Family tradition: Son releases John Lomax Jr.'s unearthed folk recordings

When the firetruck showed up at John Avery Lomax Jr.'s West University Place home, the flames out back were 30 feet high.

This was in the 1950s. Lomax Jr. had collected discarded Christmas trees from around the neighborhood and fashioned them into a makeshift fort for the neighborhood kids. After a few weeks, the wood dried out. It was time.

"The fire department showed up, hoses in hand," his son, John Lomax III, says. "And straight-faced, he asked them, 'What are you doing here? We're just having a lil' weenie roast.' "

The younger Lomax loves telling stories about his father, a strapping man who retained a childlike spirit.

In doing so, the son presents a fuller portrait of his father, a man with one of the most storied family names in American music but one who isn't as closely associated with music, musicology and folklore as his famed father and brother.

Though Lomax Jr. made his living in real estate development, he was involved in the family business, too. He managed Lightnin' Hopkins for years and would open shows for the blues great, singing old folk songs in a canyon-deep voice. He also co-founded the Houston Folklore Society, an organization that put on shows by singers and songwriters and offered early opportunities to the likes of Guy Clark and K.T. Oslin.

Lomax Jr. died in 1974, but five years earlier he'd set up a recorder at his West University home and recorded about 160 of his favorite songs - old narrative folk tunes - that had been documented by his father, John Avery Lomax. This month, John Lomax III released some of them with a title as rich as it is simple: "Folk."

"I don't know if he ever envisioned any of this music coming out," Lomax III says. "He may have just done it for himself. But I thought I'd throw it out there. Hopefully, it'll reach a few people. Unfortunately, most everybody who knew him and heard him is long gone.

"But I think these songs are still really cool and interesting. They all have a point of view, a story to tell. They're not songs about emotion and feeling bad. They're just stories. Usually about being a person, rather than being about a feeling. You don't hear much of that today."

***

There's a pause on the other end of the phone.

"Wait, which John Lomax are you talking about?" says songwriter Steve Earle, responding to a question about "Folk." "Because there's a lot of 'em."

His query is reasonable. There are a lot of them.

We'll start with the son, even though he's also the grandson and a father in this story.

Lomax III has done just about every manner of music-related work. He's written extensively about music - from the underground paper Space City News in Houston in the late '60s to "Nashville: Music City USA," a history of country music from 1968-,85 - and also managed a few notoriously difficult artists including Townes Van Zandt, Earle and Rocky Hill. Hill's name, in fact, summarizes the Sisyphean task of working with difficult and combative artists, with their strong opinions and addictions.

As is his family's wont, Lomax III believes in good songs. One of the greatest guitarists Texas ever produced, Hill sabotaged his career at every opportunity and died without leaving behind a recording commercially available that truly spoke to his talent. In 2011, Lomax III released "Texas Guitar Legend," an album of previously unreleased music that captured Hill's gifts. It didn't matter so much whether the album sold, just that some documentation of this artist was made available.

More recently, Lomax III has run Roots Music Exporters, a company that distributes music overseas. "Between streaming music and the U.S. dollar, I'm just sitting here watching that business evaporate," he says.

Like the Hill album, "Folk" won't reverse financial fortunes. This one has particular sentimental value as a son shares something from his father. And the relationship between the Lomax family and recorded music was typically based on documentation and preservation rather than finance.

The short version of that relationship also serves as a loose cheat sheet for part of the family tree: John Avery Lomax was born in Mississippi in 1867 but wouldn't remember his time there, as the family moved to Bosque County, south of Fort Worth, when he was a toddler. It's where old cowboy songs sung along the Chisolm Trail caught his ear. Even as a kid, he transcribed what he heard, unaware that such documentation would become his life's work.

Lomax Sr. chose an education over the family's farm, eventually landing at the University of Texas. He founded a folklore society there, and taught. And his interest in cowboy music became more formal. In the first years of the 20th century, he collected songs such as "Buffalo Skinners" from a buffalo hunter and "Home on the Range" from a bartender.

Think about that just a moment: Decades before Hollywood codified a particular vision of the Old West, Lomax Sr. transcribed a song that has since achieved full cultural ubiquity. His work was the containment of oral traditions that were previously vaporous.

In 1910, Lomax Sr. published some of those pieces of music in "Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads." His interest in folk music grew beyond the range to include African-American song forms. Of his two sons, Alan, became his well-known traveling companion. One of their most storied ventures came in 1933, when father and son covered 16,000 miles with a tape recorder in the trunk of their car, looking to document old folk and blues songs and the stories behind them.

"People don't always tell the whole story," Lomax III says. "My father had to convince my grandfather to go on that trip. My grandfather was in a bad place: His wife had died, his health was bad, the Depression was going on. He was a bond salesman in Dallas, who'd talked his friends into buying these bonds, the value of which disintegrated when the Depression hit.

"But Dad had convinced him to go on this lecture tour and went along with him. And then after that, he convinced him he needed to make this trip, this song-collecting trip. It's still a remarkable trip when you think about it. The whole back of the car was for this 300-pound tape recorder. They were literally sleeping on the side of the road most nights. They were out to collect songs, not knowing if they'd find anything of any value or not."

