John Lomax

John Lomax was an American teacher, musicologist and folklorist who worked to preserve American folk music. Raised in central Texas, he studied at the University of Texas and Harvard, where George Lyman Kittredge urged him to collect ballads in the field; his Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads appeared in 1910 with an introduction by Theodore Roosevelt. From 1933 he made recording trips for the Library of Congress with his son Alan, recording Huddie Ledbetter, Lead Belly, at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, and from 1934 until his death he was honorary curator of the Archive of American Folk Song. He also directed the gathering of ex-slave narratives for the Federal Writers' Project.