Making the Ordinary Heroic

The Story of John A. Lomax

John A. Lomax

Yes, it has been over a year since I posted a BOOST. Can my excuse, once again, be that I’m a loose Cannon? It’s been one hell of a year. There’s been lots of sorting, re-arranging, discarding, reassessing, and plain old moving. We now live on water but have not mastered walking on water. I dream of being more active sending out BOOSTS but don’t hold me to it. Recently I was asked to give a keynote address in Texas. If you have time to listen, I’d suggest that rather than reading it.

This is my Keynote Address at the 2024 Lone Star Cowboy Poetry Gathering 2/16/24,  Friday, 9:15 am, Marshall Auditorium, Morelock Academic Building, Sol Ross State University, Alpine, TX)

Thanks to the Western Folklife Center for much of the recordings used in this presentation. Below are subtitles if needed along with cool photographs.

Part 1:  INTRODUCTION

As a young teenager I could take or leave the westerns, The Lone Ranger, Gunsmoke, Bonanza. I liked the older shows better, particularly if they had singing cowboys like the Sons of the Pioneers or Gene Autry.

My tastes, as a kid, ran more towards people like Woody Guthrie with his song “This Land is your Land. This land is my land” (what a lovely sentiment). I remember my cousin playing me a Folkways record of old-time fiddle and banjo from the Blue Ridge Mountains. Along with the driving music I heard the tapping sound of boots on a cabin floor in the background. I was transfixed. I remember my first car stereo and and how I would make cassette copies of music from cowboy singers who recorded the first 78 records far from Nashville, Hollywood or New York, men like Carl T. Sprague, Jules Verne Allen and Mac McClintock.

Also, I started learning about the early folklorists and collectors who were out there documenting the traditional music of folks who lived very different lives than mine. Lately I’ve been trying to figure out the appeal of all of this. Though the recordings were scratchy and had a far-off sound, the whole thing seemed so romantic. At the same time it was real and grounded and didn’t seem full of hype. I guess I was sensitive to that. (Still am). I’m not sure I could have articulated this back then but at this point in my life I’m more inclined towards reflection. 

I grew up in the city where my dad sold big trucks to support our family and our farm. We all worked weekends and summers on the land and I have to admit I hated the work.  But somehow it got in my blood. Since then my wife Teresa and I have had horses and raised cows and sheep and sold the meat. Teresa’s family ranched for close to a hundred years in Wyoming.  I’ve never presumed to call myself a cowboy.

Over the years I’ve interviewed hundreds of people asking for their stories, poems and songs. I’ve done this as a folklorist, an ethnographer and a radio producer. But really it’s always been personal too, a quest for wisdom and beauty. And yes it’s been a way to give back, to show respect for folks who are often overlooked. Along the way my work has resulted in organizing festivals, making collections that resulted in books and records, and producing scores of radio and TV shows.

There are a handful of folklorists who were my inspirations. At the top of this list is John A. Lomax. That’s who I’m going to talk about today.

I mentioned this talk to a friend of mine, the great poet Kim Stafford, and he asked a question that I liked so much I decided this talk should answer it:

“If  John Lomax had not traveled thousands of miles in this country, starting in Texas, and if he had not collected thousand of songs, how would WE be poorer today? What would we not know about ourselves from what he did?"

Kim Stafford in the keyhole, becoming poet laureate of Oregon

My talk will seem like a radio documentary and that’s intentional. I like what comes “straight from the horses mouth.” And that’s what you’re going to get.  When we really listen, a voice tells us a lot more than what is in the words alone.

So --- today you will hear my voice and many others including John Lomax himself. You will hear from his son Alan, his daughter, Bess, and other cowboys and folks whose voices have become all the more precious because they are no longer with us. Today I’m giving you a rare little time capsule as I present the story of John Lomax, particularly about his work with cowboys.

It's been over a century since Lomax published his first collection of cowboy songs,  a book that was a milestone in musical history. A few years ago I traveled with a couple of fellow folklorists, Steve Zeitlin and Taki Telonidis, across Texas to follow some of the trails Lomax blazed in his day. We undertook this journey to document how times have changed. And boy, have they changed.  Many of the recordings we made ended up part of an hour-long radio documentary I made for Radio National, Australia’s national radio network.

