John Lomax
Musician · 1867–1948 · Bosque County, Texas
Best known for
Songwriter
John Avery Lomax was a Mississippi-born, Texas-raised folklorist whose 1910 collection Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads — with an introduction by President Theodore Roosevelt — established the academic study of American folk song and gave first print to “The Old Chisholm Trail,” “Jesse James,” “Sweet Betsy from Pike,” and “The Buffalo Skinners.” As the honorary curator of the Library of Congress’s Archive of American Folksong, he recorded Lead Belly, Aunt Molly Jackson, and dozens of other foundational American singers.
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- Born September 23, 1867, in Goodman, Holmes County, Mississippi; the family moved by ox cart to central Texas’s Bosque County in December 1869.
- Heard cowboy songs and frontier ballads from drovers and farmhands as a child on his father’s 183-acre Bosque River farm.
- Graduated from the University of Texas in 1897; later studied folklore under George Lyman Kittredge at Harvard.
- Published Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads in 1910 with an introduction by President Theodore Roosevelt; the collection went through many editions and is the foundational document of academic cowboy-song scholarship.
- Was named the honorary curator of the Archive of American Folksong at the Library of Congress in 1933.
- Recorded Huddie Ledbetter (Lead Belly) at Louisiana’s Angola Prison in 1933 and carried him north on a recording and lecturing tour after Lead Belly’s release.
- Father of the folklorists Alan Lomax, John Lomax Jr., and Bess Lomax Hawes (the Almanac Singer and Bess Lomax Hawes Award namesake).
- Died in Greenville, Mississippi on January 26, 1948, at age 80.
