Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads

John Avery Lomax (1867-1948) was an American teacher, a pioneering musicologist and folklorist who did much for the preservation of American folk songs. In 1895, he entered the University of Texas at Austin, specializing in English literature. In his autobiography Adventures of a Ballad Hunter (1947), he recounts the story of his arrival at the university with a roll of cowboy songs he had written down in childhood. He was awarded a Sheldon Fellowship grant to research and collect cowboy songs and the resulting anthology, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (1910), with an introduction by President Theodore Roosevelt, made him famous. Around the same time, he co-founded the Texas Folklore Society with Professor Leonidas Payne of the University of Texas at Austin. His other works include: The Book of Texas (with Harry Benedict) (1916), Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp (1919) and Unexplored Treasures of Texas Folk-Lore (1935).