Last Cavalier: The Life and Times of John A. Lomax, 1867-1948

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University of Illinois Press, 1996 - 580 pages
Last Cavalier is the never-before-told story of Lomax's long career, as colorful and lively as it was controversial. The book chronicles how this native Mississippian (although Lomax emphatically considered himself a Texan, having come to that state with his family as a child) collected folksongs on horseback, sold stocks and bonds, served at several major universities, lectured nationwide on many occasions, published a dozen books, helped legitimize comparative literature as an academic discipline, and played a major role in developing the Library of Congress's Archive of American Folk Song, now part of the American Folklife Center. This first full account of Lomax's life relies on eight years of research through the Lomax family letters and papers and many interviews with those who knew him.
 

Contents

Lone Star Trail
1
PURSUIT OF THE VISION
5
Texian Boys 186787
7
Hard Times in the Country 188795
20
The Highly Educated Man 189597
33
Come All You Fair and Tender Ladies 189799
50
Trouble Trouble 18991903
68
EXILE AND RETURN
85
HIGH ROADS HARD ROADS
271
Johnny Wont You Ramble? 1932
273
Hallelujah Bum Again 193233
288
Wedlock 193334
309
Prison Moan 1934
329
Yankee Doodle 1935
345
Rambled the Country Early and Late 193536
363
TWILIGHTS LAST GLEAMING
381

Married Me a Wife 19034
87
The Boston Come AllYe 19046
101
The Highly Educated Man Part 2 19067
113
John Was AWritin 190710
127
Git Along Little Dogies 191011
145
ONE MANS FAMILY
159
Man on the Flying Trapeze 191115
161
Long Summer Day 1915
181
Hell in Texas 191517
195
Goodbye Old Paint 191719
217
More Hell in Texas 191925
231
Fare Thee Well Babe 192532
253
White House Blues 193436
383
Ten Thousand Miles from Home 193639
402
Home on the Range 193941
417
Pass around Your Bottle 193745
431
Look down That Lonesome Road 193947
450
When the Works All Done This Fall 194248
467
Notes
487
Sources
551
Acknowledgments
557
Index
561
Copyright

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About the author (1996)

Nolan Porterfield is the author of Jimmie Rodgers: The Life and Times of America's Blue Yodeler, winner of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award; A Way of Knowing, a novel that won the Best Texas Novel Award of the Texas Institute of Letters; and "Jimmie Rodgers on Record," a monograph and discography that accompanied a Smithsonian reissue of the music of Jimmie Rodgers and was nominated for a Grammy Award.

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