Even if you somehow aren’t familiar with the Lomax family, you’ve almost certainly been affected by their work in one way or another.
“What our family’s done for its whole existence is finding music and spreading it around the world,” says journalist and author John Lomax III, who’s worked in myriad music-business roles over the course of his decades-long career. He speaks with the Scene in the office of his West Meade home, where he’s surrounded by countless books, papers and photographs. Coffee is brewing in the kitchenette behind us, and his old pal Townes Van Zandt is looking on from a nearby photograph — a print of a picture Lomax took himself. Like his father, his uncle and his grandfather, Lomax is a collector and something of an archivist — or a “packrat,” as he puts it.
Roughly 140 years ago, Lomax’s grandfather John Sr. was a child in Meridian, Texas, which happened to be “right smack in the middle of one of the branches of the Chisholm Trail.” He’d sneak out during the night to listen to cowboys singing their frontier songs as they camped along the cattle-driving trail, writing down the lyrics and memorizing their melodies despite having no musical training or background. That was the birth of a family obsession with music preservation and archival work that would span four generations.
In 1910, Lomax Sr. released Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, the now incredibly influential tome with a forward by none other than Theodore Roosevelt. It included, among other songs, “Home on the Range,” which had never been in a book before. Years later, during the depths of the Great Depression, Lomax Sr. and his son Alan would crisscross the country again, making field recordings of songs and stories by folk, gospel and blues artists direct to disc on a machine built into the back of a Model A Ford. With discs and recording equipment supplied by the Library of Congress, the Lomaxes eventually amassed something like 8,500 recordings. Among their finds was a blues singer named Huddie William Ledbetter — better known as Lead Belly. After Lomax Sr.’s death in the 1940s, Alan continued to seek out and record little-known performers, expanding his work to include Haiti and Europe, where he lived out much of Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare.
“They both took the view,” says John Lomax III of his late uncle and grandfather, “ ‘We’re not going to copyright these. These songs belong to the American people.’ ”
As he speaks of his family’s work in music preservation, Lomax’s memory is remarkable — dates, numbers, names. He keeps a massive archive of every promo picture he’s ever received, and not long ago he licensed 18 images to the production of Ken Burns’ forthcoming PBS documentary series on country music.
“I’ve got seven original pictures and 11 archive pictures in the Ken Burns project that’s coming up in September,” says Lomax. “They used 3,278 images. … My little 18 pieces is about one-half of 1 percent, so I like to tell people they couldn’t have done it without me.”
Lomax, who has lived in Nashville since 1973, has also played a role in the careers of several noted songwriters and performers. For a time in the ’70s, he managed the aforementioned Van Zandt, encouraging the legendary songster to relocate to Music City. With his brother Joe, Lomax put together the book For the Sake of the Song, a collection of Van Zandt’s music, along with essays and photographs. But as Lomax tells it, some music-biz types got in Townes’ ear, convincing the singer to fire his manager of two years. “I was asking about, ‘Where are the contracts? Where’s the money? Where’s the publishing statements? Where are the royalties?’ And they just fired me. They got Townes drunk and had him sign some papers, and I was gone.”
Lomax swore off managing for a time, but in the 1980s he decided to take on a young songwriter by the name of Steve Earle. That ended around the time Earle released his 1986 debut Guitar Town, and despite swearing off managing yet again, Lomax would go on to represent artists including Appalachian-dulcimer player David Schnaufer and Australian country singer Kasey Chambers.
For the past 23 years, Lomax’s primary gig has been foreign distribution — shipping, among other things, retail-store-exclusive CDs from the likes of Prince, Garth Brooks and Miley Cyrus to importers, as well as work by independent artists who don’t have international distribution. Business there isn’t what it once was, due in large part to the proliferation of streaming services, but Lomax continues to further the family work by touring, lecturing and writing. In 2017, he released a collection of folk standards recorded by his father John Lomax Jr., titled simply Folk. Lomax III’s son John Nova Lomax (a senior editor at Texas Monthly) and his daughter Amanda (an artist and photographer) both volunteered their input on the project.
“My uncle’s motto was ‘giving a voice to the voiceless,’ and now it’s even worse because giant corporations are squeezing everything but their music out of the picture,” says Lomax. “Some of these songs are just great, they’re a part of our heritage, and they need to have all the help they can get to last to another generation.”
For as long as he’s able, Lomax intends to do his part.
