Question: What UT alum became famous for his many compilations of folk songs?
Answer: John Avery Lomax. Born in Mississippi in 1867, Lomax grew up in Bosque County near a branch of the Chisholm Trail, where he heard numerous folk songs from the cowboys driving cattle to the slaughterhouses up north.
After graduating from the University of Texas, he taught at Texas A&M and continued his studies at Harvard University, where he was encouraged to produce a scholarly compilation of the nation’s folk songs. His first collection, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, was published in 1910 with an introduction by former president Theodore Roosevelt.
