Bess Lomax Hawes
| Bess Lomax Hawes | |
|---|---|
| Born |
January 21, 1921 Austin, Texas |
| Died | November 27, 2009 (aged 88) Portland, Oregon |
| Notable instruments | |
| Guitar, banjo, mandolin | |
Bess Lomax Hawes (January 21, 1921 – November 27, 2009) was an American folk musician, folklorist, and researcher. She was the daughter of John Avery Lomax and Bess Bauman-Brown Lomax, and the sister of Alan Lomax.
Born in Austin, Texas, Bess grew up learning folk music from a very early age, since her father, a former English professor and twice president of the American Folklore Society, was Honorary Curator of American folk song at the Library of Congress from 1935 to 1948. As a child, she excelled at classical piano, under the tutelage of her mother, and later she learned to play the guitar.
She entered the University of Texas at fifteen and the following year assisted her father, John A.; her brother, Alan Lomax; and modernist composer Ruth Crawford Seeger with their book, Our Singing Country (1941). She graduated from Bryn Mawr College near Philadelphia with a degree in sociology. Later, in the 1960s, she was among the first group of students to receive an M.A. in folklore at the University of California at Berkeley, under the guidance of professor Alan Dundes.
In the early 1940s she moved to New York City, where she was active on the folk scene. She was an on-and-off member of the Almanac Singers; she and a fellow Almanac singer, Baldwin "Butch" Hawes, an artist, were married in 1943. Another Almanac member, Woody Guthrie, taught her mandolin.
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