The titans of song collecting were a charismatic Texan double-act: John A. Lomax (1867–1948) and his son Alan (1915–2002). John grew up among what he called ‘the upper crust of the po’ white trash’, and a burning sense of mission led him to become Twenties America’s most influential folklorist; his musical discoveries among cowboys and black convict singers spanned the end of oral transmission and the dawn of recording. Alan Lomax became his father’s co-recordist at seventeen; after John’s death, he carried on the torch in the Mississippi Delta, before extending his activities worldwide.

John brought celebrated singers including Lead Belly into the limelight; the classic songs he collected and anthologised helped redefine American culture. Alan Lomax’s effect on that culture was seismic, as he made his own discoveries, and as a singer-collector-impresario led folk-blues revivals in both America and Britain. His books, plays, and radio programmes championed the music of the dispossessed; he played a leading part in the musical revolution which threw up Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, and the Beatles. Meanwhile with his researches in Haiti, Spain, and Italy he opened up new fields in musicology. And drawing on his archive of films, videotapes, and sound recordings he promoted ‘Cantometrics’, a system of song-classification which he himself had created, and which he messianically believed could unify – musically at least – the world.

This was what six-year-old John Lomax chanted as he ran barefoot through freshly turned furrows, doling out seed-corn from his bucket. His autobiography, Adventures of a Ballad Hunter, depicts a rural Texan childhood in which folk songs, revivalist hymns, and the recitation of English poetry were all part of daily life. His best friend was a young ex-slave whom he taught to read, and who taught him plantation songs and dance steps in return. Lomax didn’t grow up a cowboy because his father didn’t have enough livestock, but cowboy culture was all around him, and cowboy songs got into his soul. His father had bred him up to be a farmer, but he was determined to study, and sold his beloved pony to finance himself.