[12] 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.
[14] 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 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.
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.
[35] 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.
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.
"[38]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.
[40][41] Galvanized by Kittredge's advice and support, Lomax had begun collecting cowboy songs and ballads,[42] but his work was interrupted on February 7, 1908, when "The Great A&M Strike" broke out.
Among the songs included were "Jesse James", "The Old Chisholm Trail", "Sweet Betsy From Pike", and "The Buffalo Skinners" (which George Lyman Kittredge considered "one of the greatest western ballads" and which was praised for its Homeric quality by Carl Sandburg and Virgil Thomson.
This publication exemplified the society's express purpose, and the motivation behind Lomax's own work: to gather a body of folklore before it disappeared, and to preserve it for the analysis of later scholars.
These early efforts foreshadowed what would become Lomax's greatest achievement, the collection of more than ten thousand recordings for the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress.
Lomax judged that it would be wrong to leave his post at Lee, Higginson & Co so soon after arriving, especially with regards to his friendship with the family of Barrett Wendell, so he remained in Chicago for eighteen months until the war ended.
His work, for which he was paid a salary of one dollar, included fund raising for the Library, and he was expected to support himself entirely through writing books and giving lectures.
He and Alan recorded Spanish ballads and vaquero songs on the Rio Grande border and spent weeks among French-speaking Cajuns in southern Louisiana.
Installing it in the trunk of his Ford sedan, Lomax soon used it to record, at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, a twelve-string guitar player by the name of Huddie Ledbetter, better known as "Lead Belly," whom they considered one of their most significant finds.
In contrast to earlier amateur collectors, the Lomaxes were also among the first to attempt to apply scholarly methodology in their work, though they did not adhere to the strict empirical positivism adopted by the subsequent generation of academic folklorists, who believed in refraining from drawing conclusions about the data they amassed.
At the urging of John Jr., Lomax engaged Lead Belly as his driver and assistant, and the pair traveled the South together collecting folk songs for the next three months.
[67] "But," writes jazz historian Ted Gioia, few would deny the instrumental role he played in the transformation of the one-time convict into a commercially successful performer of traditional African American music.
As Curator and Assistant in Charge of the Folk Song Collection John and Alan Lomax supervised and worked with many other folklorists, musicologists, and composers, amateur and professional, all over the country, amassing more than ten thousand records of vocal and instrumental music on aluminum and acetate discs along with many pages of written documentation.
Starting in 1933, the Lomaxes, father and son, traveled tens of thousands of miles, endured many hardships, exercised great patience and tact to win the confidence and friendship of hundreds of singers in order to bring to the Library of Congress records of the voices of countless interesting people they met on the way.
Very much remains to be done to make our Archive truly representative of all the people, but the country owes a debt of gratitude to these two men for the excellent foundation laid for future work in this field.
They include Gordon Barnes, Mary E. Barnicle, E. C. Beals, Barbara Bell, Paul Brewster, Genevieve Chandler, Richard Chase, Fletcher Collins, Carita D. Corse, Sidney Robertson Cowell, Dr. E. K. Davis, Kay Dealy, Seamus Doyle, Charles Draves, Marjorie Edgar, John Henry Faulk, Richard Fento, Helen Hartness Flanders, Frank Goodwin, Percy Grainger, Herbert Halpert, Melville Herskovits, Zora Neale Hurston, Myra Hull, George Pullen Jackson, Stetson Kennedy, Bess Lomax, Elizabeth Lomax, Ruby Terrill Lomax, Eloise Linscott, Bascom Lamar Lunsford, Walter McClintock, Alton Morris, Juan B. Rael, Vance Randolph, Helen Roberts, Domingo Santa Cruz, Charles Seeger, Mrs. Nicol Smith, Robert Sonkin, Ruby Pickens Tartt, Jean Thomas, Charles Todd, Margaret Valliant, Ivan Walton, Irene Whitfield, John Woods, and John W. Work III.This checklist has been prepared as a result of countless requests.
A mere glance at the titles listed here will be sufficient to show the variety and complexity of the democratic life of our country.After 1942, field work of collecting folk songs under government auspices was discontinued due to a shortage of acetate needed for the war effort.
But the work had aroused the ire and suspicion of Southern conservatives in Congress who were fearful it could be used as a cover for civil and worker rights agitation, and because of congressional opposition it has never been resumed.
[citation needed] John A. Lomax's contribution to the documentation of American folk traditions extended beyond the Library of Congress Music Division through his involvement with two agencies of the Works Progress Administration.
[74] In 1947 his autobiography Adventures of a Ballad Hunter (New York: Macmillan) was published and was awarded the Carr P. Collins prize as the best book of the year by the Texas Institute of Letters.
The book was immediately optioned to be made into a Hollywood movie starring Bing Crosby as Lomax and Josh White as Lead Belly, but the project was never realized.
In 1932, Lomax met his friend, Henry Zweifel, a rancher and businessman then from Cleburne in Johnson County, while both were volunteers for Orville Bullington's Republican gubernatorial race against the Democrat Miriam Ferguson.
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).
... Whatever the motive, at its annual meeting in 1938 the American Folklore Society adopted a resolutions distancing itself from the material from the Federal Writers' Project under Lomax's direction.