The Gant Family
The Gants, a family of folk musicians, were led by mother Maggie, whose family came from the hills of Tennessee. Maggie’s mother Sarah Reeves, who came to Texas before Maggie was born, was a devout member of the LDS church. Maggie Lindley and George Gant married in Wood County in 1911 and their first two children were born in Kelsey, where a Mormon colony was established in 1898.
‘George was a religious man,’ Maggie said, according to the History of the Early Settlers of the Kelsey, Enoch, and Gilmer Branches of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. ‘We had prayer every night and morning. We went to Sunday School and Church every time it was possible for us to go. We worked in the church there (Kelsey). He was a ward teacher and local missionary. He was also a Peace Officer in the Branch. I was Relief Society Visiting Teacher, also, Primary Teacher. We loved outwork in the church. We were young and had lots of fun and many friends.’
Maggie had a daughter from a previous marriage, Glida, and she had seven children with George: Nephi, Ether, Foy, Ado, Ella, Georgia and Trovesta. Maggie was close to her mother who was living with the Gants at the time of her death. Maggie said of her parents, ‘I never heard them fuss in my life. Mother was a natural nurse, and she nursed the sick all her life. My mother helped me so much with my children. She was such a good mother, never was contrary with the children, and they loved her.’
The Gants were by all accounts a close-knit family in love with music. Farmers hit hard by drought and the Depression, the family moved to Austin in 1932, where they lived in a flood-prone house on the banks of the Colorado and were major players in the establishment of Austin’s folk scene. They came to the attention of Alan Lomax through his University of Texas classmate John Henry Faulk. Alan and his father John A. Lomax recorded fifty songs collected from the Gants between 1934 and 1936 for the Library of Congress. Several of these songs were transcribed by Ruth Crawford Seeger and appeared in the Lomax’s 1941 book Our Singing Country.
‘One morning I called on the Gant family at ten o’ clock in the morning,’ John Lomax wrote. ‘Mrs. Gant met me at the door dressed in her early morning wrapper. “The children are all asleep she whispered apologetically, and haven’t gone to school today. Last night we all got to singing and dancing. We didn’t go to bed until two o’ clock this morning. The children stayed up too, so I’m letting the whole bunch sleep until dinner time.”’
Lomax, who estimated the Gant repertoire at 200 folk songs, described the Gants singing at home: ‘Mrs. Gant, who taught them their songs and their love of singing, and who knew the saddest songs; the oldest daughter, Glyda, who pretended to turn her nose up at ballads but could sing “The Old Lady From Tennessee” better than anybody else in the family; Foy, who could pick the guitar as well as a man and used to remind them of their tunes, “especially the funny ones;” the three boys, who mostly sang the blues, the cowboy songs, and the jailhouse ballads; Mr. Gant, who had one song, “Bangum and the Boar,” over which his rights were almost personal; and then on the beds, leaning against someone’s knee or breast, the tow-headed Gant kids, listening, falling asleep, and waking up to listen again.’
The oldest Gant boy was named after Nephi, a principal figure in the Book of Mormon. According to Alan Lomax, who was about Nephi’s age, and wrote the story of his murder at an eastside beer joint called Ollie’s Place in February of 1936: ‘He hadn’t gone down to that joint to get no drink, anyhow. He told his mama he wasn’t going to stand around and do nothing while his children went hungry; he was going down there and borrow fifty cents from the bartender; maybe he could pick up a few nickels singing. The Gants thought he probably could, because he was the best singer in the family. Why, his voice was so loud till they had to turn his back to the mike up at the radio station and he could pick the box better than anybody, if you forgot his little brother, Adoniron. So he just went down there to ask the bartender to loan him two or four bits till Monday—if he had it—; and he couldn’t have got drunk, only having been gone fifteen minutes.
‘The way it was, see, Nephi was settin’ there in a booth by himself and this fellow is raisin’ sand. They’d just turned him loose out of the state penitentiary twenty-four hours before and he was already crazy drunk and lookin’ for trouble.’ He challenged Nephi, ‘who was just settin’ there,’ to a fight and Nephi, who was six foot four, hit him and knocked him to the floor. The man went home for his gun and came back and shot Nephi through the glass door.
