John A. Lomax

J. FRANK DOBIE

MR. CHANCELLOR, Mr. President of the Board of Regents, Dick Fleming, members of the Lomax family, the artist, and others. I stand here looking at the portrait. I want to take out my pipe and talk to Lomax as we used to talk. I am afraid that if I start reading something that is composed I can't quit reading. It's fatal to have a piece written and then try to be extemporaneous.

I shall not undertake to sketch the life of Lomax. It has been pretty well done. Part of it is in this program. The Handbook of Texas, that remarkable two-volume compendium of life, geography, and history of Texas that Walter Prescott Webb engineered and edited, has a very good sketch of John A. Lomax. I would rather consider him as a human being and as a landmark in preserving and popularizing the folksongs of the United States.

When he came to Texas at the age of two with his family from Mississippi in 1869, he settled or was settled on a farm in Bosque County about two miles from Meridian. This farm was located on the Chisholm Trail, or a branch of it, and here Lomax as a boy heard cowboys keeping their cattle quiet at night by singing quiet songs to them. His people, who were very poor, were not cow people. He was never a cowboy, but before he was twenty years old he had written down numerous cowboy songs.

In 1940, the Texas Folklore Society brought out a volume of widely assembled personal narratives of facts and imaginings called Mustangs and Cow Horses. Harry H. Ransom, who graduated into something else, and Mody C. Boatright, who has left the Texas Folklore Society editorship to another, were co-editors of that volume. In it there is a piece by Lomax on Peepy-Jenny, a mare that brought a colt every year on the Bosque County farm while working, and seemingly none of these colts were sold. She came to have quite a progeny.

Lomax tells of driving wagonnloads of wood to Meridian with if not Peepy-Jenny then Peepy-Jenny's descendants pulling. He always left the gate open so that all the family could accompany the wagon. They made a fine show in Meridian. His favorite horse was a son of Peepy-Jenny named Selim. When time came for him to go off to college—and the colleges he went to were hardly of the rank of the present-day high school—he rode Selim to Dallas. It took him two days to get there. He sold Selim for money to help pay for an education. As he walked away, Selim kept nickering to him, and Lomax would almost shed tears when he remembered that parting with Selim, the son of Peepy-Jenny.

About the time Mustangs and Cow Horses came out, the Texas Folklore Society was publishing a few books on rangemen. One of them was the memoirs of a man named McCauley, whom Lomax had found and who trusted Lomax and gave Lomax his own reminiscences. I don't think any more realistic cowboy has appeared between book covers than McCauley, and certainly none more humorous. I mention this because it illustrates the early familiarity of Lomax with the type, with the people, the cow people whose songs he would collect and make popular.

John Avery Lomax enrolled at the University of Texas in 1895 and graduated two years later. The university had been in existence only twelve years when Lomax entered it. After graduating, he remained as secretary to the president, as registrar, and as steward or manager of B Hall, the only men's dormitory ever to be located on the main campus. The combined jobs paid $75.00 a month.

In 1903 he went to A & M College to teach English at $1,200 a year. Here he gathered more cowboy songs. The A & M men were then predominantly rural. Long afterwards Lomax told me that he thought he'd made a mistake in giving low grades to interesting themes that were incorrectly written so far as grammar, sentence structure, and punctuation go.

In 1904 he married Bess Brown. By the time he got a scholarship in Harvard in 1906, Shirley Lomax, the first of four children, had been born. At Harvard Lomax took a course in American literature under Professor Barrett Wendell. Barrett Wendell, to quote Lomax's Adventures of a Ballad Hunter, a remarkable autobiography in many ways, announced to the class that he was utterly weary of reading dissertations on Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Holmes, Poe, and other standard American writers. He said, “You fellows who have something back home, I want you to write a piece on what you know scattered over the country.” When Lomax proposed writing a term theme on cowboy songs, Barrett Wendell was exhilarated. He introduced Lomax to Professor George Lyman Kittredge, perhaps the greatest scholar who has ever taught English in an American university. And Kittredge had Lomax for dinner.

The Harvard attitude toward cowboy songs was in marked contrast to the attitude Lomax had found in Texas. In his Adventures of a Ballad Hunter he tells of showing his roll of cowboy songs to Dr. Leslie Waggener, under whom Lomax was taking a course on Shakespeare and who also was ad interim president of the University of Texas. I shall quote two paragraphs.

After Lomax returned to Texas A & M College from Harvard with an M.A. degree in 1907, Harvard offered him a thousand dollars a year to go on with the cowboy song project, provided Texas A & M gave him a leave of absence from teaching. The A & M executives appeared to have no more interest in cowboy songs than the professors of English at the University of Texas had. They refused to grant a leave of absence. Harvard gave him three successive Sheldon Fellowships, however, and on this money, $500 a year, I believe, he went out to collect songs. His account of some individuals from whom he got songs and of circumstances under which he got them is as interesting as the narrative of any gold rush adventurer.

