LEONIDAS PAYNE
Leonidas Payne (July 12, 1873 – June 16, 1945) was an American linguist and professor of English at the University of Texas. He edited the first anthology of Texas literature, A Survey of Texas Literature (1928) and was one of the first to recognize the talent of e.e. cummings. In 1909, he and John Lomax founded the Texas Folklore Society, of which Payne was the first president.(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)
