John Lomax

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

Life

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

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

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

With Professor Leonidas Payne of the University of Texas Lomax founded 1909, the Texas Folklore Society, a section of the American Folklore Society. The objective of the society was to collect traditional folk before they fell into oblivion, and to make them accessible to researchers.

1910, Lomax to a management job at the University of Texas. He also led his research further. 1917 Lomax was made redundant due to political disputes between the University President and the Governor, together with other colleagues. He moved to Chicago and worked at a bank, but without giving up his interest in folklore research. However, the possibilities for this were limited in Chicago.

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

At this time, the archive already had a collection of commercial phonograph records, to recordings of folk songs on wax cylinders that were made ​​on site. Lomax struck a deal with the archive, which provided him with the recording device, with which he would travel around to make authentic images for the archive. The result was a ten-year fruitful cooperation, in which the entire family of John Lomax involved, including his second wife, Ruby Terrill Lomax, whom he married in 1934.

1933 John Lomax undertook together with the 18 -year-old Alan first expedition on behalf of the archive. They visited mainly penal camp in Texas, where they recorded the songs of prisoners such as James "Iron Head " Baker, Moses "Clear Rock" Platt and Lightnin ' Washington. In Louisiana, they made recordings of Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Leadbelly.

1936 Lomax was also working for two agencies of the Works Progress Administration, for which he collected historical recordings and transcripts of the narratives of slaves.