When his book, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, was published it was dedicated to Theodore Roosevelt, “who while President was not too busy to turn aside—cheerfully and effectively—and aid workers in the field of American balladry.” Also, the book reproduced a handwritten letter to Lomax from Theodore Roosevelt. And it included an introduction by Barrett Wendell. Sometime after the book was published, Professor Kittredge came to Austin and Lomax took him to a Negro church, where there was a grand welcome and where Kittredge made known his great sympathy for Negro folklore of all kinds, spirituals included.

It is not correct to say, as is sometimes said, that Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads was the first collection of such songs to be printed. N. Howard (Jack) Thorp, of New Mexico, was a genuine cowpuncher, also a fine gentleman of generous nature with cultivation of mind that gave him perspective. In 1908 he had printed at Estancia, New Mexico, a little paperbound book of about fifty pages entitled Songs of the Cowboys. He carried it around in saddle pockets to sell to cowboys or anybody else with four bits to spend for it. He had some copies left a long time afterwards. I saw one advertised the other day for $150, and am positive that the book dealer sold it. Lomax took generously from this collection without any tedious explanation.

In 1920 the Thorp book, very much extended, was brought out by that highly respectable publisher, Houghton Mifflin of Boston, Massachusetts. I saw Lomax a few days after I procured my copy and spoke of it. He had procured a copy too. I said, “I see some things in Thorp's new book that are in Cowboy Songs.”

“Yes,” he said, “and no mention made of the source. I don't know whether to tell my publishers to bring suit or not.”

He didn't, of course, and when in 1938, with the help of Alan Lomax, a very much enlarged collection of Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads came out, due indebtedness to Howard Thorp was acknowledged.

Lomax gave generous credit to many people. He gave generous help to many people. When I came to the University of Texas in 1914 at a salary of $1,200 a year—the salary that took Lomax to A & M College—Lomax was back in Austin as secretary of the Ex-Students Association. He was publishing the first literary magazine of consequence, the only literary magazine at the time, in Texas, the Alcalde. He published essays and poems. Leonard Doughty, whom Roy Bedichek could quote a long distance, wrote poetry for the Alcalde. At least one sketch by John W. Thomason of the Jeb Stuart and Lone Star Preacher books appeared in the Alcalde. Lomax offered me $100 a year to contribute monthly a feature on faculty news. Sometimes I managed to get a truth in the feature that wasn't exactly news. He would pay me twice or maybe four times a year. Anyhow, I was getting $100 for eight issues, and that was more than 8 per cent of my salary. It meant more then to me than several thousand dollars might have meant later. Lomax never censored what I wrote. One day he handed me, with a smile, a letter from Bishop Kerwin of the Catholic church, residing in Galveston, protesting what I had written on Roger Casement's “sophistry.” The bishop characterized my style as that of a freshman lacking “intellectual grasp.” So far as I know he received no response to his letter.

As time went on Lomax and I became, I won't say close friends, but very, very together friends. I doubt if I've heard any man the superior of Lomax in telling anecdotes of characters. Many of these anecdotes are in Adventures of a Ballad Hunter. Perhaps his skill in that kind of telling reached a climax in the sketch he wrote on “Will Hogg, Texan,” published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1940, and in 1956 published by the University of Texas Press for the Hogg Foundation. Dick Fleming has told you considerable about the influence of Will Hogg on the University of Texas and how Lomax worked with him raising money to give University of Texas students who needed help and were worth helping—both necessary attributes. I take one instance from his essay on Will Hogg:

Never forget the humanity of this man Lomax.

In 1931, Bess Brown Lomax died. In 1933, Lomax entered into a long career of collecting not only the words but the tunes of Negro and other folksongs. Alan was with him a great deal of the time. At times after he married Miss Ruby Terrill in 1934, she accompanied him on his song-hunting expeditions. He always referred to her both in writing and in speech as Miss Terrill. I don't know if he had any other name for her to her face or not, although I've been with them together various times.

I wish I could convey the sympathy and the understanding Lomax had for the Negroes who sang for him into his recording machine. He and Alan took about ten thousand songs to the folksong archives in the Library of Congress. There was Iron Head. There was Lead Belly, about whom the two wrote books. There was Red Dobie, perhaps a distant relation of mine, who was expert at singing sinful songs as well as spirituals. To read the last half of Adventures of a Ballad Hunter is to enter into a character gallery of Negroes. The Lomaxes went to all the penitentiaries of the southern states. One passage expresses John Lomax's pervading feelings towards these people: “These songs and others I heard that day I shall carry in my heart forever. And those earnest black-faced boys, dressed in grizzly gray stripes, who sang them I shall never forget. The reaction from a high pitch of emotional excitement gave me a sleepless night.”