Hal Cannon, in his article On the Trail of John Lomax: Visiting Ella Gant McBride, writes of visiting Ella at the Latter Day Assisted Living Center near Salt Lake City just before she died. ‘As I drove down the highway I began singing one of those songs that Mike Seeger learned from the Gants, a song that many people have covered over the years including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Jerry Garcia.’
When first unto this country
A stranger I came
I courted a fair maiden
And Nancy was her name
I courted her for love
Her love I didn’t obtain
Do you think I’ve any reason
Or right to complain?
Cannon played a Library of Congress CD of Ella and Foy singing together, ‘two sweet untrained voices singing in unison,’ and asked the old woman if she remembered singing with Foy. ‘Foy was my sister. I love her so much.’ Ella had a binder beside her bed. ‘On the first page was a telling inscription: “dedicated to my eternal husband Mark.” Following were pages of family photos and a sheet talking about the importance of keeping and preserving family songs. Then came the collection itself, at least a hundred songs, both words and music all compiled by Ella. I knew many of them as old ballads from Great Britain, popular songs from the Civil War era, cowboy songs, sentimental songs from the day and original songs Ella had written.’
Musician Lyle Lofgren considered the Gants to be ‘among the most important informants on traditional music that no one’s ever heard of. (Their repertoire) was astoundingly broad. It included many rare versions of archaic British ballads, the sort you might expect to find, if you were lucky, in some remote holler of the Appalachians, but probably not in Austin.’
The Gants had the authentic, organic sound of a family that learned to sing by singing. Listening to Foy and Ella sing Long Came Johnny or Foy singing the children’s song Lazy Mary is a direct experience untainted by a sense of performance. The Gants, through their love of each other and of music, played an inestimable role in preserving traditional songs that might otherwise have been lost forever.
lili li
Austin
10 November 2020
________________________________________
Family Search ID: KW83-9FS
Adoniron was Ado’s full first name.
Ado wrote an unpublished memoir: Places we lived growing up as I remember them.
The Gants, a family of folk musicians, were led by mother Maggie, whose family came from the hills of Tennessee. Maggie’s mother Sarah Reeves, who came to Texas before Maggie was born, was a devout member of the LDS church. Maggie Lindley and George Gant married in Wood County in 1911 and their first two children were born in Kelsey, where a Mormon colony was established in 1898.
‘George was a religious man,’ Maggie said, according to the History of the Early Settlers of the Kelsey, Enoch, and Gilmer Branches of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. ‘We had prayer every night and morning. We went to Sunday School and Church every time it was possible for us to go. We worked in the church there (Kelsey). He was a ward teacher and local missionary. He was also a Peace Officer in the Branch. I was Relief Society Visiting Teacher, also, Primary Teacher. We loved outwork in the church. We were young and had lots of fun and many friends.’
Maggie had a daughter from a previous marriage, Glida, and she had seven children with George: Nephi, Ether, Foy, Ado, Ella, Georgia and Trovesta. Maggie was close to her mother who was living with the Gants at the time of her death. Maggie said of her parents, ‘I never heard them fuss in my life. Mother was a natural nurse, and she nursed the sick all her life. My mother helped me so much with my children. She was such a good mother, never was contrary with the children, and they loved her.’
The Gants were by all accounts a close-knit family in love with music. Farmers hit hard by drought and the Depression, the family moved to Austin in 1932, where they lived in a flood-prone house on the banks of the Colorado and were major players in the establishment of Austin’s folk scene. They came to the attention of Alan Lomax through his University of Texas classmate John Henry Faulk. Alan and his father John A. Lomax recorded fifty songs collected from the Gants between 1934 and 1936 for the Library of Congress. Several of these songs were transcribed by Ruth Crawford Seeger and appeared in the Lomax’s 1941 book Our Singing Country.
‘One morning I called on the Gant family at ten o’ clock in the morning,’ John Lomax wrote. ‘Mrs. Gant met me at the door dressed in her early morning wrapper. “The children are all asleep she whispered apologetically, and haven’t gone to school today. Last night we all got to singing and dancing. We didn’t go to bed until two o’ clock this morning. The children stayed up too, so I’m letting the whole bunch sleep until dinner time.”’
