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5 unusual facts about John Lomax


Bruce Mamando

He went on to play in fourteen matches for the Raiders over the next three seasons, scoring 3 tries, but struggled to cement a place in the Raiders forward pack which included Bradley Clyde, John Lomax, Quentin Pongia, Jason Croker, and David Furner.

John Lomax

While serving as the former music editor of the Houston Press, John Nova Lomax won an ASCAP Deems Taylor award for music journalism for his profile of troubled former country music superstar Doug Supernaw.

In January, Lomax, who knew nothing whatever about the recording business, became Lead Belly's manager and, through a friend, cowboy singer Tex Ritter, got Lead Belly a recording contract with the famous A&R man Art Satherly of ARC records.

Upon Lomax's departure this work was continued by Benjamin A. Botkin, who succeeded Lomax as the Project's folklore editor in 1938, and at the Library in 1939, resulting in the invaluable compendium of authentic slave narratives: Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of Slavery, edited by B. A. Botkin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945).

John Nova Lomax also helped discover rising country troubadour Hayes Carll.


Dink's Song

The first historical record of the song was by ethnomusicologist John Lomax in 1908, who recorded it as sung by an African American woman called Dink, as she washed her man's clothes in a tent camp of migratory levee-builders on the bank of the Brazos River, a few miles from College Station, Texas and Texas A&M College.

I Know You Rider

Modern versions can be traced back to the song's appearance in the 1934 book, American Ballads and Folk Songs, by the noted father and son musicologists and folklorists, John Lomax and Alan Lomax.


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