Pete Seeger & Texas Gladden - The Farmer's Curst Wife

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"The Farmer's Curst Wife" is Child ballad number 278. It has been recorded by Pete Seeger and Jean Ritchie

Song synopsis: A farmer had a bad woman for his wife, and one day the devil came for her. They reached Hell, and the gates were shut, so she struck him. She made life in hell so bad that the devil brought her back to her husband.

Peter "Pete" Seeger (born May 3, 1919) is an American folk singer and a key figure in the mid-20th century American folk music revival. A fixture on nationwide radio in the 1940s, he also had a string of hit records during the early '50s as a member of The Weavers, most notably the 1950 recording of Leadbelly's "Goodnight, Irene," which topped the charts for 13 weeks in 1950. In the 1960s, he re-emerged on the public scene as a prominent singer of protest music in support of international disarmament, civil rights, and for environmental causes.

As a song writer, he is best known as the author or co-author of "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?", "If I Had a Hammer (The Hammer Song)" (composed with Lee Hays of The Weavers), and "Turn, Turn, Turn!", which have been recorded by many artists both in and outside the folk revival movement and are still sung throughout the world. "Flowers" was a hit recording for The Kingston Trio (1962), Marlene Dietrich, who recorded it in English, German and French (1962), and Johnny Rivers (1965). "If I Had a Hammer" was a hit for Peter, Paul & Mary (1962) and Trini Lopez (1963), while The Byrds popularized "Turn, Turn, Turn!" in the mid-1960s, as did Judy Collins in 1964. Seeger was one of the folksingers most responsible for popularizing the spiritual "We Shall Overcome" (also recorded by Joan Baez and many other singer-activists) that became the acknowledged anthem of the 1960s American Civil Rights Movement, soon after folk singer and activist Guy Carawan introduced it at the founding meeting of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1960. The long television blacklist of Seeger began to end in the mid-1960s when he hosted a regionally broadcast, educational folk-music television show, Rainbow Quest. Among his guests were Johnny Cash, June Carter, Reverend Gary Davis, Mississippi John Hurt, Doc Watson, The Stanley Brothers, Elizabeth Cotten, Patrick Sky, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Tom Paxton, Judy Collins, Donovan, Richard Fariña and Mimi Fariña, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Mamou Cajun Band, Bernice Johnson Reagon, The Beers Family, Roscoe Holcomb, and Shawn Phillips. Thirty-nine hour-long programs were recorded at WNJU's Newark studios in 1965 and 1966, produced by Seeger and his wife Toshi, with Sholom Rubinstein. In 1998 Appleseed Records issued a double-CD tribute album: Where Have All the Flowers Gone: the Songs of Pete Seeger, which included readings by Studs Terkel and songs by Billy Bragg, Jackson Browne, Eliza Carthy, Judy Collins, Bruce Cockburn, Donovan, Ani DiFranco, Dick Gaughan, Nanci Griffith, Richie Havens, Indigo Girls, Roger McGuinn, Holly Near, Odetta, Tom Paxton, Bonnie Raitt, Martin Simpson, and Bruce Springsteen, among others.

Texas Gladden (1895-1967) was an American folk singer born in Saltville, Virginia. She was best known for her traditional Appalachian ballad style of singing, which she began to record in the 1930s. In 1941, along with her brother, musician Hobart Smith, she began to record with pioneer folk archivist and musicologist Alan Lomax. The largest collection of her work, which includes 37 tracks of songs and interviews is compiled on the album Texas Gladden: Ballad Legacy which Lomax produced as part of his Southern Journey series. This album contains traditional ballads of Anglo-Saxon/Celtic origin, such as Barbara Allen, Mary Hamilton, and Lord Thomas as well as regional songs and even a Civil War-era ghost story. She did not enjoy much fame during her life and has remained a relatively obscure artist. Her work did experience a resurgence in popularity during the 1960s as she was rediscovered by Joan Baez, and more recently through harpist Joanna Newsom's cover of the traditional Appalachian style song Three Babes.

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[LaylaT6]

I'm so glad stuff like this has been recorded and survived. So much wonderful stuff that may have been lost to history is being saved by the digital age and that's important.

[prometheusjohnson]

hail satan

[lawnkhan]

and people say the internet doesn't do good things for humanity.