Boyhood Home of John A. Lomax

The Lomaxes reached Bosque County from Goodman, Mississippi, before Christmas 1869, after setting out in August in two covered wagons, and farmed north of Meridian. Decades later John Lomax was recording the work songs and spirituals of Black inmates on phonograph disks, often with his son Alan. At the Angola prison farm in Louisiana they met Huddie Ledbetter, known as Lead Belly. After Lead Belly's release Lomax took him on a tour in the north, and their book of his songs appeared in 1936. Neither source names the servants the plaque mentions.

What the plaque says

Boyhood Home of John A. Lomax Only a log kitchen now marks the homesite of John Lomax, one of the foremost collectors of American folksongs. Here, on part of the Chisholm Trail, young Lomax heard cowboys crooning and yodeling to restless herds; Negro servants taught him jig tunes, chants, work songs, and calls; and on winter nights his family sang songs and swapped stories around a blazing fire. Lomax began to write down this music while still a boy; and when he left Bosque County at age 20, he carried with him a roll of cowboy ballads -- the nucleus of his lifelong work. (1970)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Meridian State Park — 4.3 mi
  A 505-acre park in Bosque County where World War I veterans of a Civilian Conservation Corps company dammed Bee Creek in 1933-34 for a 72-acre lake and cut stone buildings around it.
• Bosque Museum — 13 mi
  A Clifton museum holding what it calls the largest repository of Norwegian artifacts in the South and Southwest, with Bosque County finds some 10,000 years old and a log cabin built by the Olson family.
• Cleburne State Park — 22 mi
  A 1930s Civilian Conservation Corps park on the old Chisholm Trail crossing country, with a spring-fed lake, a hand-carved three-tiered spillway and a CCC bridge in Johnson County.
• Dinosaur Valley State Park — 22 mi
  Theropod and sauropod trackways of about 113 million years ago in the bed of the Paluxy River, a National Natural Landmark where R. T. Bird found the first distinct sauropod tracks in 1937.

More markers nearby

• General Alison Nelson — 1.9 mi
• Bosque County — 2.3 mi
• Captain J. J. Cureton, C.S.A. — 8.7 mi
• James Buckner "Buck" Barry, C.S.A. — 8.7 mi