SOURCE: “Preparing the Audience, Informing the Performers: John A. Lomax and Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads,” in American Music, Vol. 7, No. 3, Fall, 1989, pp. 260‐77.

In the following essay, Fenster contends that in Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (1910) John A. Lomax intentionally emphasized the romantic notion of the singing cowboy, and thus contributed significantly to the popularization of this almost mythical image.

John A. Lomax's 1910 book, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, while not the first collection of such material, was the first widely distributed, full length publication that featured the image of the cowboy as singer. Stanley Clark had included a few songs in his 1897 book Life and Adventures of the American Cow‐Boy.¹ and N. Howard Thorp's self‐published, self‐promoted and self‐distributed collection/broadside Songs of the Cowboys had appeared in 1908.² But Lomax's longer book, published by Sturgis and Walton, a New York publishing...