What does Jerry Bywaters and John Lomax, and John’s son, Alan, have in common…SMU and the Southwest Review!
Alan Lomax’s music archive is now online! http://www.openculture.com/2019/04/alan-lomaxs-massive-music-archive-is-online.html
“First litho made Jan. 1, 1935” appears in Jerry Bywaters’s handwriting on the first page of his print notebook for the print Gargantua. This was a decisive date for Bywaters for he was now serious about printmaking and evidently was planning to document each print carefully. The subject for Gargantua, Bywaters’s first recorded lithograph, was the Lomax House at 723 W. Oak in Denton, Texas, a large Victorian – style house of a type that was commonly found in the higher-income areas of Texas towns and cities. Bywaters humorously entitled the lithograph Gargantua, taking the title from the 16th century book by Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, a story of two giants – a father (Gargantua) and his son (Pantagruel). Bywaters gave the full title to one of the lithographs but resorted to the shorter version for the remaining prints. The lithograph was exhibited in the Seventh Annual Dallas Allied Arts Exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts where it won the Dallas Print and Drawing Collectors’ Society Prize. One can see Bywaters’s sense of humor emerging in his handling of the subject for the print image. Francine Carraro, Bywaters’s biographer, described the image this way:
Gargantua, a caricature of an overstuffed Victorian house, effectively used exaggeration to make a point. Bywaters found humor in the curious mix of architectural styles that dotted the Texas landscape and small towns. “No greater paradox has ever been seen on the Texas plains,” he claimed, “than Gothic Cathedrals serving as courthouses, or wives of ex-cowhands speaking French in the Chinese drawing rooms of Romanesque mansions.”
The house has been recently restored and is still referred to as the Lomax House. Built between 1898 and 1902, it was purchased in 1911 by a Mr. R. P. Lomax. Mr. Lomax’s brother, John A. Lomax, and John’s son, Alan Lomax, were well known collectors of folk songs and authorities on native American range songs. Both John and Alan Lomax wrote articles about these subjects for Southwest Review during the 1930s and 1940s. In 1933 John Lomax became curator of the Archives of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress, and later, in 1937, Alan joined the archival staff as assistant in charge. Both men were instrumental in making recordings of folk music of the South and Southwest. In the 1930s the Lomaxes discovered the legendary blues singer Huddie Ledbetter, better known as “Leadbelly,” in a Louisiana prison, and they recorded his music. Their book, American Ballads and Folk Songs, received a favorable review in the April, 1935 issue of Southwest Review. John Lomax eventually moved back to Dallas where he joined Jerry Bywaters as an associate editor for the Southwest Review during the 1940s.
Blog post: Courtesy of Ellen Buie Niewyk, from her publication, Jerry Bywaters – Lone Star Printmaker. 23-26. Also accessible through SMU Scholar at https://scholar.smu.edu/ebooks/1/
Featured image: Jerry Bywaters, Gargantua, lithograph, 1935.