Lomax, who estimated the Gant repertoire at 200 folk songs, described the Gants singing at home: ‘Mrs. Gant, who taught them their songs and their love of singing, and who knew the saddest songs; the oldest daughter, Glyda, who pretended to turn her nose up at ballads but could sing “The Old Lady From Tennessee” better than anybody else in the family; Foy, who could pick the guitar as well as a man and used to remind them of their tunes, “especially the funny ones;” the three boys, who mostly sang the blues, the cowboy songs, and the jailhouse ballads; Mr. Gant, who had one song, “Bangum and the Boar,” over which his rights were almost personal; and then on the beds, leaning against someone’s knee or breast, the tow-headed Gant kids, listening, falling asleep, and waking up to listen again.’
The oldest Gant boy was named after Nephi, a principal figure in the Book of Mormon. According to Alan Lomax, who was about Nephi’s age, and wrote the story of his murder at an eastside beer joint called Ollie’s Place in February of 1936: ‘He hadn’t gone down to that joint to get no drink, anyhow. He told his mama he wasn’t going to stand around and do nothing while his children went hungry; he was going down there and borrow fifty cents from the bartender; maybe he could pick up a few nickels singing. The Gants thought he probably could, because he was the best singer in the family. Why, his voice was so loud till they had to turn his back to the mike up at the radio station and he could pick the box better than anybody, if you forgot his little brother, Adoniron. So he just went down there to ask the bartender to loan him two or four bits till Monday—if he had it—; and he couldn’t have got drunk, only having been gone fifteen minutes.
‘The way it was, see, Nephi was settin’ there in a booth by himself and this fellow is raisin’ sand. They’d just turned him loose out of the state penitentiary twenty-four hours before and he was already crazy drunk and lookin’ for trouble.’ He challenged Nephi, ‘who was just settin’ there,’ to a fight and Nephi, who was six foot four, hit him and knocked him to the floor. The man went home for his gun and came back and shot Nephi through the glass door.
Hal Cannon, in his article On the Trail of John Lomax: Visiting Ella Gant McBride, writes of visiting Ella at the Latter Day Assisted Living Center near Salt Lake City just before she died. ‘As I drove down the highway I began singing one of those songs that Mike Seeger learned from the Gants, a song that many people have covered over the years including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Jerry Garcia.’
When first unto this country
A stranger I came
I courted a fair maiden
And Nancy was her name
I courted her for love
Her love I didn’t obtain
Do you think I’ve any reason
Or right to complain?
Cannon played a Library of Congress CD of Ella and Foy singing together, ‘two sweet untrained voices singing in unison,’ and asked the old woman if she remembered singing with Foy. ‘Foy was my sister. I love her so much.’ Ella had a binder beside her bed. ‘On the first page was a telling inscription: “dedicated to my eternal husband Mark.” Following were pages of family photos and a sheet talking about the importance of keeping and preserving family songs. Then came the collection itself, at least a hundred songs, both words and music all compiled by Ella. I knew many of them as old ballads from Great Britain, popular songs from the Civil War era, cowboy songs, sentimental songs from the day and original songs Ella had written.’
Musician Lyle Lofgren considered the Gants to be ‘among the most important informants on traditional music that no one’s ever heard of. (Their repertoire) was astoundingly broad. It included many rare versions of archaic British ballads, the sort you might expect to find, if you were lucky, in some remote holler of the Appalachians, but probably not in Austin.’
The Gants had the authentic, organic sound of a family that learned to sing by singing. Listening to Foy and Ella sing Long Came Johnny or Foy singing the children’s song Lazy Mary is a direct experience untainted by a sense of performance. The Gants, through their love of each other and of music, played an inestimable role in preserving traditional songs that might otherwise have been lost forever.
lili li
Austin
10 November 2020
________________________________________
Family Search ID: KW83-9FS
Adoniron was Ado’s full first name.
Ado wrote an unpublished memoir: Places we lived growing up as I remember them.
