by John Szwed
But in the fall of 1895, at age twenty-eight, John arrived in Austin to begin working toward a bachelor’s degree at the University of Texas with the financial help of a cousin. At enrollment, he signed up as being several years younger than he was, then took double the number of required courses in an effort to make up for lost time. He did so well in his classes that he was classified as a sophomore even before he ended the first semester. At the same time he was editor of the Texas University magazine, writing articles and poetry, and joined the staffs of the student newspaper and the yearbook. By his graduation in 1897—four years of college compressed into two—he had majored in English literature, become deeply involved in campus politics, been acknowledged as a student leader, and moved easily among the faculty and administration. It therefore came as a shock when he was unable to get a teaching job after graduation. Just when he was beginning to lose hope, he was equally shocked to be offered the job of registrar at his alma mater. He accepted the offer, though it was not at all what he had wanted, since he assumed it concerned little more than recordkeeping. But once in the job, he was also asked to handle some of the university’s correspondence, to serve as the president’s secretary, and to manage the men’s dormitory. What’s more, to assume this job he was required to continue being a student and had to enroll for a two-year M.A. program. It was a poorly paid, overworked position, but one that would give him more education and immediate respect, so it was hard for him to resist. By age thirty he had become the sole support of his mother, and his siblings regularly sought loans from him. To the world at large, he would soon seem successful, dignified, and scholarly. With his long coats and his Stetson hat and cigar, he was called “Professor” by students and many of those outside the university. It may have been a functionary’s job, but he made something of it, and over the years he managed to survive the resignation of an unpopular president who had backed him, and also learned to steer his way through the arcane and fickle politics of Texas. Because he had the role of guiding young students’ entry into the university, he became a well-known and popular figure all across the state, one who played a significant role in the lives of most of its future business, educational, and governmental leaders.
At his age, he might have been thought of as settling into the life of an academic bachelor, but his interest in women was pronounced, if well controlled. Most of the women he knew were much younger than him, and were understood to be under his protection at the university. In fact, for five years John had been carrying on an intense if largely long-distance relationship with a young woman of culture and intelligence from the Texas town of Palestine. Shirley Green was John’s first love, but a doomed one, as she was dying of tuberculosis, a fact that she revealed to him only when he began to press her about their future. Just before she passed away, she told him that she was encouraging several of her women friends to correspond with him. One of them, Bess Baumann Brown, a kindergarten teacher in Dallas, visited Austin with plans to enter college, and to his amazement showed a strong interest in him. After Shirley died, he and Bess became close and began to talk of marriage.
The University of Texas had from its beginnings been embroiled in state politics, yet John had found ways to handle the shifts and turns that came with it. But when the university’s president, George Taylor Winston, whom he had served so faithfully, clashed too many times with the Legislature, he resigned, and John began to feel his future threatened. Once again he began thinking of teaching, and asked for time off to study educational administration at Harvard, the university that provided most of the senior faculty at Texas. When his request was turned down by the administration, John applied again, but Texas would still not grant him leave. Then, in the summer of 1903, at thirty-six years of age, he made an uncharacteristically sudden move, quitting the university to become an instructor in English at its archrival, Texas A&M, where one of his Austin friends had just become president. It meant a cut in pay and a loss of prestige moving down from Austin, but he hoped now at least to have more time for his interest in folk songs and to be free of academic politics.
After nine months of teaching and traveling back and forth on weekends from College Station, the home of Texas A&M, to see Bess in Austin where she was studying, they were married in early June 1904 and then traveled up the East Coast to Harvard, where John attended summer school. When they returned to A&M, they chose a small faculty house as far away from the campus as they could find and stocked it with chickens, two pigs, two milk cows, and a dog. It was not unusual to see a family with a few chickens in the South at the time, but the Lomaxes were supplying much of their own food, as well as selling milk and eggs to the neighborhood.
Suddenly everything seemed to be breaking John’s way. When their first child arrived in August 1905, they named her Shirley, after Bess’s former girlfriend. When he boldly asked to have the whole year of 1906-1907 off to study at Harvard, the administration agreed, giving him an unprecedented one-third of his salary. Harvard accepted his application and, more surprisingly, awarded him a top teaching fellowship that paid $500.
Harvard meant validation to John, perhaps even revenge on the teachers who had taken his ability, his passion for folk song, and his aspiration to be a first-rate scholar lightly. Now he was in the premier department of English in America, in a group of students that inclued Van Wyck Brooks, Charles Seeger, and T. S. Eliot, another fugitive from the provinces. From his first days on campus John became a favorite among some of the faculty, who were unusually receptive to nontraditional students. The dean of Harvard College, Le Baron Russell Briggs, for example, who taught John’s English composition class, made him comfortable writing about things he knew, and welcomed essays on subjects that were far from the norm: lynchings, cattle roping, and all things southwestern. Barrett Wendell, who taught “Literary History of America,” encouraged his students to write about the regions of the United States from which they came, and became so excited when John proposed to write about cowboy ballads that he immediately introduced him to George Lyman Kittredge, the preeminent scholar of English literature of his time, a specialist on Chaucer and Shakespeare, and the foremost student of the ballad in the country. Kittredge and Wendell were delighted by the idea that there were distinctively American ballads in existence and that they might still be being created somewhere, and the two professors encouraged John to begin systematic collection of western ballads. They even allowed him to use their names in sending letters across the country in search of song texts, and promised to look for a foundation that might underwrite his research.
