John A. Lomax

Biography

John Avery Lomax (1867–1948) was an American folklorist and musicologist who pioneered the collection and preservation of American folk music. Born in Goodman, Mississippi, and raised in Texas, Lomax began collecting cowboy songs as a young man and spent decades traveling across the American South and West with recording equipment, documenting folk songs, ballads, work songs, and spirituals that might otherwise have been lost. His first collection, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (1910), brought songs like “Home on the Range” to national attention. With his son Alan Lomax, he recorded thousands of songs for the Library of Congress Archive of American Folk Song, including landmark recordings of Lead Belly and Muddy Waters. Lomax’s work preserved a vast treasury of American musical heritage—cowboy songs, African American work songs, prison songs, and frontier ballads—that profoundly influenced the folk music revival and the development of American popular music.