The Gant Family
The Gants, a family of folk musicians, were led by mother Maggie, whose family came from the hills of Tennessee. Maggie’s mother Sarah Reeves, who came to Texas before Maggie was born, was a devout member of the LDS church. Maggie Lindley and George Gant married in Wood County in 1911 and their first two children were born in Kelsey, where a Mormon colony was established in 1898.
‘George was a religious man,’ Maggie said, according to the History of the Early Settlers of the Kelsey, Enoch, and Gilmer Branches of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. ‘We had prayer every night and morning. We went to Sunday School and Church every time it was possible for us to go. We worked in the church there (Kelsey). He was a ward teacher and local missionary. He was also a Peace Officer in the Branch. I was Relief Society Visiting Teacher, also, Primary Teacher. We loved outwork in the church. We were young and had lots of fun and many friends.’
Maggie had a daughter from a previous marriage, Glida, and she had seven children with George: Nephi, Ether, Foy, Ado, Ella, Georgia and Trovesta. Maggie was close to her mother who was living with the Gants at the time of her death. Maggie said of her parents, ‘I never heard them fuss in my life. Mother was a natural nurse, and she nursed the sick all her life. My mother helped me so much with my children. She was such a good mother, never was contrary with the children, and they loved her.’
The Gants were by all accounts a close-knit family in love with music. Farmers hit hard by drought and the Depression, the family moved to Austin in 1932, where they lived in a flood-prone house on the banks of the Colorado and were major players in the establishment of Austin’s folk scene. They came to the attention of Alan Lomax through his University of Texas classmate John Henry Faulk. Alan and his father John A. Lomax recorded fifty songs collected from the Gants between 1934 and 1936 for the Library of Congress. Several of these songs were transcribed by Ruth Crawford Seeger and appeared in the Lomax’s 1941 book Our Singing Country.
‘One morning I called on the Gant family at ten o’ clock in the morning,’ John Lomax wrote. ‘Mrs. Gant met me at the door dressed in her early morning wrapper. “The children are all asleep she whispered apologetically, and haven’t gone to school today. Last night we all got to singing and dancing. We didn’t go to bed until two o’ clock this morning. The children stayed up too, so I’m letting the whole bunch sleep until dinner time.”’
Lomax, who estimated the Gant repertoire at 200 folk songs, described the Gants singing at home: ‘Mrs. Gant, who taught them their songs and their love of singing, and who knew the saddest songs; the oldest daughter, Glyda, who pretended to turn her nose up at ballads but could sing “The Old Lady From Tennessee” better than anybody else in the family; Foy, who could pick the guitar as well as a man and used to remind them of their tunes, “especially the funny ones;” the three boys, who mostly sang the blues, the cowboy songs, and the jailhouse ballads; Mr. Gant, who had one song, “Bangum and the Boar,” over which his rights were almost personal; and then on the beds, leaning against someone’s knee or breast, the tow-headed Gant kids, listening, falling asleep, and waking up to listen again.’
The oldest Gant boy was named after Nephi, a principal figure in the Book of Mormon. According to Alan Lomax, who was about Nephi’s age, and wrote the story of his murder at an eastside beer joint called Ollie’s Place in February of 1936: ‘He hadn’t gone down to that joint to get no drink, anyhow. He told his mama he wasn’t going to stand around and do nothing while his children went hungry; he was going down there and borrow fifty cents from the bartender; maybe he could pick up a few nickels singing. The Gants thought he probably could, because he was the best singer in the family. Why, his voice was so loud till they had to turn his back to the mike up at the radio station and he could pick the box better than anybody, if you forgot his little brother, Adoniron. So he just went down there to ask the bartender to loan him two or four bits till Monday—if he had it—; and he couldn’t have got drunk, only having been gone fifteen minutes.
‘The way it was, see, Nephi was settin’ there in a booth by himself and this fellow is raisin’ sand. They’d just turned him loose out of the state penitentiary twenty-four hours before and he was already crazy drunk and lookin’ for trouble.’ He challenged Nephi, ‘who was just settin’ there,’ to a fight and Nephi, who was six foot four, hit him and knocked him to the floor. The man went home for his gun and came back and shot Nephi through the glass door.
