Adventures of a Ballad Hunter

Focus on American History

by John A. Lomax

Growing up beside the Chisholm Trail, captivated by the songs of passing cowboys and his bosom friend, an African American farmhand, John A. Lomax developed a passion for American folk songs that ultimately made him one of the foremost authorities on this fundamental aspect of Americana. Across many decades and throughout the country, Lomax and his informants created over five thousand recordings of America’s musical heritage, including ballads, blues, children’s songs, fiddle tunes, field hollers, lullabies, play-party songs, religious dramas, spirituals, and work songs. He acted as honorary curator of the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress, directed the Slave Narrative Project of the WPA, and cofounded the Texas Folklore Society. Lomax’s books include Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, American Ballads and Folk Songs, Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Leadbelly, and Our Singing Country, the last three coauthored with his son Alan Lomax.

Adventures of a Ballad Hunter is a memoir of Lomax’s eventful life. It recalls his early years and the fruitful decades he spent on the road collecting folk songs, on his own and later with son Alan and second wife Ruby Terrill Lomax. Vibrant, amusing, often haunting stories of the people he met and recorded are the gems of this book, which also gives lyrics for dozens of songs. Adventures of a Ballad Hunter illuminates vital traditions in American popular culture and the labor that has gone into their preservation.

Genres: Music, History, Memoir, Nonfiction, Biography

Hardcover

First published June 1, 1971

About the author

John Avery Lomax was an American teacher and a musicologist.

Reviews

[Marianne · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars and it lost about a star (ie otherwise would've been a high 4, maybe a 5) for being from a long time ago, written by an old man looking back, and thus having a lot of period-typical racist crap (some of it obviously just out of ignorance, but people are responsible for their own ignorance at a certain point) bubbling around what is overall an anti-racist life's work. i loved this book in the complex way of loving flawed things from past eras. but also, he sure was a white Texan born before 1900. but also, there are plenty of books from that era that are every bit as racist but deal in straight up *omission*, ie those people couldn't be bothered to write about or really even acknowledge the existence of anyone who wasn't white... which is actually worse than what Lomax did: living a relatively-for-his-whiteness-and-position integrated life, working actively to help Black people of his broad acquaintance, writing about their lives, and in the process saying shit that we know is wrong now... those other books are just less grating for me to read since I can be oblivious more often. So. *shrug* The past, man.

John Lomax! Was Alan Lomax's dad! (I have been fascinated by that younger Lomax since high school!) Grew up on the edge of poor-but-land-owning vs really-poor right after the civil war! Elevated his social class through ample educational opportunities (and a pretty quick brain)! Spent large swathes of his life chasing down the folk / work / country songs of both Black and white poor people all over the continental United States! Had a big impact on the survival of these songs and on encouraging other people to do folklore stuff through the LoC and the WPA! Had a lot of insight and warmth! Had some weird early-20th-century-white-man-typical ideas of what is funny (ie stuff that really is NOT funny). It was also so strange (and thankfully quite RARE) to read him, without apparent self-awareness, talking with empathy, respect, even the stirrings of civil rights feelings about elders he worked with who survived slavery, one moment, and then equally fondly (and more uncritically) of some Confederate old guy who is still all over that disgusting lost cause in the next one. Just because both sets of people happened to have a big musical vocabulary....

Also he sure didn't appreciate the nuances of aka the *very good reasons* why middle-class educated black people did not as a rule embrace his project and sit at his feet to learn from him. *frowns* Again, it fortunately does not come up a whole lot, and it's more valuable historically that the document acknowledges him not being welcome at Tuskegee and other HBCUs than the alternative, him NOT complaining about it, would've been.

1947 sure was not 2017! As published white people born in 1860s America go, I found this one very charming and companionable? It's a relatively low bar, but he does clear it well. And like I said, overall his project and his sympathies and his approach to life were remarkably egalitarian. Which makes the weird little gross bits more startling and appalling in context, yes - but less upsetting overall. I like to think today's version would be able to learn better and do better, but I could be kidding myself. (His son did, overall, learn better and do better, which suggests that it's true... and I reckon part of that learning was because the son spent a lot of his late adolescence traveling with and learning from the same Black people as his dad.)

One of the best parts of this book is that large amounts of the songs and even some sermons and services are quoted at length for pages. I prefer the mix of songs and contextualizing autobiographical prose, even with its faults and biases, to a straight songbook.

CN: period-typical racism as discussed above; copious unredacted use of the n-word (almost all in songs by Black people but not all, sometimes it's part of an anecdote) and occasionally other kinds of racist slurs.

[Melanie H · Rating 3 out of 5]

My rating: 3.25 stars

There’s no doubt in my mind that without John A. Lomax, much of America’s traditional folk music would have been lost. I admire a man so driven by his passion that he crisscrossed the country on numerous occasions, often at his own expense, to collect and record America’s songs.

Lomax spins his tale in an equally folksy manner, but I am curious about what scholars and journalists, especially African-Americans, have to say about him and his quest. While he seems, at least for his pre-Civil Rights era, to make an effort to treat African-Americans with some dignity and goes out of his way to pay individuals for their songs, I’m definitely interested in an alternative perspective of his life’s work.

You would think that his travels through the rural South, meeting prisoners on the chain gang and the like would have given him a much more self-aware social conscience. And maybe it did, but it goes unmentioned in this book.