Taki Telonidis and Steve Zeitlin

Let’s get started. I’ll start by introducing Bess Lomax Hawes. She was John Lomax’s youngest daughter. She grew up in Austin helping her father type transcripts of field collections and going with him when he recorded folk songs. As a young woman she was part of the original Almanac Singers with Woody Guthrie in New York and later in headed the folk arts program at the National Endowment for the Arts where I met her and she became an important mentor.

 PART 2 Lomax YOUTH

Bess Lomax Hawes:  Mississippi to Texas clip :49

My father was John A. Lomax, and he used to lecture about cowboy poetry and songs all through the western states.. that was how he made his living for a while. He was born the last of seven children in the Black River country of West Central, Mississippi, in 1867. When he was two years old, his family loaded all their possessions into two wagons, one pulled by two mules named Jack and Fan and the other by two oxen named Bright and Berry and they all started out on the 500 mile trail for East Texas, my grandmother wrote in her diary. They bought timbered land there on the edge of the Bosquie River, near a spot which was to be a fording spot on one of the south eastern branches of the Chisholm Trail

Bess Lomax Hawes

HC: The first place we went to was Lomax’s childhood home, Meridian, Texas

John Campbell clip :27

It's somewhere between here and here...Hal Cannon: Is that a creek? That's the Bosque River.  So they may have had one of these bends. His place was this side of the river, so it may have been right in there. Hal: OK. Did they have farm land there? 138 acres of basically bottomland farm land.and they raised horses and cattle and corn. 

HC: That’s John Campbell whose wife Anna is a Lomax cousin. We met at the local history museum where they showed me early maps of the major cattle herding trails. Looking over this river valley I can imagine what it was like in John Lomax’s day.  He was born just after the Civil War, and this country was the edge of the western frontier. As a young boy he would have witnessed the early cattle trail drives that came through.  These were vivid memories for Lomax who recalled them clearly…several decades later.  

John Lomax- 1:08

“I couldn't have been more than 4 yrs old when I first heard a cowboy sing and yodel to his cattle. I was sleeping in my father's  cabin in TX beside a branch of the old Chisolm Trail..12 of us in 2 rooms. Suddenly a cowboy's song woke me while I slept in my bed. And my heart lept even then to the yodel of that cowboy..trying to quiet in the deep darkness and rain..a trail herd of restless cattle.” "13 Ballad Hunter-Early Cowboy Songs.aiff-  yodel sound. As the cowboys drove the cattle along...they sang called and yodeled to them. They made up songs about trail life. I began to write down the words of these songs...when a small boy.”

HC: But what were these songs? This was the 1870s before there were recording machines

Alan Lomax –1:04

This boy was awakened by something like this. Sings fragment of “Whoopie Ti-Yi-Ya, Git Along Little Doagies.” Later on that morning when they camped and made their breakfast he hit in the bushes and this is what he heard. “Wake of Jacob, days a breaking…” the camp cook was getting everybody to breakfast on time

Alan Lomax

HC: That’s John Lomax’s son Alan. If anyone carried on his father’s legacy it was Alan. He continued collecting folk music throughout his life from all over the world.  You can go online and search for the Alan Lomax Digital Archive and listen to most everything both he and his father recorded from the 30s through the 1980s.

PART 3 – Burning the manuscript

HC: John Lomax realized early he wanted to make a difference and his path was to get an education. He cobbled enough money to enroll in the local Granbury College. After graduating he taught in a country school and then was a school principle for a while. He drifted on to the Eastman Business College then became a head of the business Department at Weatherford College. Lomax decided to set his sights higher and at the ripe old age of 28 he matriculated at the University of Texas in Austin. This is how he viewed this time in his life, “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.”

HC: All those years later Lomax kept that boyhood scene on the Chisholm Trail, those songs, in his heart. He even noted down the words to the songs he heard. One of the defining stories of his life took place while a student at the University of Texas when he decided to test the waters submitting his cowboy song collection to his professor. Here’s daughter Bess reading her father’s account of this incident.

