Cowboy Life in West Texas by John A. Lomax

One of the people that inspired J. Frank Dobie to devote his career to writing about Texas and preserving the stories and folk ways of the Southwest was John Avery Lomax.  Lomax lived from 1867 to 1948 and during those years he did a considerable amount of work to preserve and record American folk music, especially the folk music of the cowboys.  He was born in Mississippi but came to Texas in 1869 in a covered wagon. His family settled on a farm near Meridian and he spent many of his formative years growing up near the Chisholm Trail and witnessed the trail drives passing by firsthand. Lomax was also instrumental, along with another of Dobie’s mentors, Leonidas Warren Payne, in creating the Texas Folklore Society in 1909, and three of Lomax’s children also went on to preserving American folk songs. He published several books on folklore, including Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads in 1910 and Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp in 1919.  He published his autobiographical Adventures of a Ballad Hunter in 1947, not long before his death in 1948.

This episode shares some information from a presentation Lomax gave at a folklore society meeting in San Marcos.  In it he shares some knowledge on the Texas cowboy’s speech and mode of living. You might think that you know everything about cowboy culture but I’d bet there’s something in it that will surprise you.  I’ve edited it slightly to make it more readable in print form and a little bit more polite in a couple of places.

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