The Sunny Slopes of Long Ago

“Here’s to the sunny slopes of long ago,” was the favorite toast of John A. Lomax, co-founder of the Texas Folklore Society, which lends its name to this volume which opens with J. Frank Dobie’s sketch of Lomax. It is followed by Lomax’s own “Cowboy Lingo,” found among Dobie’s papers, and by two other articles on the cowboy by men whose names sound out in the history of southwestern writing—Eugene Manlove Rhodes and Andy Adams.

The theme of the cowboy and the West is further pursued in “The...