AMERICAN FOLKLORE SOCIETY
The American Folklore Society (AFS) is the US-based professional association for folklorists, with members from the US, Canada, and around the world, which aims to encourage research, aid in disseminating that research, promote the responsible application of that research, publish various forms of publications, advocate for the continued study and teaching of folklore, etc. The Society is based at Indiana University and has an annual meeting every October. The Society’s quarterly publication is the Journal of American Folklore. (More from Wikipedia)
John A. Lomax began chronicling cowboy songs in the early years of the 20th Century. He had grown up in rural Texas and began transcribing these songs as a hobby at a young age. Ronnie D. Lankford, Jr. notes in Allmusic:
“[H]is first book, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, in 1910, [was] a groundbreaking work that helped establish the validity of the American folk song outside of the British tradition. He also joined with Professor Leonidas Payne in establishing a Texas branch of the American Folklore Society, an organization committed to preserving folklore before it disappeared.”
(February 2015)