John revealed to his mentors that he had earlier assembled a collection of cowboy songs in a “roll of dingy manuscript written out in lead pencil and tied together with string” and taken it to show to one of Texas’s English professors. He was told that his songs were “tawdry, cheap and unworthy,” and that he should instead devote himself to the best that English literature had to offer. In anger and shame, John said, he waited until night, went behind the dormitory where he lived, built a small fire, and burned up every scrap of his song collection.
John spent days writing hundreds of letters in search of cowboy songs, and still kept up with his classes. By spring 1907, the letters began to pay off and songs started coming in. By then, however, Bess was pregnant again and he needed to go back to work, though he had no luck with his job search. As his final examinations approached he began to suffer from eyestrain and stomach problems and ended up in the infirmary. His professors agreed—against all rules—to grant him his master’s degree without completing his exams for what they termed “a nervous collapse.”
Back in Texas, he continued to work on his collection, and when a research grant failed to materialize, Professor Wendell helped modestly finance John’s work out of his own money. On June 14 the Lomaxes’ first son, John Jr., was born. The lack of money was now becoming a problem: both children were sick with various illnesses, John Jr. quite seriously, and Bess was suffering from what she called �
��a general breakdown.” Harvard then offered him a postgraduate fellowship on the condition that Texas A&M would give him a year off at half salary. When the A&M administration refused, Harvard offered him three successive yearly grants for his use during vacations.
In 1909 John convinced some friends in Austin that they should form some sort of organization to gather and preserve local folklore, and he was elected the first secretary of the Texas Folklore Society. At the request of Professor Kittredge, he addressed the meeting of the Modern Language Association at Cornell on the topic of “Cowboy Songs of the Mexican Border.” It was a paper written to be read, as was the academic practice, but he delighted the gathering of professors when he began to sprinkle Texas stories throughout his talk. And when he yelled cattle cries across the room, sang songs, and asked the austere audience to join in, he created a sensation that would eventually bring hundreds of invitations for him to speak from all across the country. Now in his forties, balding, paunchy, and wearing a suit, he looked like anything but a cowboy and often drew giggles when he first walked onstage. But he knew how to draw in an audience, recalling his elocution courses, reciting as much as he sang, and booming out southwestern country poetry and ranch songs as if he were an old hand himself.
Then, again to his surprise, he was asked to become the secretary of the University Faculties at Austin. It was still not the teaching position he wanted, but when he asked for time off in the summers to travel in search of songs, the administration agreed. He now had time to finish the book he called Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, which was published in 1910, with an introduction by President Theodore Roosevelt, appearing just in time to feed a rising interest in American folk songs. It sold steadily and stayed in print for years, helped in part by Bess and John, who promoted and sold copies from their home and at lectures.
When John Lomax began to gather cowboy ballads he joined a tradition that stretched back well over a hundred years. The story of folk song collecting in the English-speaking world begins in the eighteenth century with accusations of a forgery that had international consequences. James Macpherson, a teacher in the Highlands of Scotland, created a sensation in 1790 by publishing a collection of very old poems that suggested Scotland might possess a body of classical literature equal to that of the Homeric poetry of Greece. A few years later, however, suspicions arose that in his Fragments of Ancient Poetry Collected in the Highlands of Scotland and Translated from the Gallic or Erse Language, Macpherson was inventing “translations” of nonexistent poems, that there were very few genuine pieces in Macpherson’s epics, and that even those were heavily altered by him.
He was not alone in trying his hand at this form of authorship, especially in Scotland, where some writers were driven by the desire to prove that theirs was a much older and more literate culture than that of the British who had defeated the Scots and then annexed them. Right behind Macpherson came Thomas Percy, the son of a grocer in Northumberland, across the border in England, who created a collection of ballads based on an old manuscript collection of poetry, which he claimed to have rescued from the hands of a housemaid, who was about to light the fire with it. He published this collection as Reliques of Ancient English Poetry in 1765. Percy, like Macpherson, thought ballads were records of earlier ways of life, but unlike the Scotsman, he found them not particularly valuable as poetry, and so he felt free to alter or improve his ballad texts in order to make them more readable. The book sold well anyway, like Macpherson’s, especially among the German Romantics—Goethe, Schiller, and even Beethoven, who was inspired by it to transform a number of Scots folk songs into lieder.
