake, get some cake,
And ride them pretty little horses.

Black and a bay, sorrel and a gray,
Whole heap a’ little horses.
Black and a bay, sorrel and a gray,
Whole heap a’ little horses.

Little old horse, little old cow,
Ambling around the old hay mound,
Little old horse, he took a chew,
"Darned if I don't," said the old cow too.

Granny's music and singing style were rediscovered by Joan Baez during the American folk music revival of the 1960s. Granny was not a part of this as her health was failing at the time. She died in 1967 without ever achieving the fame and fortune she so richly deserved. Nonetheless, she remains a true Appalachian treasure to those of us who loved her and to those who loved her music.

Useful links on Texas Gladden & Hobart Smith ---
http://www.mustrad.org.uk/reviews/gladden.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobart_Smith
http://www.oldtimemusic.com/FHOFHobart.html

If you are interested, she is also seen in a short film narrated by Pete Seeger titled To Hear Your Banjo Play. It can be found at:
http://revver.com/video/263858/to-hear-your-banjo-play/



Texas+Gladden Smyth+County+VA Alan+Lomax Appalachian+ballads appalachian+history history+of+appalachia

Hang down your head Tom Dooley
Hang down your head and cry
Hang down your head Tom Dooley
Poor boy, you're bound to die.

It's the most famous murder ballad in American folk music history. And chances are, if you know it, you know the version popularized by the Kingston Trio. Their recording of the song became a major commercial hit in 1958, selling over 6,000,000 copies. That hit single spawned a movie and helped spark the folk music revival of the 1960s. How did the song make its way to the Kingston Trio? Therein hangs a tale.

May 1st marked the 140th anniversary of the criminal execution of North Carolinian ex-Confederate soldier Tom Dula. Not Tom Dooley? Think of the written word opera pronounced opry, as in Grand Ole Opry. Standard regional southern Appalachian pronunciation at work. So the Kingston Trio simply transcribed the name as it sounded to them.

Dula was hanged for the murder of his lover Laura Foster. The two lived in the North Wilkesboro, NC area. Tom Dula was a wild young buck, running around with two or three women at the same time. Foster, according to the ballad, gave him syphilis. He inadvertently passed it on to Foster's first cousin, Mrs. Ann Melton. A third woman, a Pauline Foster, was in the background as well at the time.

Both Laura and Ann were pregnant by Dula. When Mrs. Melton realized that her longtime affair would be exposed by the pregnancy, that the baby's health was seriously endangered, and that her own health had been compromised, all to her way of thinking because of Foster, she insisted that they—Dula and she—murder Laura Foster in vengeance.

As revealed in the case's court records, early one morning in 1866, Laura Foster took her best clothes and her father's horse and left for her rendezvous with Dula, who had supposedly gone to meet the justice of the peace so they could be married. Laura disappeared and Tom Dula fled Wilkes County.

The earliest known recorded version of the song was laid down on October 1, 1929 by GB Grayson & Henry Whitter. Whitter and Grayson met at a fiddlers' convention in Mountain City, TN in 1927. They teamed up, and by autumn of that year, Whitter had gotten them two record deals. They recorded eight songs for the Gennet label and six for Victor, among them 'Tom Dula.' Grayson & Whitter's recording of 'Tom Dula' is especially significant, since it was Grayson's uncle that tracked Dula in 1866.

The ballad of Tom Dooley tells us that Dula, fleeing the murder scene, was captured before he got to Tennessee by a sheriff named Grayson. Actually, Dula made it over the state line and worked for a week in Trade, TN, at the farm of Col. James Grayson, a member of the Tennessee legislature, in order to make enough money to buy a new pair of boots and continue his journey.

Dula was captured in Tennessee around July 11 by two North Carolina deputies, with the help of Colonel Grayson, and brought back to the Wilkesboro, NC, jail.

Folk music historians Anne & Frank Warner collected the song in 1938 in Beech Mountain, NC from a local banjo player and singer named Frank Profitt Sr. Frank's grandmother, Adeline Perdue, lived in Wilkes County and knew both Tom Dula and Laura Foster. Alan Lomax, of Library of Congress collecting fame, learned it from the Warners and sang it all over the country and on his radio shows. He went on to publish it in his book "Folk Song USA," and it’s THAT version that came to the attention of the Kingston Trio.

In 1962, a settlement was reached with the Kingston Trio that divided any subsequent royalties between Frank Profitt, Frank Warner and Alan Lomax.

The song lives on even today. Bobby McMillon, whose ballad singing was featured in the film ‘Songcatcher’ and who is the youngest recipient of the North Carolina Folk Heritage Award, performs it regularly. He went to school with relatives of Tom Dula.

Jeff and Gerret Warner, sons of Anne and Frank Warner, are continuing their parents' legacy. Jeff researched and edited for his mother’s book “Traditional American Folk Songs.” Gerret assembled and prepared its photographs, taken by their parents. The sons organized their parents’ notes, manuscripts and photographs, which now form the Frank and Anne Warner Collection at Duke University.

sources: www.cmt.com/artists/az/grayson_whitter/bio.jhtml
www.birthplaceofcountrymusic.org/node/207
www.wilkesnc.org/history/tomdula/
www.folkstreams.net/context,254
www.dailyyonder.com/tom-dula-murder-sold-10-000-guitars

Special thanks to Rosalie Friend for setting me on the right path with this story!


Tom+Dula Legend+of+Tom+Dooley Kingston+Trio Frank+Profitt Anne+&+Frank+Warner Alan+Lomax Grayson+&+Whitter appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history