Contributors

FRANCIS E. ABERNETHY teaches at Stephen F. Austin State College in Nacogdoches. He is currently collecting stories and lore from the Big Thicket.

ANDY ADAMS (1859-1935) was born in Indiana, worked cattle and horses in Texas, had some experience on the trail to Kansas, and lived most of the latter part of his life in Colorado Springs, devoting himself to writing. Author of The Log of a Cowboy (1903), the acknowledged masterpiece of literature having to do with the cattle country, he disliked the “picturesque” overdoing of western life in literature, and earned a reputation for faithful depiction in his novels and stories.

JOHN Q. ANDERSON, a productive scholar in the field of folklore, is a regular contributor to the TFS annual and editor of a 1966 anthology, Tales of Frontier Texas, 1830-1860. He is chairman of the English department at Texas A & M.

A. L. BENNETT, who took his last degree at the University of Texas, now teaches at Texas A & M. He grew up in Belton.

MODY C. BOATRIGHT of the University of Texas faculty published his first article in Texas and Southwestern Lore, which J. Frank Dobie edited for the TFS in 1927. He became TFS assistant editor in 1937 and chief editor in 1943, continuing as chief to 1964. The author of many books and articles on folklore, the latest book being Folklore of the Oil Industry (1963), he is now making a full-length study of the cowboy as a national figure.

JAMES T. BRATCHER is a teacher and graduate student in English at the University of Texas. His article, which grew out of a seminar with Mody Boatright, won first prize in the TFS contest for 1964.

JAN H. BRUNVAND received his training in folklore studies at the University of Indiana. He is now teaching English at Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville.

JAMES W. BYRD, originally from Alabama, teaches English at East Texas State University in Commerce. He was president of the TSF in 1965-66.

J. FRANK DOBIE (1888-1964) was secretary and editor for the TFS from 1923 to 1943. About 1920 he resolved to collect “the tales of my folk and my land” as Lomax had collected cowboy songs. In his article on Lomax he tells of the friendship that existed between them for many years. Many of Dobie's pronouncements on folklore, collected by William D. Wittliff in this book, were taken from prefaces to the volumes he edited for the TFS. Everyone knows that Dobie exerted a strong and salutary influence on literary activity in Texas and the Southwest.

EVERETT A. GILLIS is a student of western poetry in all of its forms—ballads, hymns, and popular songs. He is chairman of the English department at Texas Technological College in Lubbock.

WILSON M. HUDSON became secretary-editor for the TFS in 1964. A teacher at the University of Texas, he is studying myth as it exists and functions today. His biography of Andy Adams was published in 1964.

JAMES WARD LEE, a native of Alabama, teaches English at North Texas State University.

JOHN A. LOMAX (1867-1948) founded the TFS in 1909 along with Leonidas W. Payne, Jr. The next year he published Cowboy Songs. He did more, with the assistance of his son Alan, to collect and preserve folksongs than anyone else in the United States.

J. T. MC CULLEN, JR., came to Texas from North Carolina. He teaches Shakespeare at Texas Technological College, and maintains a scholarly interest in folklore.

ROGER P. MC CUTCHEON, formerly dean of the graduate school at Tulane and in his later years special advisor to the graduate dean at the University of Texas, was a man of range and talent. In his many academic activities he never saw people as mere names on a roster of an application blank. This is his last article; ten days after completing it he died of a heart attack in New Orleans.

PAUL PATTERSON knows West Texas from having lived there all of his life. He teaches at Crane in the Pecos country. Currently he is president of the TFS.

EUGENE MANLOVE RHODES (1869-1934) was born in Nebraska but was taken to New Mexico at the age of twelve. In New Mexico he did everything from working cattle to teaching school. He attended college in San Jose, California, and returned to New Mexico. In his stories and novels he tried to correct the East's misconceptions of the West. His longish story, “Pasó por Aquí,” is the classic defense of the West's code.

E. J. RISSMANN is a retired businessman living in Austin. He has a firsthand knowledge of the folkways of the Hill Country.

JACK SOLOMON teaches at Auburn University. He came to Houston in 1964 and read his paper at the annual meeting of the TFS.

JOHN O. WEST wrote a dissertation on the “good” outlaw tradition in the Southwest. He teaches at Texas Western in El Paso.

WILLIAM D. WITTLIFF, a graduate of the University of Texas, is sales manager for the University of Texas Press. A Dobie collector, he has a large file of Dobie's statements on a variety of subjects.