Bess Hawes: clip from JA Lomax account 1:02

Timidly,  I handed Dr. Calllaway, my roll-up dingy manuscript written out in lead pencil and tied together with a cotton string. Courteous and kindly gentleman that he was he thanked me and promised to report the next day. Alas, the following morning Dr. Callaway told me that my samples of frontier literature were tawdry, cheap and unworthy. I had better give my attention to the great movements of writing that had come sounding down the ages. There was no possible connection, he said, between the tall tales of Texas and the tall tales of Beowulf. His decision, exquisitely considered, was final, absolute. No single crumb of comfort was left. I was unwilling to let anyone else see the examples of my folly or know of my disappointment. So that night in the dark out behind Breckenridge Hall, the mens dormitory where I lodged. I made a small bonfire of every scrap of my cowboy songs.

HC: Son, Alan gives a thumbnail of what happened next:

Alan Lomax:. :45

But he was a hard driving young fella and he got himself fellowship to Harvard and the next time he came up with his cowboy songs, as he most surely did, it was in a class of a great English professor named Barrett Wendell and Wendell writes later how his whole seminar was simply struck amazed by this new literature, this realistic literature, this  literature that was all unbuttoned just the way Wittman had asked for it.  And it made everything else in the course seem very boring, this course on American literature,  and very sterile.

 PART 4 - WHITE ELEPHANT SALOON

HC: By the early 1900’s America was changing. People were moving to cities so Lomax believed he was in a race against time to preserve the voices of these early cowboys.  Back then it was radical to think that the creative contribution of common working people had any value whatsoever. He proposed to his professors that cowboy songs made an important contribution to American literature.  Some were dubious. Regardless, he started sending out queries to newspapers, wrote hundreds of letters, and lectured far and wide asking people to contribute in his quest to collect cowboy songs. Also, he set off on the road.

JOHN LOMAX ACT.  :46

In 1909 I went to the Cattlemen's Convention in Ft Worth TX.  One night I found myself in the backroom of the White Elephant Saloon. I carried with me a small Edison recording machine that used wax cylinders.  Instead of a microphone I used a big horn which the cowboys usually refused to sing into. Music: cylinder recording

Don Edwards -13

We're on Exchange Avenue and we are walking down towards the White Elephant Saloon. Let’s see if they kick us out of here (laughter) Sound of entering the saloon.

HC: That’s Don Edwards, one of the great cowboy singers of all time. We miss his songs and his great spirit. He also came to the White Elephant 60 years after Lomax stepped into this saloon as an aspiring cowboy singer.

Don Edwards - 1:01

This is where I used to sit..night after night after night..on my little stool and my guitar and sing to all these people out here. Brings back a lot of memories being here...and they hung up all these hats over here...just look at 'em. My goodness. But it's pretty much like I remember it.  And then on a weekend we'd use that stage up there and we'd have a band and everything..we had a piano and horns and everything. Man we had the western swing deal goin'. Hal Cannon- 32:44- So John Lomax recorded in the White Elephant. So what do you think the WE was like when he showed up with a wax cylinder recorder in 19-whatever wanted to record Cowboy songs.  *Oh I can imagine the scene. I mean gosh...if you think about these Ft Worth stockyards, there was cowboys crawling all over the place at that time.  And when he come in with that machine..they'd all scatter...(laughs) you ain't pokin' that thing in front of me.  But I"ll tell you one thing, he had a lot of moxie to come in.. bunch of cowboys...sing!

Don Edwards at the White Elephant

PART 5: Night Herding Song

HC: There were all sorts of songs the cowboys sang, some to entertain each other but some were made for quite a different purpose. Listen carefully and guess what’s going on here.

YAK milking MUSIC. :43

(milking sound/then singing) This is a song when the mother Yak needs to feed the baby one. And just to give them move love..it’s like a lullaby song for the animals. (singing ends, bit of Mongolian) She’s saying after she sang, now it’s going really well you can hear the sound (milking sound)

HC: I recorded this song in Mongolia. It’s a woman milking her Yak and it has to do with an ancient tradition which exists in every culture of music. These are songs whose intension is to make things happen, to have objective results.  For instance most of us know that spiritual music is supposed to help us get closer to God.  But this kind of musical intention is simple and direct. singing to relax your Yak… or your cattle for that matter.

