John Lomax

Folklorist, ethnomusicologist, American folk music historian

John Lomax worked for years with his son Alan Lomax at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Other notable Amerian folklorists include Harry Oster and Lomax's predecessor at the Library of Congress, Robert Winslow Gordon.

Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads

Our Singing Country

Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp

U.S. Library of Congress' Archive of American Folk Song

Historical Records Survey (Advisor on Folklore)

Federal Writers' Project (Folklore Editor)

John Lomax was born in Mississippi in 1867, and raised on a farm in central Texas. Although he grew up with a fascination for cowboy songs, Lomax studied English at the University of Texas in Austin. Later, he took a job teaching English at Texas A&M. A few years later, though, he enrolled at Harvard University, where he earned a Master's degree. After graduate school at Harvard, Lomax received a grant to research cowboy songs. In 1910, he released his first anthology, Cowboy Songs and Other Fronteir Ballads.

Lomax co-founded the Texas Folklore Society, focusing it partly on discovering the folk music of the Mexican-American and African-American populations of Texas. Later, he also archived thousands of recordings for the Archive of American Folk Song at the U.S. Library of Congress, along with his son Alan.

Archive of American Folk Song

Lomax's first expedition of folk song collecting began in 1933 with son Alan Lomax. The goal was to capture African-American field recordings. They started with the prisons, since so many black men were imprisoned. They started in the Texas pentitentiaries, and then moved onto Louisiana—where they discovered Huddie Ledbetter (a.k.a. Leadbelly).

The Lomaxes convinced a judge to release Leadbelly to their care, and he later became a huge contributor to the evolution of the country and folk blues tradition. Other artists he discovered through the prison system were Lightnin' Washington, Mose "Clear Rock" Platt, and James "Iron Head" Baker, as well as many others.

John Lomax died of a stroke at age 79, in 1948. His son Alan and grandson John Lomax III carry on his work as musicologists and folklorists in their own right.