Texas Folklore Society. Vol. 1, 1909-1943 (Publications of the Texas Folklore Society ; 51)

The Society had its beginnings at the A&M-Texas football game in 1909. John Avery Lomax, a forty-two-year-old A&M English teacher from Harvard and Leonidas Warren Payne, a thirty-six year old UT English professor and linguist, met to discuss establishing a folklore society, as had been suggested by George Lyman Kittredge of Harvard. The announced purpose of the society was to collect and make known to the public songs and ballads, superstitions, signs and omens, cures and peculiar customs, legends, dialects, games, plays, and dances, and riddles and proverbs. Volume I of this history chronicles the collecting and publishing from 1909 to 1943. The second volume to the Texas Folklore Society history covers from the McCarthy era to the end of the wild and woolly sixties. Includes the publishing history of the TFS books, anecdotes about the gatherings of the Society (including Hermes Nye starting the tradition of the hootenanny at Texas Folklore Society meetings in 1956), and the emphasis on singing beginning at Society gatherings. The final volume begins with the move from Wilson Hudson's editorship at the University of Texas to F. E. Abernethy's editorship at Stephen F. Austin State University: "We moved during the burnt-out end of August, Wilson and I ... We sweated and cussed some as we packed the Society's materials in cardboard boxes and carried them out to the station wagon parked behind Parlin Hall. We took down the pictures of Lomax and Payne and Thompson and some Cisneros sketches ... Frank Dobie's old felt hat with a turkey feather in the band was sitting on a filing cabinet, so we put it in. Very gently we loaded a box of Mody's paisanos, five or six of them ... And the Society's publications ... that stretched back to Stith Thompson's Volume I in 1916 and make up our umbilicus, the visible chain of the Society's being, that makes us all a part of it from its inception in 1909." This is the third volume in a history of the Texas Folklore Society. Covering the years 1971 to 2000, it begins with the move from Wilson Hudson's editorship at the University of Texas to Francis Edward Abernethy's editorship at Stephen F. Austin State University. This is a society that you join because you want to. The purpose of the society is to collect and make known to he public sons and ballads, superstitions, games, plays, and proverbs v. 1. 1909-1943 v. 2. 1943-1971 v. 3. 1971-2000.