Born in 1867, Lomax grew up in frontier Texas, graduated from the University of Texas in 1897, and in 1906 entered the English graduate program at Harvard University. Lomax studied with George Lyman Kittredge, Barrett Wendell, and other pioneers in promoting the study of ballads and Medieval English literature, as well as American literature and folk music. Kittredge and Wendell especially encouraged him to begin collecting the cowboy ballads and songs of Lomax’s native west. He mostly solicited songs and ballads through newspaper notices, rather than doing much field work, and copied old songsters.
Lomax’s Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads appeared in 1910. At the same time southern collectors were searching for, and discovering, indications of surviving English and Scottish ballads, particularly those published by Francis Child. Lomax, however, with the encouragement of Child’s colleague Kittredge, sought out uniquely western folk songs. Yet Lomax could not discount their historic ties, and, he believed, the romantic, primitive circumstancesthat gave rise to the songs. “Illiterate people, and people cut off from newspapers and books, isolated and lonely—thrown back on primal resources for entertainment and for the expression of emotion—utter themselves through somewhat the same character of songs as did their forefathers of perhaps a thousand years ago,” Lomax explained in his introduction. “The songs represent the operation of instinct and tradition.” He was interested in occupational songs, not the traditional Anglo-American ballads. Cowboy Songs included “The Buffalo Skinners,” “Old Paint,” “Sweet Betsy From Pike,” and the recently composed “Home On the Range.” In 1920 he published a brief sequel, Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp (and in 1938, along with his son Alan, he issued an expanded version of Cowboy Songs). After the original Cowboy Songs appeared, Lomax gave a series of talks on college campuses, and he realized “that our native folk songs awakened interest among intelligent people,” as he later noted in his 1947 autobiography, Adventures of a Ballad Hunter.
Cowboys,real and imagined, had been celebrated in dime novels and in Wild West shows since the Civil War, but it only became apparent that those “illiterate” cowboys were writing songs as early as in the 1890s. D. J. O’Malley wrote “When the Work’s All Done This Fall” in 1893; it would later become the first popular cowboy recording when released by Carl T. Sprague in 1925. Jack Thorp composed “Little Joe, the Wrangler” five years later, and he issued Songs of the Cowboy in 1908, two years before Lomax’s book.
Cowboys probably did often sing to quiet the herds at night, fitting new words to old folk songs and ballads, but not until the publication of the Thorp and Lomax books were the songs more widely known. (Dr. Brewster Higley, the author of “Home On the Range” in 1873, was no cowboy, but his art song was soon considered a folk song.) Charles Siringo issued The Song Companion of a Lone Star Cowboy in 1919, while Charles Finger first published Sailor Chantey’s and Cowboy Songsin 1923. Typewritersalesman Bentley Ball had the first commercial cowboy recordings in 1919, “Jesse James” and “The Dying Cowboy”; he was soon followed by Carl Sprague and Vernon Dalhart. While there was little musical or textual connection between cowboy songs and southern mountain tunes, the two would later be lumped together under the commercial designation Country and Western music.
The Unfinished Southern Songs