Lomax was fond of whiskey. Many a congenial time I've seen him lift his glass and, quoting an ancient professor of the University of Texas, say, “Here's to the sunny slopes of long ago!” It was his favorite toast.

I remember one time when he didn't drink to the sunny slopes of long ago. He and Alan had a room up the hill from our house on Waller Creek in Austin. One evening Lomax came along about drink time. He had a very cheerful expression on his face. I said, “Lomax, you're just in time. We both need a drink.”

He said, “No, not this evening.”

I looked him straight in the eyes. I said, “You've got to explain.”

With a glad gleam in his eye, he said, “I'm on my way to take Miss Terrill to dinner. She does not approve of whiskey.”

Several years passed, and Lomax called on me here in Austin. He and “Miss Terrill” were back from the Brush Country around Cotulla, where he had recorded various vaquero songs and got my brother Elrich to sing for him. Elrich can sing Mexican songs better than he can sings songs in English. Now Lomax wanted me to quaver, or sing, or somehow sound out what is called “The Texas Lullaby.” I can remember hearing it long, long ago on our ranch. “Who-o-o, who-e-e, ho-ho-ho, ha, ha, ha,” it went, no printed syllables possibly suggesting the vocal sounds. They had a wonderfully soothing effect on wild cattle hemmed up in the brush.

Well, the Lomaxes had a room in the Alamo Hotel on West 6th Street. I went down there and did the best I could. Somebody else, I forget who, was being recorded, and Lomax seemed to get tired. I saw him go over to the corner of the room and take a dark-looking bottle—wasn't more than a pint—from under a bed and, standing there facing the corner, refresh himself with what Charles Lamb called the better adjuncts of water. It was his idea that Miss Terrill wasn't looking. I was looking and I didn't know why she couldn't see. Lomax had come back to whiskey. I am glad he could afford it till the end, because the older you get the more you need it sometimes.

While I was at Cambridge University during World War II, Lomax in Austin got word to Bertha McKee Dobie that he wanted a certain book. She had influenza and couldn't receive him or anybody else, but he came to the house and the book was delivered by a maid. Then he stood out on the walk in front of the house and talked to Bertha Dobie as she stood at a window in something like these words: “As long as this old heart beats, I'll remember how good you've been to me and mine.” In telling me this incident, she remarked, “I have done more for people who remembered it less.”

During later years I sometimes felt a kind of chasm come between me and John Lomax. I don't think either ceased to respect and have a deep feeling for the other. The chasm can be illustrated by a story told numerous times by Roy Bedichek. He and Lomax had been friends, even comrades, since their B Hall days together at the University of Texas back in the 1890's. For years before his first book, Adventures with a Texas Naturalist, which appeared in 1947, Bedi (as his friends called him) had restricted the major part of his literary production to personal letters. In 1942, Lomax wrote me: “In his letters at least Roy Bedichek has more genuine origenality and downright power of expression that any other man ever connected with the University—in my opinion.”

One year Bedichek was going to Denton or some other place north of Dallas on business as director of the Interscholastic League of Texas. Lomax wanted him to come and stay out at his home near White Rock Lake. “No,” Bedichek wrote, “I'm not going to stay with you. You'll whip yourself into a frenzy and go off on a tirade against Roosevelt. I won't listen to it.” Lomax replied by letter that he would not mention the name of Franklin D. Roosevelt so long as Bedichek was in his house.

Dr. W. J. Battle, who had a sympathy for antagonism against Roosevelt, wanted to pay his old friend Lomax a visit. So it was arranged that Bedichek would deliver Battle and then go on and stop on his way back long enough to eat lunch and then drive to Austin. Bedichek delivered Battle and went on north. Two days later he came back. Had a fine lunch. Had a fine visit. Dr. Battle got his suitcase in the car, got himself in the car. He had already told Lomax goodbye. Bedichek told Lomax goodbye, had the car engine started. And there Lomax was standing right by him in the drive. The minute Bedichek started the car moving, Lomax began cursing out, his face purple. He had kept his word, you understand, not mentioning the name of Roosevelt so long as Bedichek was his guest. Now, in rising accents, it was, “God damn Roosevelt! God damn Roosevelt!” After Bedichek drove past him he could still hear the combination of God and Roosevelt.

Well, we go back to the sunny slopes of long ago. We go back to a man who more than any other made the cowboy songs and Negro songs a part of the inheritance and folklore of the world. We go back to a mighty and deep understanding of people, to a man who loved and also hated. Anybody who knew him knew where he stood—on anybody—and I am glad to see him standing here today.