John Avery Lomax (September 23, 1867 – January 26, 1948) was an American teacher, a pioneering musicologist, and a folklorist who did much for the preservation of American folk music. He was the father of Alan Lomax, John Lomax Jr. and Bess Lomax Hawes, also distinguished collectors of folk music.
Early life The Lomax family originally came from England with William Lomax, who settled in Rockingham County in what was then the Province of North Carolina. John Lomax was born in Goodman in Holmes County in central Mississippi, to James Avery Lomax and the former Susan Frances Cooper. In December 1869, the Lomax family traveled by ox cart from Mississippi to Texas. John Lomax grew up in central Texas, just north of Meridian in rural Bosque County.Porterfield, p. 10. His father raised horses and cattle and grew cotton and corn on the of bottomland that he had purchased near the Bosque River.Porterfield, p. 12. He was exposed to cowboy songs as a child.Porterfield, p. 18–19. At around nine he befriended Nat Blythe, a former slave hired as a farmhand by James Lomax. The friendship, he wrote later, "perhaps gave my life its bent."Porterfield, p. 20. Lomax, whose own schooling was sporadic because of the heavy farmwork he was forced to do, taught Blythe to read and write, and Blythe taught Lomax songs including "Big Yam Potatoes on a Sandy Land" and dance steps such as "Juba". When Blythe was 21 years old, he took his savings and left. Lomax never saw him again and heard rumors that he had been murdered. For years afterward, he always looked for Nat when he traveled around the South.Charles Wolf and Kip Lornell, Life and Legend of Leadbelly (New York: Da Capo Press, 1999), p. 107.
When he was about to turn twenty-one, and his legal obligation to work as apprentice on his father's farm was coming to an end, his father permitted him to take the profits from the crops of one of their fields. Lomax used this, along with the money from selling his favorite pony, to pay to further his education. In the fall of 1887, he attended Granbury College in GranburyPorterfield, p. 22. and in May 1888, he graduated and eventually became a teacher. He began his first job as a teacher at a country school in Clifton, southeast of Meridian.Porterfield, p. 25. As time went on, he grew tired of the low pay and country-school drudgery and he applied for work at Weatherford College in Weatherford in Parker County in the spring of 1889. He was hired as principal by the school's new president, David Switzer, who had previously been president of Granbury College until it was closed down and he was transferred to Weatherford.Porterfield, p. 26. In 1890, after having attended a summer course at Eastman Business College in Poughkeepsie, New York, Lomax returned to Texas where he became head of the Business Department of Weatherford College.Porterfield, p. 27–29. Each summer, between 1891 and 1894, he also attended the annual lecture-and-concert series at New York State's Chautauqua Institute, which pioneered adult education (and where Lomax himself would later lecture).Porterfield, p. 29. According to Porterfield, "There he improved his mathematics, struggled with Latin, listened to music that stirred him (opera and oratorios, light 'classics' of the day), and learned, for the first time, of two poets—Tennyson and Browning—whose work would soon become an integral part of his intellectual equipment."Porterfield, p. 30.
Early career Lomax decided to further his education at a first-rate university. His first choice was Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, but he realized he would likely fail its tough entrance examinations.Porterfield, p. 32. So, in 1895, at the age of 28, Lomax matriculated at the University of Texas at Austin, majoring in English literature, and undertaking almost a double course load (including Ancient Greek, Latin, and Anglo Saxon) and was graduated in two years. With a touch of Texas hyperbole, he later wrote:
Never was there such a hopeless hodge-podge, There was I, a Chautauqua-educated country boy who couldn't conjugate an English verb or decline a pronoun, attempting to master three other languages at the same time. ... But I plunged on through the year, for since I was older than the average freshman, I must hurry, hurry, hurry. I don't think I ever stopped to think how foolish it all was.Porterfield, p. 34.Porterfield, p. 40–41.
In his memoir, Adventures of a Ballad Hunter, Lomax recounts how he had arrived at the University of Texas with a roll of cowboy songs he had written down in childhood. He showed them to an English professor, Morgan Callaway, only to have them discounted as "cheap and unworthy," prompting Lomax to take the bundle behind the men's dormitory and burn it. His interest in folksongs thus rebuffed, Lomax focused his attentions on more acceptable academic pursuits.Porterfield, p. 59–60. He joined the fraternity Phi Delta Theta and the Rusk Literary Society, as well as becoming an editor and later the editor-in-chief of the University of Texas Magazine.Porterfield, p. 41. During the summer of 1896, he attended a summer school program in Chicago studying languages.Porterfield, p. 43. In 1897, he became an associate editor of the Alcalde, a student newspaper.Porterfield, p. 45. After graduation in June 1897, he worked at the University of Texas as registrar for the next six years until the spring of 1903.Porterfield, p. 50.Porterfield, p. 68. He also had other duties such as being personal secretary to the president of the university, manager of Brackenridge Hall (the men's dormitory on campus), and serving on the Alumni Scholarship Committee.Porterfield, p. 71–72. Lomax joined a campus fraternity known as The Great and Honorable Order of Gooroos receiving the title "Sybillene Priest".Porterfield, p. 73.