On that trip, Lomax Sr. and Alan found Lead Belly at Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana. The ripple effects from a 1933 recording session they did with the great folk-blues singer have extended through more than eight decades of American music.

Lomax Sr.'s account of that trip, "Adventures of a Ballad Hunter," was published in 1947, a year before he died. The book has been out of print for decades, though in another instance of old Lomax history returning to the fore this year, it will be reissued in September by the University of Texas Press for its 70th anniversary and the 150th anniversary of Lomax Sr.'s birth.

Though Alan Lomax became the name famed for carrying on the family work, Lomax Jr. was immersed in the music documented by his father because he essentially served as his father's manager. He routed travel, set meetings with publishers and archivists. He was never far removed from the music.

***

Lomax Jr. married in 1941 and later that year enlisted in the Navy after the attack on Pearl Harbor. By the mid-1940s, he and his wife and Lomax III settled in Houston on Vanderbilt, where he spent the rest of his years.

"Basically, he was a real estate developer with a lot of hobbies," Lomax III says. "He sang all the time."

He also was often at a typewriter transcribing old songs.

Lomax III's son John Nova Lomax - a senior editor at Texas Monthly - barely knew his grandfather but says, "the house stayed in our family for years after he died. And I remember the place just reeked of printer's ink."

Chris Strachwitz - a musicologist and founder of Arhoolie Records - recalls getting a wealth of historical information about Texas polka bands from Lomax Jr.

"He knew which radio stations to listen to in which towns at a specific time on a specific day," Strachwitz says. "He was such a smart guy, just full of information."

Lomax Jr. co-founded the Houston Folklore Society in 1951 in his living room. In 1956, the Smithsonian's Folkways label released "John A. Lomax Jr. Sings American Folksongs." He'd accompany Lightnin' Hopkins on tour, making sure the blues singer got to his gigs and got paid. That's when Lomax Jr. would also open some of Hopkins' shows.

As interest in old folk and blues grew in the '50s, the Folklore Society saw its shows move to larger confines. The organization's name may sound quaint today, but at the time it was a seed from which a vibrant singer-songwriter scene sprung in Houston. Aspiring writers such as Clark and Van Zandt first saw folk and blues greats including Mance Lipscomb and Hopkins perform at Folklore Society events. From there, they were moved to create their own variations on those song forms.

"I went to some of those Folklore Society shows," Earle says. "I saw Lightnin' there, I saw Mance there. And I heard Lomax sing at a few of those, a capella with this big voice."

Lomax was known to bring along a block of wood and an ax - the closest he got to instrumentation - when he sang the work song and Lead Belly standard "Take This Hammer." Wood chips would fly following the lyric, "Take this hammer, take it to the Captain."

John Nova Lomax recalls going to New Orleans a few years ago and hearing a Lead Belly song he didn't recognize.

"But it still felt so familiar," he says. "That's when I realized Pops created a lot of this singing style from listening to Lead Belly. I mean, how can you not? That's the chain of influence for an a capella singer."

Strachwitz says Lomax Jr. sang "the way a good songster or a good balladeer should sing. Clear with some style.

"He knew his stuff. He was an amazing folk singer. I think you could call him that. He didn't come out of an ethnic background like the blues singers, but he was part of that cowboy-singer tradition from Texas. I'm not sure how many horses he'd ridden, but he knew his stuff."

***

In late 1974, Lomax Jr. suffered a stroke at home and died at age 67. Lomax III didn't know he'd made those 1969 recordings until 1988, when his brother, five years younger, died. Lomax III had just remarried, so his Nashville home was in disarray, full of unopened boxes. The tapes got buried. He uncovered them only recently and was struck by what he heard.

The presentation couldn't be more beautifully basic: Lomax Jr.'s hale voice unadorned and crisply coursing through the words. Some of the songs come with introductions bearing their histories.

"These were great songs that had been obliterated," Lomax III says. "No one hears them anymore. Some of them go back to that first Lomax collection from 1910. There's cowboy stuff in there. Things like 'The Worms Crawl In,' everybody heard that as a kid. They're just great American folk songs. I thought they deserved to be brought out. To shake the dust out and see if they can fly anymore. It's like his follow-up album, released 60 years after his debut."

At 72, Lomax III finds himself increasingly inclined to cut ties with the music-related material that builds up over decades working in the industry. He's donated boxes of writings - including early work for Space City News - and photographs to Rice University.

"It just seemed to make sense," he says. "Hell, my first job was selling Cokes at Rice football games. Why not show some love to the hometown folks?"

But he's more sentimental with "Folk," as it offers another opportunity to introduce people to his father, whose musical scholarship ran as deep as his affinity for an old song.

"I think there's a lot that sets it apart," Lomax III says. "That it's a capella singing. The body count is pretty high, too. You've got Crego getting it in 'Buffalo Skinners.' 'Frankie and Johnny' doesn't end well. A guy dies in 'Rattlesnake Song.' 'The Alamo Song' is another 180, not counting the Mexicans.

"But more than that, sometimes I think we've worn out just about every genre of music. So why not go back to the beginning, to a person and a song. That's the purest way to get music, to me anyway. There are no songs here about dirt roads, tank tops, beaches and beer, dogs or Jesus. It's just a bunch of songs about heritage and a man singing them."