Home on the Range: John A. Lomax and His Cowboy Songs by Deborah Hopkinson. Illustrated by S.D. Schindler. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2009.
“John Avery Lomax grew up singing. Why, he probably knew more folk songs, tunes, and ballads than there were cattle in the great state of Texas.”
John A. Lomax was an “ethnomusicologist”. In layman’s terms, picture book language, that’s a collector of folk songs. He’s of special interest to me, a Texas girl, because he collected cowboy and western folk songs, many of them songs of Texas. John Lomax was a Texas boy, born in Mississippi, but raised in good old Texas. Deborah Hopkinson’s book tells the story of how Mr. Lomax became a folk song collector and how he recorded thousands of folk songs that might be lost to history if not for his work. Lomax’s book Cowboy Songs and Frontier Ballads, published in 1910, helped to preserve songs such as “Git Along, Little Dogies” and “Sweet Betsy from Pike” and of course, the titular song for this book, “Home on the Range.”
The book chronicles the studies and travels of the peripatetic John Lomax and his son Alan who also became a well-known ethnomusicologist. Scattered throughout the biographical material are the lyrics, or at least partial lyrics, to many of the songs that the Lomaxes collected. Unfortunately, unless you already know the songs included, you’ll have to look them up somewhere to find the rest of the lyrics to the song and the tunes. But on YouTube you can find the likes of Gene Autry and Roy Rogers and Johnny Cash and Burl Ives and others singing these old cowboy songs. Some of the songs that are alluded to:
S.D. Schindler’s illustrations that accompany Ms. Hopkinson’s fine text are first-rate. I especially liked the beautiful two page spread of cowboys in a Fort Worth saloon, where Lomax attempts to get them to sing into his “large recording horn.” There’s also a two page spread illustration of John’s classmates at the University of Texas, transformed into cowboys, and even one cowgirl, sitting around the campfire listening to Lomax sing the old songs of the West.
In the end notes to the book, Hopkinson tells readers that many of these songs, including “Home on the Range,” were thought by John Lomax to be folk songs of unknown origin, but some of them indeed had specific lyricists and composers.
“After the song (Home on the Range) became popular in the 1930’s, an Arizona couple claimed to have written it in 1905. Eventually, the song was traced to two Kansas men, Brewster Higley and Daniel E. Kelly, who wrote it in 1873. Finding the origins of songs can be difficult!”
Anyway, whoever wrote these songs, they belong to all of us now, and we can be thankful for John A. Lomax who recorded and preserved them for us to enjoy and for Deborah Hopkinson and S.D. Schindler who were also preservationists, giving us this lovely picture book biography of a pioneer musicologist and his work to save all of the old cowboy songs.