Harry Stevens- 1:10

This is Harry Stevens of Dennison TX on the microphone.  Harry tell me about the famous “Night herding Song.”which you sent me years ago. HS: Well we always got night herd..yrs ago when they didn’t have so many fences and corrals, and that was the biggest job of the cowboy. We generally had a 2 hour shift and 2 to 4 men on a shift according to the size of the herd. And when I made up this song, we always had so many squalls and yells and hollers to keep the cattle quiet, I thought it might as well have kind of a song to it. So I went ahead and put this song together after several nights of trying (sings)  

HC: Lomax recorded several old time cowboys, like Harry Stevens, who told him that singing and soothing the cattle was one of the most important jobs in open country.  As cowboy music gained a mainstream audience, Harry Stevens “Night herding Song” became popular with a new breed of cowboy entertainers. That’s when people began to forget that songs like these were originally made to be incantations to settle flighty cattle out on the trail.

Music: montage of “Night herding Song” (Songs from Yellowstone CD) :50

HC: The “Night Herding Song,” certainly got laundered and fluffed-up over the years. I wonder if these modern singers could stop a herd of stampeding cattle with their renditions of this timeless bit of cattle soothing music?

PART 6 Goodbye Old Paint -  Cowboy Blues

HC: Like all the different kind of cowboy songs out on the range, there were also a diverse lot of men singing those songs. Remember, it’s just after the Civil War and the country is full of displaced people trying to find a better life: veterans, emigrants, and a group of cowboys Mike Searles is interested in. He’s gone now but was a popular history professor at Augusta State University in Georgia.

Mike Searles - :58

Whoopin Up the Cattle (up/under/keep)

There’s a popular notion that when you’re talking about the cowboy, you’re exclusively talking about white cowboys, which of course is not true.  Black men were involved in being cowboys very early in the history of our country. For example in SE Texas where you had a large number of blacks who were slaves, and had been doing cow work…well when freedom comes it would be just a natural for them to begin to do that work./// And it was an occupation that  there was a demand for it...and they gained a degree of respect and independence...and I think all those things really made being cowboy after slavery attractive.  Plus it was the work that they knew. 

HC: The trail drives brought together a diverse lot of men…including freed slaves and Civil War Veterans from the South.  And while some cowboy crews were segregated…photographs show black and white men working side by side in what Searles calls “range equality.”

Mike Searles- :32 

ACT: (MS) There is a dependence that each cowboy has on his fellow cowboy. The work can be dangerous...there are situations where you do need the help of whoever is close to you, you need someone that can in fact sometimes save your life.  And in that environment you wanna have pretty good relations because that person could elect to help you or not help you in a dangerous situation. MUSIC:  Whoopin Up the Cattle  (final holler at the end)

mixed race cowboy crew from Pip Gillette Collection

HC: The first edition of Lomax’s “Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads”  contained 112 songs, plus a forward by President Theodore Roosevelt.  In Lomax’s notes he credits the spirit of the ancient Anglo-Saxon ballad for informing the cowboy song. But when cowboy singer Don Edwards heard some of these songs, it’s not old British ballads he heard.

Don Edwards – 1:06

You take a song like… (sings) I’m a Poor Lonesome Cowboy, I’m a poor lonesome cowboy, I’m a poor lonesome cowboy…I’m a long long way from my home. Is that a blues form?  It’s the earliest blues form there is..it’s 3 lines and a tag line. If you go down to deep south Texas where this music really was born...down in the coastal bend down there...you had white cowboys, black cowboys, Mexican vaceros.  But in that country, all cowboys were called Vacqueros.. no matter what color they were. But down there the white guys learned from the blacks and the Mexicans who were very musical people.  The white guys weren't very musical..I'm not sayin they didn't know a song or two.. but they weren’t very musical people. But the blacks and the Mexicans were...the Mexicans started singin' at the drop of a hat. They'd go to a weddin or a funeral, or a hangin' or whatever..they don't care they start singin.  But that’s where a lot of that come from. So the white guys learned alot of that stuff...and that's why lots of that stuff sounded like the blues.  Ya know.  

HC:  Lomax did credit some songs as coming from African American cowboys… notably the famous “Goodbye Old Paint”…although he never recorded a black man singing it.