Hal Cannon, in his article On the Trail of John Lomax: Visiting Ella Gant McBride, writes of visiting Ella at the Latter Day Assisted Living Center near Salt Lake City just before she died. ‘As I drove down the highway I began singing one of those songs that Mike Seeger learned from the Gants, a song that many people have covered over the years including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Jerry Garcia.’
When first unto this country
A stranger I came
I courted a fair maiden
And Nancy was her name
I courted her for love
Her love I didn’t obtain
Do you think I’ve any reason
Or right to complain?
Cannon played a Library of Congress CD of Ella and Foy singing together, ‘two sweet untrained voices singing in unison,’ and asked the old woman if she remembered singing with Foy. ‘Foy was my sister. I love her so much.’ Ella had a binder beside her bed. ‘On the first page was a telling inscription: “dedicated to my eternal husband Mark.” Following were pages of family photos and a sheet talking about the importance of keeping and preserving family songs. Then came the collection itself, at least a hundred songs, both words and music all compiled by Ella. I knew many of them as old ballads from Great Britain, popular songs from the Civil War era, cowboy songs, sentimental songs from the day and original songs Ella had written.’
Musician Lyle Lofgren considered the Gants to be ‘among the most important informants on traditional music that no one’s ever heard of. (Their repertoire) was astoundingly broad. It included many rare versions of archaic British ballads, the sort you might expect to find, if you were lucky, in some remote holler of the Appalachians, but probably not in Austin.’
The Gants had the authentic, organic sound of a family that learned to sing by singing. Listening to Foy and Ella sing Long Came Johnny or Foy singing the children’s song Lazy Mary is a direct experience untainted by a sense of performance. The Gants, through their love of each other and of music, played an inestimable role in preserving traditional songs that might otherwise have been lost forever.
lili li
Austin
10 November 2020
________________________________________
Family Search ID: KW83-9FS
Adoniron was Ado’s full first name.
Ado wrote an unpublished memoir: Places we lived growing up as I remember them.
The Gants, a family of folk musicians, were led by mother Maggie, whose family came from the hills of Tennessee. Maggie’s mother Sarah Reeves, who came to Texas before Maggie was born, was a devout member of the LDS church. Maggie Lindley and George Gant married in Wood County in 1911 and their first two children were born in Kelsey, where a Mormon colony was established in 1898.
‘George was a religious man,’ Maggie said, according to the History of the Early Settlers of the Kelsey, Enoch, and Gilmer Branches of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. ‘We had prayer every night and morning. We went to Sunday School and Church every time it was possible for us to go. We worked in the church there (Kelsey). He was a ward teacher and local missionary. He was also a Peace Officer in the Branch. I was Relief Society Visiting Teacher, also, Primary Teacher. We loved outwork in the church. We were young and had lots of fun and many friends.’
Maggie had a daughter from a previous marriage, Glida, and she had seven children with George: Nephi, Ether, Foy, Ado, Ella, Georgia and Trovesta. Maggie was close to her mother who was living with the Gants at the time of her death. Maggie said of her parents, ‘I never heard them fuss in my life. Mother was a natural nurse, and she nursed the sick all her life. My mother helped me so much with my children. She was such a good mother, never was contrary with the children, and they loved her.’
The Gants were by all accounts a close-knit family in love with music. Farmers hit hard by drought and the Depression, the family moved to Austin in 1932, where they lived in a flood-prone house on the banks of the Colorado and were major players in the establishment of Austin’s folk scene. They came to the attention of Alan Lomax through his University of Texas classmate John Henry Faulk. Alan and his father John A. Lomax recorded fifty songs collected from the Gants between 1934 and 1936 for the Library of Congress. Several of these songs were transcribed by Ruth Crawford Seeger and appeared in the Lomax’s 1941 book Our Singing Country.
‘One morning I called on the Gant family at ten o’ clock in the morning,’ John Lomax wrote. ‘Mrs. Gant met me at the door dressed in her early morning wrapper. “The children are all asleep she whispered apologetically, and haven’t gone to school today. Last night we all got to singing and dancing. We didn’t go to bed until two o’ clock this morning. The children stayed up too, so I’m letting the whole bunch sleep until dinner time.”’