Years later, Sir Walter Scott was drawn into the debate over origins and whether ballads were pure Scottish products. Having Percy’s book as a child, he began heading into the countryside along the Scottish border to collect ballads as early as 1792, relishing the stories of outlaws, murderers, adultery, and abduction. He too sometimes constructed more “complete” versions than existed, aiming for a higher level of literature than what was already there. The ballads in his 1802 Minstrelsy of the Scottish Borders were “restorations.”
Whether forged or genuine, ballads required some kind of authentication, and the two standards of the times were that there be enough of them to matter and that they be very old. They had to be presented as proper collections, not as random findings. Demonstrating their antiquity required the skills of a philologist or an antiquarian to date the manuscripts on which the ballads had been discovered. To help the dating process along, some collectors “aged” the songs, treating them as fragments that had been found and reassembled by an editor/ archaeologist, and made the story of their discovery part of the proof. A manuscript rescued from the fire, found hidden in a wall, or lying on the floor—they were all part of the tale, the romance of the collector-antiquarian. These found ballads were presented to their eighteenth-century audience as sung by bards, not folksingers or poets, for “bard” was a Celtic word, identified with Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, and so were connected to a history that preceded the Acts of Union of 1707 and 1801 that attempted to erase the boundaries between England and these other countries.
The Scots collectors were not acting solely out of nationalistic interest, however. They also sought personal betterment by attracting the attention and the imprimatur of an aristocrat, often an antiquarian himself, to whom the book was then dedicated. Most of the collectors who chose this route had already failed at some earlier occupation, and were using collecting as the vehicle for a second chance. There was little wealth to be gained from ballads, but there was a kind of fame.
In the United States, interest in ballad collecting began in the Northeast, especially in Cambridge, Massachusetts, among those connected to Harvard. In 1855, a thirty-six-year-old James Russell Lowell announced that he would be giving a series of twelve public lectures, the fourth of which was titled “The Ballad,” and the audience was pleased to see him rise in defense of America as a literary nation, and of the ballad as an important part of its literature. “The ballads are the only true folk songs that we have in English,” he said. “There is no other poetry in the language that addresses us so simply as mere men and women.” Then he took aim at the British. “English writers demand of us a national literature. But where, for thirteen centuries, was their own?” His stunning answer was that what the English call their literature was borrowed from the Celts, from the romances that were written about King Arthur and his court. Not only was he disputing the right of the British to lay exclusive claim to ballads when they were Celtic in origin, but he was also extending his argument westward and announcing his own declaration of cultural independence for Americans. (Lowell’s mother, incidentally, was a Scot, who read Sir Walter Scott to him as a child and sang him to sleep with Scottish ballads.)
Seated at Lowell’s lectures was the young scholar Francis James Child, who would later become a colleague of Lowell’s at Harvard as its first professor of English, and between 1882 and 1898 would publish a series of ten books called The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. Child started by gathering together ballads in manuscript and published form like other collectors before him, and then set about categorizing them and putting them in order. The three-hundred-plus ballads in his ten-volume collection were the result of this ordering, and they became the standard for what could be called a folk song from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries. For Child, the age of balladry was over, and nothing as fine or as noble could ever be found again in live performance.
When Child retired, his student George Lyman Kittredge replaced him. As with the other academics of his time and before him, it was the words of the folk songs that counted, and the roots of high poetry they saw in them. He had little interest in the actual music of the songs, the instruments that accompanied them, the way they were performed, or even in what they meant to the people who sang them. Collectors from the northeastern United States seldom went out among the people to gather songs, and when they
did, they followed the British practice of contacting local gentry or community officials and asking them to locate the singers for them.
In England there was one collector who was interested in ballads as songs, not poems. Cecil Sharp was a musician, not a literary scholar, and for years he collected both the words and the music of songs live from singers in the field, first in England, where he had started the English Folk Dance Society in 1911, and then later in the United States. He spent twelve months in Kentucky between 1916 and 1918, and his collection, English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians, was published after his death in 1932.
Whether it was the influence of Sharp, or something deeper that Kittredge saw in John Lomax and his cowboy ballads when he came to Harvard as a student, the professor’s encouragement of Lomax’s recording of music and text was sincere, and gave John the courage to go forward. For Kittredge to accept cowboy songs as ballads was no small thing, for they were not taken seriously at the time. Sharp, for one, had ignored cowboy ballads, remarking that the cowboy had been “despoiled of his inheritance of traditional song.”
The history of the early song collectors resonated in John Lomax’s life, and he sometimes found himself reliving it. When John asked former president Theodore Roosevelt, a Harvard graduate himself, to write “an endorsement” of his book, he was repeating Percy’s and Scott’s experiences with ballads in a democratic way. Because he was forced to sell their work to the public to survive outside of university life, John was condemned by scholars, who argued that the composite texts he published were corrupt—the same claims made against Macpherson, Percy, and Scott, even though they were eventually well received by the public. As a folklorist who collected in the field, John also found himself roughing it like big game hunters and bringing back the evidence that he had somehow managed to work his way into one or another of these groups of rural and tough people.
