Q&A: The Gladson Family Band | The Daily Yonder

Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week. The Gladson family lives, farms, and plays traditional Appalachian music in Hancock County, Tennessee. Juliet Gladson met her husband Todd, a country boy from Georgia, when he was playing music on a street corner in San Francisco. He encouraged her to pick up the guitar, and in turn the couple have given their children a musical education on all the strings it takes to form a traditional family band. Their oldest son Harlen picks banjo and guitar, while middle daughter Lindy, and youngest son Lemuel flip between mandolin, guitar, and fiddle. I caught up with the Gladsons at the 2026 edition of Knoxville’s annual Big Ears Music Festival, where the family offered up an assortment of traditional stringband tunes, as well as some songs they wrote themselves. I’d seen them perform at the festival the year prior, and had been waiting for my chance to hear their story. In addition to their music-making, we discussed Juliet’s side hustle as “a crazy molasses lady”, and the family’s involvement in their local chapter of Junior Appalachian Musicians (JAM). This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Daily Yonder: So you talked about this during your Big Ears performance, but y’all kind of “blew up the TV” and moved to the country. Can you tell me about how your family made that decision? Juliet Gladson: We initially settled in Knoxville and had a little farm outside the city. Maybe about 14 years ago, we just realized we weren’t going to be able to grow enough food for livestock, and we just wanted our kids to be able to have a little more open space. We found Hancock County, and just found a great piece of land, and for the last 12 years, had been trying to actually get there and start a homestead. So we’ve been there solidly for about two years, and the TV definitely got blown up when we went there, for sure. We just did as much living off the land as we could. Todd Gladson: I was not really ever geared up for moving into a city. I’m from Woodstock, Georgia, and it had been totally rural for most of my growing up, but then the people explosion came along, and all the farmland started to get cut up into housing developments and everything. So I was always looking to [live a rural lifestyle] somewhere else. Open space is great for the soul. So that’s really what speaks to me, is being outside. I say Hancock County really kind of chose us. It’s like the heavens opened up and said, “Hey, you can be here.” Juliet and I took an atlas, and did a compass circle of the Southeast, and then did a tighter one, and then looked at where our parents lived and how many hours away it was. And then we prayed and said, “Take us somewhere where we can do this.” Daily Yonder: Most old time or bluegrass musicians I’ve ever spoken to have talked about how the music is connected to the land and communities that settled areas like Hancock County. Can you tell me about how the music you play is connected to your rural life? Todd Gladson: When I first got interested in this fiddle music or banjo music, I learned it from people that were out in the country, old-timers that you could go sit over on the porch and learn something from. And it also was very much true that, prior to the television, or even prior to the radio, people entertained themselves, and they were more self-reliant. When I was a teenager, I read Self Reliance by Emerson. So for me the music absolutely comes from that place of wanting to be self-reliant and in connection with nature. We’ve sat in circles where we’ll be working on harmonies or singing or something, and we’ll just pause, and I’ll be like, “Listen to the creek over there. It’s in a key.” And so that, to me, is where the bridge is. You want to be able to rely on yourself, and then you’ve got nature that can give you what you need, and then you’ve got this music that bridges the two. Lindy Gladson: We live in Sneedville, and that’s where Jimmy Martin is from. I play a song called America by him, and I like the thought of me carrying that song and playing it for other people, as the music that comes from our region. Harlen Gladson: One of my favorite parts of music is how it bonds a community. Lots of places, it’s hard to find community. But if you find a community of music players, you’ll find people that are carrying their tradition together and having a good time. Like it’s not just focused on performing, it’s focused on sitting around in the living room, on the front porch, and just enjoying the evening together, playing the music that [our] ancestors played. So that’s one of my favorite parts of playing this type of music, is just how it not only carries tradition, but it’s part of our ancestors way of just having a good time and relaxing and just enjoying life at the simplest. Juliet Gladson: We’ve found music in the community, like Harlen said, in a very natural way, not through performing. We met some of our dearest friends in our county or the surrounding counties by making molasses. We grow sorghum, which is an important cultural aspect of the region where we live. And Todd always wanted to grow sorghum, and we finally had a wide open space, and we grew a bunch of sorghum and found an old mill. I kept telling Todd, “We need to find somebody with a mule to help us.” You know, to go around and work the mill to press the juice out of the cane. And last minute, it was probably like a week before it was time to cut the cane, we met a fellow in Claiborne County, and he said, “Sure, I’ll come over.” And all of a sudden they realized that we play music. Because at the molasses making event we all jammed together. They call me crazy molasses lady in the house now. After that experience, I saw molasses as being such an important part of what we’re doing with music in our community. I’m the Program Director for our county’s chapter of Junior Appalachian Musicians (JAM). It’s a nonprofit, so all the money is raised by our family, however we can figure it out. So last year, we had a bunch of molasses, and our community of friends said, “Oh, we have extra cane. Do you want to cut our cane?” So we ended up making about 25 gallons of molasses this year. And I really like that part of the tradition of molasses is that you don’t sell it, you give it away. And so the fellow that gave us his cane, he said, “Well, what are you gonna do with the molasses?” I said, “I’ll put on biscuits, I’ll eat it with everything. I love it.” And he said, “I know, but what are you gonna do with all of it?” The next time we saw him, when we made molasses again, I said, “I came up with an idea. Tell me what you think.” Because he didn’t want me to sell it, I said, “How about we use it as a fundraiser for JAM, and we donate the molasses for the fundraiser. And he loved it. So we named it Molasses for Music. We asked for donations of the molasses, then Lindy and I make taffy and brittle and whatever we can think of and package it up for the fundraiser. Last fall, we made about $1,000, and were able to partner with Gold Tone and buy two banjos for our program. Daily Yonder: Can you tell me some more about how the Hancock JAM program got started, and what you each enjoy about it? Juliet Gladson: So our family is built on faith. In about July of 2024 I started praying and telling my family, I said, I’m praying that my children can teach the children of the community in Hancock County their music. And I told a preacher over at Elm Springs Church, and the music director, and the Chamber of Commerce – I told them my prayer. And they said, “Well, you can use this church if you want to do it. You can teach here.” And I said, “Well, I just need to find the i