“Texas Gales” (also “Texas Gals”) is a traditional American fiddle tune with its earliest confirmed commercial recording made in 1927 by the Hill Billies — featuring Tony Alderman and Charlie Bowman on fiddle — on Vocalion Records. The Hill Billies were a western Virginia band, and the fact that an Appalachian string band first commercially documented a piece with “Texas” in the title reflects how freely regional fiddle-tune names migrated across the geography they evoked. No specific Texas origin for the melody has been established, and the Tune Archive classifies it as a Country Rag and Reel of American origin with no single regional home. Doc Watson is credited with bringing the tune to wide attention as a flatpicking vehicle on the festival circuit in the 1960s and 1970s.
The G-major reel has a momentum and melodic clarity that reward open guitar positions and give flat-pickers a demanding but satisfying showcase — the kind of piece that separates players who can maintain drive through the B section from those who can only manage the A part at full speed.
Norman Blake and Tony Rice recorded the featured version for Blake and Rice (Rounder, 1987), a guitar-duo record that placed two of the most important acoustic guitar voices of the post-revival generation in direct conversation. Their recording of “Texas Gales” has become the standard reference for flat-pickers approaching the piece, a collaboration between two musicians whose independent contributions to the tradition are difficult to overestimate.