Rooster Morris and Franklin Willis - 1:57

My name is Rooster Morris, and that version of Old Paint…my great uncle learned that from an ex-slave Charlie Willis.

MUSIC: Jess starts to sing Old Paint (first verse)When you first listen to the song…the lyrics..you think it doesn’t make any sense…and then before you know it you’re seeing this wonderful movie in your mind of visions, and you can feel it. MUSIC: Old Paint “In the middle of the ocean there grow a green tree, and I’ll prove false to the girl that loves me. Old Paint Old paint I’m leaving Cheyenne

Franklin Willis –

My name is Franklin Willis, and I’m the great grandson of Charlie Willis, who rode the Wyoming trail during the 1870s.  He had a knack for singing. He had a gift if you will..because his voice was real soothing to the cattle and this is why they wanted him to participate in these big cattle drives ‘cuz he would sing to ‘em..and just make them relax.

Mr. and Mrs. Charlie Willis

HC: Franklin Willis heard these stories passed down by his family.  But there are no recordings of his great grandfather, or even of his father who was also a singing cowboy. But that ancient recording Lomax made of Jess Morris pays homage to the former slave…and to the larger experience of those early cowboys working out in the heat and cold for a dollar a day.  Out of that hard reality was born the iconic cowboy.

PART 7 – Lomax and the Depression 6:00

HC: John Lomax had several jobs in those years before the depression. He worked at universities as a teacher and administrator. He also worked in banking. At the same time he kept up collecting music and lecturing far and wide about cowboy music. His daughter Bess recollects childhood memories.

Bess Hawes - 1:20

I just recall bits… kind of isolated little flashes. I remember, for instance, how my father used to end his cowboy song lectures. He always ended with an isolated verse, whose origin I don’t know, but I can still hear his voice saying it. “I’ve been where the lightning, the lightning tangled in my eyes, the cattle I could scarcely hold.  I think I heard my boss man say, I want all brave hearted men who aint afraid to die to hoop the cattle from morning till night way up on the Kansas line. Oh boy, that was the stuff to feed the troops.  I remember roars of applause from his young college audiences of the 20s and 30s as I sat there in the dark thrilled to be let stay up beyond my bedtime. And I remember the great blues man, Leadbelly, singing out on our side porch in Austin. “When I was a Cowboy”

HC: Unfortunately collecting folk music and lecturing didn’t pay the bills. It was the height of the Great Depression and Lomax’s life was in shambles. Here’s Anna Lomax Wood,  granddaughter of John Lomax.

Anna Lomax --- :54

What happened was that he fell into a terrible depression, you know.  He lost my grandmother Bess, and that was a terrible blow…she died young. After having been kicked around, pretty much, you know, he lost his job at the University of Texas because of political reasons, then he adapted, he got a job at a bank, he sold bonds. But then after the stock market crashed, all the bonds were worthless. -and he was very depressed about that. So, my uncle John, who was also pretty much involved in folk music in various ways throughout his life, but he persuaded him, you know, to get him out of the doldrums..you know, to start work again.

HC: Lomax proposed to the Library of Congress to do a serious survey of southern music. That survey started in east Texas in 1933 when Lomax hit the road camping along the way with his 18-year old son Alan.

In addition to cowboy songs, Lomax had a lifelong fascination with African American folk songs: the blues, spirituals, work songs. These passions drove Lomax to what many consider his greatest achievement, the collection of more than 10-thousand recordings for the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress. The bulk of these recordings were made in the 1930’s, when he and his son traveled to more than a dozen states and clocked tens of thousands of miles in his Ford sedan, outfitted with a “portable” phono recorder which weighed-in at over 300 pounds.

Though Lomax was a pioneer in recording he believed the emerging technologies of his day (namely broadcast radio and record companies) were creating a mass culture that was erasing what he valued most, folk music in its “purest” form.  Some of his best-known recordings of this period were old blues songs that harkened back to the hollers and work songs of the 19^th century. Believing that authentic songs could only be found in places untouched by popular culture, he sought out African American singers in the most isolated environment he could think of: prison. He roamed the penitentiaries of the south, relentlessly negotiating with prison wardens and guards for access to convicts. When Lomax met Huddle Leadbetter, better known as Leadbelly, at Angola Prison in 1933 he not only met a bluesman but a true songster who was a living juke box of music, including cowboy songs.

