John A. Lomax
1867–1948
Biography
John Avery Lomax was born in Mississippi in 1867, and as a boy his family travelled by ox cart to central Texas, where he grew up on a farm in Bosque County. His schooling was broken up by the work the farm needed from him, but he persevered, taught school, and took a degree in English at the University of Texas. He later spent time as a graduate student at Harvard. Long before any of this he had heard cowboy songs in his childhood, and he said later that this early exposure shaped the course of his life.
His best-known book is Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, a collection of songs from the range and the trail, published in 1910 with an introduction by the former president Theodore Roosevelt. It came to be seen as a leading anthology of Western songs and had a strong influence on those who studied American folk song. Lomax's largest achievement came later, when he worked with the Library of Congress as curator of its Archive of American Folk Song, a post he held until his death in 1948. Field recordings made by Lomax and his son Alan, and by others, drew on singers from many states, and the archive holds more than ten thousand of them.
Lomax was a field collector as well as a scholar. In the early 1930s he recorded the singer Huddie Ledbetter, known as Lead Belly, at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, and the two men then travelled and performed together. Their partnership ended in a quarrel over money. The book on this site is the 1910 collection, and it is the best place to start for readers who want to meet the cowboy songs in the form Lomax first put before the public.
This biography was written by a language model. The sources below are where to check it; treat details with care.
Books
Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads
by John A. Lomax (collector)
John Lomax's 1910 collection of songs he gathered from cowboys, miners and railroad hands in the American West, among them The Dying Cowboy, Jesse James and The Days of Forty-Nine. The songs are given with his headnotes, and the introductions are left out here. This book uses…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.