Lomax, who estimated the Gant repertoire at 200 folk songs, described the Gants singing at home: ‘Mrs. Gant, who taught them their songs and their love of singing, and who knew the saddest songs; the oldest daughter, Glyda, who pretended to turn her nose up at ballads but could sing “The Old Lady From Tennessee” better than anybody else in the family; Foy, who could pick the guitar as well as a man and used to remind them of their tunes, “especially the funny ones;” the three boys, who mostly sang the blues, the cowboy songs, and the jailhouse ballads; Mr. Gant, who had one song, “Bangum and the Boar,” over which his rights were almost personal; and then on the beds, leaning against someone’s knee or breast, the tow-headed Gant kids, listening, falling asleep, and waking up to listen again.’
The oldest Gant boy was named after Nephi, a principal figure in the Book of Mormon. According to Alan Lomax, who was about Nephi’s age, and wrote the story of his murder at an eastside beer joint called Ollie’s Place in February of 1936: ‘He hadn’t gone down to that joint to get no drink, anyhow. He told his mama he wasn’t going to stand around and do nothing while his children went hungry; he was going down there and borrow fifty cents from the bartender; maybe he could pick up a few nickels singing. The Gants thought he probably could, because he was the best singer in the family. Why, his voice was so loud till they had to turn his back to the mike up at the radio station and he could pick the box better than anybody, if you forgot his little brother, Adoniron. So he just went down there to ask the bartender to loan him two or four bits till Monday—if he had it—; and he couldn’t have got drunk, only having been gone fifteen minutes.
‘The way it was, see, Nephi was settin’ there in a booth by himself and this fellow is raisin’ sand. They’d just turned him loose out of the state penitentiary twenty-four hours before and he was already crazy drunk and lookin’ for trouble.’ He challenged Nephi, ‘who was just settin’ there,’ to a fight and Nephi, who was six foot four, hit him and knocked him to the floor. The man went home for his gun and came back and shot Nephi through the glass door.
Hal Cannon, in his article On the Trail of John Lomax: Visiting Ella Gant McBride, writes of visiting Ella at the Latter Day Assisted Living Center near Salt Lake City just before she died. ‘As I drove down the highway I began singing one of those songs that Mike Seeger learned from the Gants, a song that many people have covered over the years including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Jerry Garcia.’
When first unto this country
A stranger I came
I courted a fair maiden
And Nancy was her name
I courted her for love
Her love I didn’t obtain
Do you think I’ve any reason
Or right to complain?
Cannon played a Library of Congress CD of Ella and Foy singing together, ‘two sweet untrained voices singing in unison,’ and asked the old woman if she remembered singing with Foy. ‘Foy was my sister. I love her so much.’ Ella had a binder beside her bed. ‘On the first page was a telling inscription: “dedicated to my eternal husband Mark.” Following were pages of family photos and a sheet talking about the importance of keeping and preserving family songs. Then came the collection itself, at least a hundred songs, both words and music all compiled by Ella. I knew many of them as old ballads from Great Britain, popular songs from the Civil War era, cowboy songs, sentimental songs from the day and original songs Ella had written.’
Musician Lyle Lofgren considered the Gants to be ‘among the most important informants on traditional music that no one’s ever heard of. (Their repertoire) was astoundingly broad. It included many rare versions of archaic British ballads, the sort you might expect to find, if you were lucky, in some remote holler of the Appalachians, but probably not in Austin.’
The Gants had the authentic, organic sound of a family that learned to sing by singing. Listening to Foy and Ella sing Long Came Johnny or Foy singing the children’s song Lazy Mary is a direct experience untainted by a sense of performance. The Gants, through their love of each other and of music, played an inestimable role in preserving traditional songs that might otherwise have been lost forever.
lili li
Austin
10 November 2020
________________________________________
Family Search ID: KW83-9FS
Adoniron was Ado’s full first name.
Ado wrote an unpublished memoir: Places we lived growing up as I remember them.
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