John Lomax - Texas Folklore Society

Texas Folklore Society

Around the same time, Lomax and Professor Leonidas Payne of the University of Texas at Austin co-founded the Texas Folklore Society, following Kittredge’s suggestion that Lomax establish a Texas branch of the American Folklore Society. Lomax and Payne hoped that the society would further their own research while kindling an interest in folklore among like-minded Texans. On Thanksgiving Day, 1909, Lomax nominated Payne as president of the society, and Payne nominated Lomax as first secretary. The two set out to marshal support, and a month later, Killis Campbell, an associate professor at the University, publicly proposed the formation of the Society at a meeting of the Texas State Teachers Association in Dallas. By April 1910, there were ninety-two charter members.

Lomax then used his prestige as a nationally-known author to travel the country raising money for folklore studies and to establish other state folklore societies. "He was among the first scholars to present papers about American folk songs to the Modern Language Association, the nation's leading organization of teachers of languages and literature. For the next several years he hit the lecture circuit, traveling so often that his wife, Bess Brown, had to help him with his schedules and even some of his speeches." His lectures on cowboy songs, ballads and poetry took him all across the eastern USA. For example, in December 1911, Lomax made a successful performance at Cornell University, singing and reciting some of the cowboy songs he had collected. Sometimes he would have a chorus of college students dress up as cowboys to add interest to his presentations.

Lomax's abiding interest in African-American folklore was also in evidence, for he had plans to publish another book containing black folk songs within a year. Although the book failed to materialize, he did publish (in the Journal of American Folklore, December 1912) "Stories of an African Prince", a collection of sixteen African stories, which he had obtained through his correspondence with a young Nigerian student, Lattevi Ajayi. In 1912, with the backing of Kittredge, John A. Lomax was elected president of the American Folklore Society, with Kittredge (himself a former president of the society) as First Vice President. He was re-elected for a second term in 1913. In 1922, J. Frank Dobie became secretary-treasurer of the Texas Folklore Society, a job he was to hold for 21 years.

Lomax's second son (and third child), Alan, was born on January 15, 1915. In time, Alan Lomax would prove a worthy successor of his father. A second daughter, Bess, was born in 1921, and she too had a distinguished career, both as a performer and teacher.

The Texas Folklore Society grew gradually over the next decade, with Lomax steering it forward. At his invitation, Kittredge and Wendell attended its meetings. Other early members were Stith Thompson and J. Frank Dobie, who both began teaching English at the university in 1914. In 1915, at Lomax's recommendation, Stith Thompson became the society’s secretary-treasurer. In 1916, Lomax's voluminous encyclopedia, The Book of Texas, which he had written jointly with Harry Yandall Benedict, was published. The same year, Stith Thompson edited the first volume of the Publications of the Texas Folklore Society, which Dobie reissued as Round the Levee in 1935. 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. In the inaugural issue of the Publications of the Texas Folklore Society, John A. Lomax urged the collection of Texas folklore: "Two rich and practically unworked fields in Texas are found in the large Negro and Mexican populations of the state." He adds, "Here are many problems of research that lie close at hand, not buried in musty tomes and incomplete records, but in vital human personalities."

Throughout the next seven years, he continued his research and lecture tours, assisted and encouraged by his wife and children. All this came to an end on July 16, 1917, however, when Lomax was fired along with six other faculty members as the result of a political battle between Governor James Ferguson and the University President, Dr. R. E. Vinson. Lomax moved to Chicago to take a job selling bonds at Lee, Higginson, a bond brokerage firm run by the son of his old professor Barrett Wendell. A few months later, Ferguson was impeached and the Board of Regents rescinded its dismissal of the faculty, Lomax who felt some loyalty to the family of Barrett Wendell felt it would be wrong to desert his post at the Chicago brokerage so quickly and remained in Chicago for the duration of the war. He had moved to Chicago to take a job with the brokerage firm of Lee, Higginson and remained there for eighteen months until the war ended. There he struck up a what turned out to be a lifelong friendship with Chicago poet Carl Sandburg, who frequently mentions him in his book, American Songbag (1927). In 1919, his next book, Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp, an anthology of cowboy poetry, was published by Macmillan. That year Lomax returned to Texas to be secretary of the Texas Exes, which had become financially independent of the University, so as to avoid further interference from politicians. Nevertheless, interference struck, when Ferguson, whom the law prohibited from holding office, ran his wife, Miriam "Ma" Ferguson, as his surrogate. As governor, Mrs. Ferguson was able to pack the board of regents and oust John from his job as editor of the Alcade, which during his tenure was a 100-page long publication. Seeing how the wind was blowing, Lomax resigned his secretaryship and joined the Republic Bank of Dallas in 1925. The economic crash of 1929 presaged bad things for the bank, however.