Sometime around July 1898 Lomax began an intense relationship with Shirley Green of Palestine, Texas, to whom he had been introduced in 1897 by the president of the University of Texas.Porterfield, p. 53–66.Porterfield, p. 75–77. For four years, their friendship had its ups and downs, until June 1902, when Lomax met one of Green's acquaintances, Bess Baumann Brown from Dallas.Porterfield, p. 79–80. It ultimately emerged that the reason for Green's reluctance to commit herself to an engagement to John Lomax had been her awareness that she was mortally ill with tuberculosis.Porterfield, p. 62–66. However, Lomax continued to exchange letters with Green until a month before her death, which occurred in February 1903.Porterfield, p. 83. That year, Lomax accepted an offer to teach English at Texas A&M University beginning in SeptemberPorterfield, p. 87. To bolster his credentials, in the meantime, he decided to enroll at the University of Chicago for a summer course.Porterfield, p. 89. Upon his return to Texas he became engaged to Bess Brown and they married on June 9, 1904, in Austin.Porterfield, p. 94–95.Porterfield, p. 100. The couple settled down at College Station near the A&M campus.Porterfield, p. 101. Their first child, Shirley, was born on August 7, 1905.Porterfield, p. 105.
Lomax, aware of the deficiencies of his early education, still wished to improve himself, however, and on September 26, 1906, he jumped at the chance to attend Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a graduate student, having previously received a $500 stipend: The Austin Teaching Fellowships.Porterfield, p. 106–108. Here he had the opportunity to study under Barrett Wendell and George Lyman Kittredge, two renowned scholars who actively encouraged his interest in cowboy songs.Porterfield, p. 114. Harvard, in fact, was the center of American folklore studies (then viewed as a subsidiary of English literature, itself a novel field of scholarship in comparison with the more traditional study of rhetoric focused on classical languages and geared to preparing lawyers and clergy). Kittredge, in addition to being a well-known scholar of Chaucer and Shakespeare, had inherited the professorship in English literature previously held by Francis James Child, whose courses he continued to teach and whose great, unfinished eight-volume edition of the Popular Ballads of England and Scotland he brought to completion.
It was Kittredge who pioneered modern methods of ballad study, and who encouraged collectors to get out of their armchairs and library halls and to get out into the countryside to collect ballads first hand. When he met John Lomax in 1907, this was what he encouraged him to do; the cowboy songs Lomax had been writing down were glimpses into a whole new world, and Lomax should follow up on his work. "Go and get this material while it can be found," he told the young Texan. "Preserve the words and music. That's your job."Wolfe and Lornell (1999) p. 108.
Wendell and Kittredge continued to play an important advisory role in Lomax's career after he returned to Texas in June 1907 to resume his teaching position at A&M after completing his Master of Arts degree. This included a visit by the two professors to Texas during which Lomax took them to a Sunday service in an African-American church.
Soon after his return to Austin, John Lomax's son, John Jr., Retrieved on 24 November 2014 was born, on June 14, 1907.Porterfield, p. 123.Porterfield, p. 127. Galvanized by Kittredge's advice and support, Lomax had begun collecting cowboy songs and ballads,Wilgus situates Lomax's collecting as follows:Three traditions guided the collecting [in the United States]: the academic, which, following Child, sought accurate transcriptions of text first and music later for scholarly study; the local enthusiastic, which searched out and displayed the quaint, the unusual, the exciting, the enjoyable in undisciplined and mercurial fashion; and the musical aesthetic, which sought the distinguishable art form of the folk tune for appreciation and performance. The collectors themselves were academics, whether somewhat detached leaders of regional activity or lone workers aided by chance location, early upbringing, or special interest. Or they were interested amateurs in that they began and pursued their labors for a wide variety of reasons unrelated to the values of disinterested scholarship. A union of both types of collector, in the person of John A. Lomax, enriched the greatest collection of all, the Archive of American Folk Song (Library of Congress). —D. K. Wilgus, Anglo-American Folksong Scholarship Since 1898 (Rutgers, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1959), p. XV.although he paid generous tribute to John A. Lomax's greatness as a collector, as a first-generation professional academic folklorist, Wilgus could be harshly critical. In particular, although he acknowledged the accuracy of Lomax's transcriptions and notations of sources, he objected to his having published composite versions of the songs in his books intended for the public. but his work was interrupted on February 7, 1908, when "The Great A&M Strike" broke out. The strike, caused by student dissatisfaction with the administration,Porterfield, p. 131. continued even after February 14, 1908, when the university, in a conciliatory gesture, fired some of its administrators. Unable to teach because of the strike, Lomax decided to see about resuming his collecting of cowboy ballads with a view to publishing them in a book. Encouraged by Wendell, he applied for and was awarded a Sheldon Fellowship grant.Porterfield, p. 140. In June 1908, Lomax became a full professor at A&M. That August the strike ended when the president of the university resigned.Porterfield, p. 133–135. In June 1910, Lomax accepted an administrative job at the University of Texas as "Secretary of the University Faculties and Assistant Director of the Department of Extension."Porterfield, p. 147.