Leadbelly “When I was a Cowboy” :48

HC: I too followed Lomax’s path to Angola Prison where I recorded the music of current day inmates. The music I found there bore little resemblance to the songs of Lomax’s day but never the less, the music scene was rich.

I’m here today to talk about Lomax and cowboy music so I’ll stick with that. So far I’ve been telling Lomax’s story chronologically but as I wind down (like an old victrola) let’s go back to the time when he was attempting to publish his first collection of cowboy songs. We’re back to 1910

PART 8 – Lomax and Roosevelt

Come give me your attention and hear the right and wrong

It is a simple story and it won’t detain you long

I’ll try to tell the reason why we are bound to roam,

And why we are so friendless and never have a home.

I am a roving cowboy,  I’ve worked upon the trail

I’ve shot the shaggy buffalo and heard the coyote’s wail

I’ve slept out on my saddle, all covered by the moon

I expect to keep it up, dear friends, until I meet my doom

The cowboys name is butchered by the papers in the east

And when we’re in the city, we’re treated like the beasts.

But in our native country, our name is always dear

And you bet we’re always welcome by the Western Pioneer

HC: This song is the story of “Texas Jack,” a pioneering wild west cowboy showman by the same stage name.  But the song is also known as “the Western Pioneer,” and is about the perceptions of cowboys in an earlier time.

The cowboys name is butchered by the papers in the east

And when we’re in the city, we’re treated like the beasts.

But in our native country, our name is always dear

And you bet we’re always welcome by the Western Pioneer

HC: What I appreciate about these words is that the cowboy is both portrayed as heroic and downtrodden in the same verse. It’s sort of like Lomax’s story of  being rebuked by his Texas professor for collecting cowboy songs so he goes back to his dormitory and burns the manuscript. But then he steps up to prove himself and also the worth of cowboy songs. He somehow gets into Harvard where he finally finds acceptance. To become a hero you need a trial first.

Cowboy heroism is not just an American invention. In most cultures, around the world there is a nobility to a life on horseback and along with that a longstanding poetic and musical traditions born of a life with cattle and horses.

But still, I’d like to suggest there was a shift in America’s attitude towards cowboys. The great western writer Wallace Stegner observed, “The image of the cowboy, before Roosevelt, Remington, and Wister remade it, was hardly heroic or glamorous.” Stegner claims that cowboys did not take on the qualities of hero until after the first wild west shows in the 1870s and 80s. Interestingly, the great trails drives, which scholars attribute as the flourishing of cowboy lore, took place at the same time as the dawning of cowboy popularity.  

So what did Theodore Roosevelt have to do with this shift in attitude towards the cowboy and what part did he play to enable John Lomax to convince people outside the rural west that the voice of the cowboy was worth listening to?

Roosevelt was a post Civil War child born into New York City high society. He grew up sickly but turned his life around through intense physical activity and a life in nature. He had a natural sense for politics and was on his way up when his first wife and mother died on the same day. In despair, he left the city moving to a ranch on the frontier in North Dakota. There he reinvented himself as a rough and ready cowman and hunter. He once commented,  “I have never so wished to be a millionaire or indeed any other person than a literary man with a large family of small children and taste for practical politics and bear hunting.”

Roosevelt saw the promise of America in the western frontier with all the opportunities it afforded. After the Civil War America needed a new narrative and the vision of the west was positive after the heartbreak of North versus South. It was just what the nation required.  

Theodore Roosevelt chose the frontier life not out of financial need but in a quest to cultivate essential values. I’m struck by the value he put on the right for Americans to have a romantic vision of life. He once commented,

“Cherish the natural resources. Cherish the history and romance as a sacred heritage, for your children and your children's children.”

Indeed John Lomax, came from a modest farm on the Chisolm Trail but he saw his life in those same heroic terms as the cowboys he heard sing and yodel as a boy, later describing them as  “bold youthful Vikings of the seas of sage grass.”

In 1910 Lomax finally had his manuscript of cowboy songs ready for publication. However his publishers were nervous that the literary book buying public would not take interest in the indigenous literature of cowboys.

