John Lomax - Early Career

Early Career

By this time, however, his desire for further education made him dream of a degree at a first-rate university, and his first choice was Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. But he soon realized that he probably would not pass Vanderbilt's tough entrance examinations. In 1895, at the age of 28, Lomax entered 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-pogde, 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.

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. 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. During the summer of 1896, he attended a summer school program in Chicago studying languages. In 1897, he became an associate editor of the Alcalde, a student newspaper. After graduation in June 1897, he worked at the University of Texas as registrar for the next six years until the spring of 1903. 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. Lomax joined a campus fraternity known as The Great and Honorable Order of Gooroos receiving the title "Sybillene Priest".

Sometime around July 1898 Lomax began an intense relationship with Miss Shirley Green of Palestine, Texas, whom he had met in 1897. Their friendship had its ups and downs for years until June 1902, when Lomax met Bess Baumann Brown from Dallas, one of Green's acquaintances. It ultimately emerged that the reason for Miss Green's reluctance to commit herself was that she was mortally ill with tuberculosis. However, he continued to exchange letters with Miss Green until January 1903. She died a month later. In 1903, he accepted an offer to teach English at Texas A&M University beginning in September In the meantime, Lomax decided to enroll at the University of Chicago for a summer course. Upon his return to Texas he became engaged to Miss Bess Brown and they married on June 9, 1904, in Austin. The couple settled down at College Station near the A&M campus. Their first child, Shirley, was born on August 7, 1905.

Lomax, however, driven by consciousness of the inadequacy of his early education, still burned with the desire to improve himself, 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. 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. 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, was the son-in-law of renowned ballad scholar Francis James Child, whose professorship of English literature he inherited, and who continued Child's work in folklore.

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."

Both Wendell and Kittredge continued to play an important advisory role in Lomax's career long after he returned to Texas in June 1907, Master of Arts degree in hand, to resume his teaching position at A&M. The two professors even went down to Texas to visit their former pupil, who took them to visit Sunday services in a black church.

Soon after his return to Austin, John Lomax's son, John Jr., was born, on June 14, 1907. Galvanized by Kittredge's advice and support, Lomax had begun collecting cowboy songs and ballads, 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, 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. In June 1908, Lomax became a full professor at A&M. That August the strike ended when the President of the University resigned.

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." In November 1910, the result of his collecting labors, the anthology, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, was published by Sturgis and Walton, with an introduction by then-former president Theodore Roosevelt. 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.) From the first, John Lomax insisted on the inclusiveness of American culture. Some of the most famous songs in the book — "Git Along Little Dogies", "Sam Bass," and "Home on the Range" — were credited to black cowboy informants.

Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads emerged as a major collection of Western songs and had "a profound effect on other folk song students.". According to noted folklore scholar, D. K. Wilgus, the book's publication "sparked a great surge of interest in folk songs of all kinds, and in fact, inspired a search for folk material in all regions of the nation." Its success transformed John A. Lomax into a nationally known figure.