John Lomax

John Avery Lomax (born September 23, 1867 in Goodman , Mississippi , USA , † January 26, 1948 ) was an American folklore and music researcher. His work was carried on by his children, especially Alan Lomax .

Life

John Lomax was born in Mississippi , but grew up in Texas . In the rural setting of Bosque County , he got used to hard work early on and in the process acquired the irrepressible energy with which he later devoted himself to his research.

After a few years as a teacher, Lomax studied English literature from 1895 at the University of Texas , where he initially worked after graduating. In 1903 he was offered a call to Texas A&M University , where he lived from then on with his wife Bess Brown Lomax.

In 1907 he went to Harvard University to get a Masters degree. He returned to Texas A&M University, where he resumed teaching, but at the same time began a research project on cowboy songs. In 1910 he published the highly regarded result of the work under the title Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads .

In 1909, with Professor Leonidas Payne of the University of Texas , Lomax founded the Texas Folklore Society , a section of the American Folklore Society . The aim of the society was to collect traditional folklore before it was forgotten and to make it accessible to researchers.

In 1910, Lomax took an administrative job at the University of Texas. In addition, he continued his research. In 1917, however, Lomax was dismissed along with other colleagues as a result of political disputes between the university president and the governor. He moved to Chicago and worked at a bank, but without giving up his interest in folklore research. However, the options for this in Chicago were limited.

In 1931, Bess Brown Lomax died at the age of 50. The youngest of the couple's four children was ten years old at the time. With his sons John and Alan , Lomax resumed his research. In 1932 he won a publishing house in New York to publish an anthology of American ballads and folk songs. He traveled to Washington to search the Archives of American Folk Song for suitable material.

At that time, the archive already had a collection of commercial phonograph - Records , to recordings of folk -songs on wax cylinders that had been made on site. Lomax made an agreement with the archives that provided him with the recording equipment he would travel around with to make authentic recordings for the archives. This resulted in a ten-year fruitful collaboration in which John Lomax's entire family participated, including his second wife Ruby Terrill Lomax, whom he married in 1934.

In 1933, John Lomax and 18-year-old Alan undertook a first expedition on behalf of the archive. They mostly visited penal camps in Texas, where they recorded songs by prisoners like James "Iron Head" Baker , Moses "Clear Rock" Platt, and Lightnin 'Washington . In Louisiana , they shot Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Leadbelly .

In 1936 Lomax also worked for two agencies of the Works Progress Administration , for which he collected historical recordings and transcripts of the stories of slaves .

Web links

Commons : John A. Lomax  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

• "Lomax, John Avery" in the "Handbook of Texas Online"
• John A. Lomax on the Library of Congress website