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)