Lomax had the audacious idea that an endorsement from Theodore Roosevelt could help his cause. He tried to gain access to the President through his Harvard connections but had little luck. It was August 1910 and he had run out of time. He did have one more collecting trip planned traveling to the famous Cheyenne Frontier Days Rodeo

John Lomax recording 1 – :57

(song) ‘The round house in Cheyenne is filled every night with loafers and bummers of most every plight. In their bags there’s no clothes and their pockets no bills.’ Don’t go away, stay at home if you can. Stay away from that city, they call it Cheyenne. If I had obeyed the advice of this song I stayed away from Cheyenne I perhaps would never have seen the famous Cheyenne Rodeo, the grandfather of all rodeos, 20,000 people gathered to see the vivid exhibition of ranch life portrayed by working ranchhands. I had come not only to see how the experts roped cattle, milked wild cows bulldogged steers and rode unbroken horses but also to collect the songs of the cowboy.”

HC: When Lomax arrived in Cheyenne he found much more happening than he expected. The Cheyenne State Leader reported that the town was “filled with dash and vim and scores of thrills and many amazing developments.”  One of the developments for John Lomax was a chance to meet the former president.

John Lomax recording 2 -- :50

The next day at the rodeo I saw the rough riding Teddy Roosevelt gallop by the grandstand waving a big ten gallon white hat a giving cowboy yells. That evening I went to see the President at his hotel to ask him to write a forward to my new book on cowboy songs. I told him I had not found much encouragement for my collecting work in the West and that the western people fail to realize that ballads throw light on western condition and western traditions. Teddy Roosevelt added not only that but that the ballads illustrate the curious reproduction of medieval conditions in the West.

HC: Let me set the scene in Cheyenne, 1910. Col. Roosevelt had been invited by Gov. B.B. Brooks and rancher and Senator Francis E. Warren. Saturday started with a parade with the 9^th and 10^th U.S. Cavalry, black troops, then the 11^th Infantry. That was followed by field artillery with a long string of mules with jack guns on their backs. Each unit was escorted by a brass band. Then came 3 tribal groups in full regalia, Sioux, Shoshone and Arapaho. There were local dignitaries and the rodeo committee in automobiles and carriages and the parade ended with the fire department. It lasted 2 hours. In the early afternoon Roosevelt addressed the crowds with Mrs. Fredrick Remington by his side. Then the rodeo began.

John Lomax was in the stands that day as was my wife Teresa’s family who would have ridden into town from their ranch 50 miles away on Chugwater Creek. I’m sure they would have been volunteering behind the scenes along with their neighbors. Frontier Days is still a pronominal community effort all these years later.

John Lomax recording 3 -- :35

The President wrote this letter for my book. ‘Cheyenne, August 28, 1910. He began, you have done a work emphatically worth doing and one that should appeal to the people of our country. And he ended, it is a work of real importance to preserve  permanently this unwritten ballad literature of the back country and the frontier. With all good wishes I’m very truly yours Theodore Roosevelt.

HC: At that point folklore was the study of finding remnants from the medieval in the stories and ballads of ordinary people, or in Europe from the peasant classes.

Earlier I talked about Lomax preserving the actual voice of cowboys. Living as we do in a time when you can tune in and share music from all over the world with the click on your phone…it’s difficult to appreciate the importance of Lomax’s work.  In his day, songs were local.  They varied from town to town, and people in the big cities had never heard the songs sung along the back roads and byways.  American classics such as “Home on the Range,” “Git Along Little Dogies,” and later, “Goodnight Irene” and “Midnight Special,” …were unknown until John Lomax collected and published them for the rest of America to enjoy.  He was the first folklorist to pay attention to songs that chronicled the American experience. The publication of Cowboy Songs in 1910 was a landmark in the history of America’s interest in its own folk culture, and it made Lomax a national figure.

John Lomax was not the first to publish a collection of cowboy songs. Jack Thorp’s book “Songs of the Cowboy,” came out a couple years earlier. I’ve noticed in the cowboy world there is a critical eye to what cowboys perceive as authentic, what represents the cowboy most accurately. I rarely hear cowboys talk about Owen Wister’s “The Virginian,” but I always hear about the writing of Will James. Again,  the paintings of Frederick Remington might be appreciated but it’s Charlie Russell the cowboys revere.

