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AN ENDURING RELATIONSHIP: THE TEXAS FOLKLORE SOCIETY AND FOLK MUSIC by L. Patrick Hughes  A commitment to the preservation, analysis, and enjoyment of folk music underlay the 1909 creation of the Texas Folklore Society. As it was in the beginning, so it remains. Over its century-long existence , the Society has been a nurturing home for collectors and interpreters such as John A. Lomax, William A. Owens, Américo Paredes, and others. Its publications are replete with both scholarly and popular examinations of cowboy songs, train songs, field hollers, border corridos, the blues, and Old World ballads that made their way to Texas. Annual meetings have consistently featured presentations on various aspects of folk music by both academicians and lay aficionados. Groups as varied as the Southwest Texas Sacred Harp Convention, the Jubilee Choir, Four Boys from the Brakes, and the East Texas String Ensemble have performed the songs of our collective past at TFS convocations all across the Lone Star State. Nor would any annual meeting be complete without the hootenanny that has been a TFS tradition for the last halfcentury . It has been and remains a symbiotic relationship that through all the years has enriched both the Society and folk music. The Society owes its existence in no small measure to John A. Lomax’s fascination with the drover songs of the open range. He grew up as a child in Bosque County among men who’d been up the cattle trails to Kansas, and began collecting their songs long before receiving his baccalaureate degree from the University of Texas at Austin. Graduate studies at Harvard University under professors George Lyman Kittredge and Barrett Wendell led to academic legitimation and encouragement of his collecting efforts. The results were impressive. Lomax, pursuing every possible lead, rescued and preserved melodies and lyrics for “The Old Chisholm Trail,” “Git Along, Little Dogies,” and “Buffalo Skinners” among others. Returning to Texas in 1909, graduate degree in hand and 145 Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads in the works, the fortytwo -year-old musicologist, working with University of Texas linguist Leonidas W. Payne, launched the Texas Folklore Society. Payne agreed to serve as president and Lomax as secretary. In part, Lomax was repaying Professor Kittredge for his kindnesses by following through on his mentor’s suggestion that he start such an organization upon his return home. Creation of the Society, perhaps more importantly, served his own professional interests as he readily admitted in a May 25, 1910, letter to Wendell: “I hope the Folk-lore Society is going to help me in my ballad collecting; in fact, that is my only interest in it.”1 While hyperbole, Lomax’s statement foreshadows the centrality folk music would play in Society affairs during its critical first years. Seeking to broaden its base, the Society issued a circular in 1910 announcing its existence, stating its goals, and soliciting new members. Crafted by Payne, it nonetheless bore Lomax’s imprint. Various folklore topics worthy of study included legends, dialects, superstitions, omens, cures, games, and dance. The category of “Songs and Ballads,” however, was first on the list: We want the “Play Party” songs of both negro and white . . . the songs the negroes improvise and sing, the native Spanish ballads, and the many songs that have grown up in the state or have been brought to it from the other states celebrating local conditions and events—such as battles with Indians or Mexicans , the career of the desperado, the deeds of the ranger, and the life of the rancher, the freighter, the bummer or the cowboy.2 The number of presentations on such types of music must have been pleasing to Lomax once the Society began its annual meetings in 1911. In its first six gatherings, one out of every three papers involved folk music. Programs featured papers on “The Ballad of the Boll Weevil,” “A Batch of Mexican Border Ballads,” “Negro Ballads and Reels,” “Some Hobo Ballads,” and “Folklore in 146 Books, Papers, and Presentations: Texas Folklore Scholarship Appalachian Mountain Music” among others. Nor was the topic slighted once the Society went to print. First came the 1912 publication in pamphlet form of Will H. Thomas’ presentation from earlier that same year entitled “Some Current Folk-Songs of the Negro and Their Economic Interpretation.” The Society’s first book followed four years later. A miscellany titled Publications of the FolkLore Society of Texas, Number 1, known after its 1935 reissue as Round the Levee, contained three music...

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