John Lomax was born in Mississippi in the late 1860s and carried by ox cart to a river-bottom farm in rural Texas, where he heard cowboys sing on the cattle trails and formed a life-changing friendship with Nat Blythe, a formerly enslaved farmhand who taught him folk songs and the juba dance in exchange for reading lessons. Lomax sold his favorite pony to fund college, arrived at the University of Texas with a roll of handwritten cowboy song transcriptions, and burned them behind the men's dormitory after an English professor dismissed them as worthless.

This episode follows his recovery at Harvard in 1906 under George Lyman Kittredge, the 1910 frontier ballad anthology with a foreword by Theodore Roosevelt, and the catastrophic early 1930s when his wife died, the Dallas bank where he worked failed, and he was 65, in debt, and raising a chi ...