As far as Lomax goes, his ambitions may have made some folks nervous. He certainly came from rural Texas stock but there’s a part of Lomax that felt the need legitimize the voice of cowboys. Lomax had something to prove and he wanted to change the world with the material he collected.  By the time he was recording and lecturing in the thirties he had national stature. By 1934 he was named Honorary Consultant and Curator of the Archive of American Folk Song, a title he held until his death in 1948.

In recording the voices of the actual cowboys and ordinary people singing their songs, telling their stories he couldn’t have known the political and social power that had. The Irish have a saying, “The victors write the history, the vanquished write the songs.” I’m not sure Lomax realized that with Roosevelts support his quest had taken on political ramifications. What he was doing had become patriotic.

Listen to this telling piece of newsreel audio from the days Lomax managed Leadbelly’s ascent to fame.

Leadbelly Library of Congress Audio

SOUND:..then hailed by the Library of Congress music Division, as it’s greatest folksong find in 25 yrs, Leadbelly’s songs go into the archives of the great national institution along with the original copy of the Declaration of Independence…

HC: Like all important work the Lomax legacy is complex and defies easy answers. I’ll come back to my original question, “If John Lomax had not traveled thousands of miles in this country, and if he had not collected thousands of songs, how would we be poorer today? What would we not know about ourselves from what he did?"

I’d like to bring his daughter Bess back one more time. I had the chance to ask her about the Lomax family legacy when she was about my age, 75. She spoke frankly about her regret at a rift between her father’s politics and the politics she and her brother Alan held.  And yet she articulated a beautiful tribute to her father and what she believes he intended in his work.

Bess Lomax Hawes 1:22

The kinds of things my father saw happening were things that he thought were of enormous importance and one of the major ones was this stream of creative commentary that he found first in the songs of cowboy and then later on in the songs of southerns, cause that was where he really he worked the rest of his life. And he felt there was enormously beautiful and effective poetry that was being created by people who the rest of the world were completely passing by. He really wanted to rectify that. And he didn’t want to do it for just those people, by the way. He wanted to do it because he thought the American people would benefit from this. He thought the nation as a whole should contained and be excited by it.

I think that father’s basic message to us was that everybody who isn't really outside of the human condition, has the potential for creativity and for contribution, and that they should be admired for whatever it is they can, they can produce, that is positive.

HC: Though I’m tempted to make wide sweeping pronouncements about how our lives are the richer for Lomax’s work I think I’ll just speak personally since that’s how I started this talk.

As a folklorist entering the cowboy world I had no idea I would learn so much, feel so fortunate for the people I’ve known, or be so enriched. I’m not sure that could have happened or that we could have ever pulled off the first Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, had John Lomax not paved the way.

Playing music and singing songs have been a constant thread in my life. When I retired from the Western Folklife Center in 2013 I totally changed gears and went back to writing songs. I organized a trio that ended up touring a lot. But if it were not for the example of cowboy poets and singers I could have never done this. First, these new friends led by example showing me a way to be both sensitive and creative and yet strong and resilient. The guts people showed in their work has been an inspiration.

In addition, I’ve been shaped by the support and encouragement I’ve received from cowboy poets and musicians. Even if I went off on musical tangents I always felt my cowboy friends had my back. Baxter Black deemed  3hattrio’s music as “a profundo Gregorian sagebrush chant”

I’ve felt such solid support from so many people I could take up several more minutes just listing them all and then would probably forget scores more.  Without all this help I could never have mustered the heart to heed Bess Hawes words, explore creativity and make a contribution. If that idea traces back to John Lomax I have a lot to thank him for.  

I’m going to end with the first cowboy song I had a creative part in. It’s Bruce Kiskaddon’s brilliant words and my simple little melody.

The moon rides high on the cloudless sky and the stars are shining bright

The dark pines show on the hills below, the mountains capped with white.

My spurs they ring and the song I sing is set to my horses stride.

I gallup along to an old-time song as out on the trail I ride.

I’m hittin’ the trail tonight, tonight. I’m hittin’ the trail tonight.

My horse is pulling the bridle rein, I’m hittin’ the trail tonight