Digital Repository

John Avery Lomax

Born in 1867, folklorist John Lomax spent his life collecting songs "around chuck wagons, up hollers and down in river bottoms, on levee and railroad, in the saloons, churches, and penitentiaries of the South and Southwest." Upon his death in 1948, the New York Times wrote, "If anybody ever did, John Lomax really heard America singing."

Image: John Avery Lomax, ca. 1930–1950. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Audio: Houston Public Media

Photograph of John Avery Lomax