John Lomax and The Cowboys

John Lomax was enthnomusicologist in the early twentieth century. He grew up in Texas and was exposed to cowboy songs and frontier songs growing up in the area were he lived. He later attended University of Texas at Austin where he majored in  English Literature and later on went off to collect ballads of cowboys after he graduated.  He spent many years out south and west collecting ballads of the cowboys and of the frontiersmen. An anthology of his collected data entitled Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads was later written after his years in the field.

Who were the cowboys of which Lomax put so much time and effort into studying? When the thought of a cowboy comes to most peoples minds an imagine of the typical romanticized man is imagined. In reality these people were "...illiterate people, and people cut off from news papers and books, isolated and lonely" (Lomax xvii), not really the typical image that comes to mind. The were rough and rugged men that lived "...in the canons of the Rocky Mountains, among the mining camps of Nevada and Montana, and on the remote cattle ranges of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona" (Lomax xvii). They were lonely men living and working in the rough conditions of the land they lived on. They worked laborious jobs of miner, rangers, and desolate cattlemen. They lived out in the the open fields of the west, the cold Rockies of Colorado, and out in the scorching deserts of New Mexico and Arizona.

Most of their time was consumed with their work of mining and ranching, but between they were "...thrown back on primal resources for entertainment and for the expression of emotion they utter to themselves to somewhat the same character of songs as did their forefathers of perhaps one thousand years ago" (Lomax xvii).  They sang songs of that evoke their inner emotions and struggles of lonesomeness tied in with the struggle of the work they did. These songs held similar to old Anglo-Saxon ballads of their ancestors and Lomax found the connection between the two. He would reference these ballads to great epics such as Beowulf and classic Anglo stories such as Sir Galahad and King Arthur. He made these connection because he found that these ballads of these rugged men out west of North America correlated to these stories and with Anglo-Saxon music and litterateur. Lomax was a English Literary Major and study in great depth of such English works and he was able to connect the dots between the two.


John Lomax study the cowboys and frontiersmen of the North American and was able to construct an anthology of all the ballads he collected over the years of study out in the field. The vision of  the romanticized cowboys that we invasion in out head greatly differed from that of the reality. These men worked hard out in the rough terrain of the land on which they lived on. When the time came when they were not working they would sing songs in the camps where they lived that express their lonesomeness and emotional struggle of working out in the land. John Lomax was able to find the correlation between the ballads of the rugged cowboys and that of the Anglo-Saxon ballads and literature.


1. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8c/John_Lomax.jpg
2. http://www-tc.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/media/uploads/special_features/photo_gallery/billy_gallery_05.jpg
3.  http://www.lemen.com/cowboys7a.jpg

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