The Beautiful Music All Around Us: Field Recordings and the American Experience

Chapter 9: Texas Gladden: From Here to the Mississippi

[ 237 ] 9 Texas Gladden From Here to the Mississippi J im Gladden stood in his canning shed looking over his neatly stacked shelves of jams, jellies, and pickles. Each fall Jim made preserves for the winter months. Now, with Thanksgiving just two days away, he took a quick inventory. Along one shelf he kept several rows of homegrown tomatoes. Packed into wide-mouthed jars, their lids made tight with spring-loaded clamps, the largest of the produce looked faintly orange while the rest resembled grayish plums. In narrow glass cylinders fastened with rubber seals, peppers suspended in a vinegary solution splayed like branches across some miniature forest. He began to pick out an assortment, asking whether my family might prefer this item or that. With so many provisions at hand, Jim Gladden’s larder appeared ready not only for the holiday, but for the longer cold times ahead. Years before, his mother, Virginia ballad singer Texas Gladden, first showed him how to prepare and store foodstuffs. “We lived like pioneers, you know,” said Jim of the early 1930s when he, his eight brothers and sisters, and their parents, James and Texas Gladden, occupied a nearby log cabin five miles outside of Salem. Wagon tracks rutted the one sloping lane to their home, surrounded by woods, that perched at the furthest end of Mangrum’s Holler . A large family with little cash, the Gladdens had to grow their own food [ 238 ] and put up what they needed for the frigid months. Even so, Jim recalled, “In the fall, harvest time, that was my mother’s favorite time of year. With the canning and preserving and putting things away, you could see what you was accomplishing.”1 Just then, a motor kicked on and he pointed to a pump that operates from the same enclosure. In this part of Virginia’s Roanoke Valley, water runs in seams of such irregularity that while Jim’s well extends 54 feet deep, his next-door neighbor had to drill 300 feet. When survey teams came to locate a potential site for a dam, they found a widespread underground network of limestone caverns. One test drilling alone required some 2,500 bags of cement to fill the narrow hole. Not only could no reservoir be built, as the land could not have supported such a weight, but the drillers detected by sound a submerged river rolling through many of the jagged tunnels. A surveyor told Jim that “This country is so cavernous, it would be possible to travel from here to the Mississippi, if you could find your way.”2 That such a complex might exist and that one could follow it, however fancifully, to the nation’s central tributary suggested another meandering, too: the course of a ballad his mother used to sing, the piece she called “One Morning in May.” This mournful story of a girl gone wrong offers a feminine retelling of “The Unfortunate Rake,” an Anglo-Irish broadside of the eighteenth century that conveys the last words of a young soldier dying of venereal disease. With its famous set of funeral instructions, the ballad has achieved abiding life in two of America’s most popular songs: “Streets of Laredo” and “St. James Infirmary Blues.” It has appeared under various titles and on myriad recordings —from Louis Armstrong and his Savoy Ballroom Five to the Norman Luboff Choir; from Blind Willie McTell’s guitar-accompanied eulogy titled the “Dying Crapshooter’s Blues” to cowboy singer Dick Devall’s tale of a fallen wrangler in “Tom Sherman’s Barroom.” So popular has been the “Rake” that it has given rise to numerous parodies as well, parodies that span the troubles besetting a downhill skier to the trials of being a fan of the Chicago Cubs.3 Contemporary interpreters of the ballad include a hard rocker, a mystery novelist, and a Pulitzer prize–winning poet.4 Over the years the song has operated as a kind of public property, a created work whose artistic responsibility many have borne. Texas Gladden took this most supple of ballads and made it her own. Just as she came to be presented as an exemplary Appalachian singer, “One Morning in May” has come to represent a folksong that continues to live through a dazzling variety of forms. Together their histories map an artistic process chapter 9 [ 239 ] defined as much by its diversity as by its continuity...