Discovering keepers of folk music

It sure seemed quiet for 10 a.m. on a weekday, when John A. Lomax, who recorded folk songs for the Library of Congress, knocked on the front door of a six-room shanty on the northern bank of the Colorado River. Maggie Gant answered, still in her bedclothes. The children were still asleep, the mother of eight whispered.

"Last night we all got to singing and dancing. We didn't go to bed until 2 in the morning," she told Lomax, which he recalled in "Our Singing Country," his 1941 book that contained four songs collected from the Gants.

"The singing kept us so happy," Maggie Gant told Lomax, "we couldn't go to sleep."

It was 1934, during the depths of the Depression, but the Gant family of dispossessed sharecroppers was rich in music.

Lomax, a former University of Texas administrator, and his son Alan made more than 40 primitive recordings of the Gant family, whose vast repertoire ranged from jailhouse ballads and play ditties to cowboy songs and minstrel tunes.

The most prominent of those, in retrospect, was "When First Unto This Country a Stranger I Came," which Joan Baez sang live and Jerry Garcia and David Grisman recorded in 1993. They all learned it from the 1960s folkies the New Lost City Ramblers, who heard it from the Gants.

Mike Seeger (Pete's half-brother) of the Ramblers and his sister Peggy knew the song growing up, as their mother, Ruth Crawford Seeger, transcribed and archived the songs the Lomaxes recorded for the Library of Congress in the 1930s.

If Maggie Gant and her 17-year-old daughter, Foy, hadn't sung the tragic song about a jilted lover-turned-horse thief into the Lomaxes' acetate phonograph disk recorder, it almost certainly would've been lost forever.

The Lomax family, based in Austin, lived to keep such songs of the working-class people alive, lugging their 315-pound disk-cutting machine to prison work camps, Cajun settlements, fishing villages, cattle ranches, the hills of Kentucky, the Rio Grande Valley and even Haiti to find words and music that told the story of a culture.

With the Gant family of singers, led by mother Maggie (father George wasn't very musical), the Lomaxes found a treasure in their own backyard.

In a note in the Lomax family papers, archived at UT's Center for American History, John Lomax wrote, "The Gant family in Austin, Texas has a repertoire of about two hundred genuine folk-songs. We only had just begun the job of recording these tunes when we left town."

The Lomaxes recorded only a fraction of the Gants' material before they took off to manage and tour with their great discovery Leadbelly, yet it's a body of work that puts the Gants as "among the most important informants on traditional music that no one's ever heard of," said Minnesota musician/folklorist Lyle Lofgren.

The family's list of songs passed down was "astoundingly broad," Lofgren said. "It included many rare versions of archaic British ballads, the sort you might expect to find, if you were lucky, in some remote holler of the Appalachians, but probably not in Austin."

The mystery behind the music has made the Gants' story all the more intriguing. Even the Library of Congress, which keeps a thin file of info on the Gants, did not know until a few months ago that one member of the family, 86-year-old Ella Gant, was still alive and living in Utah.

But the biggest question has always been this: Where did this family of Mormons, originally from East Texas, learn some extremely rare songs of so many different styles?

A clue came with the family's recently discovered genealogy, which daughter Foy Gant Kent registered with the Mormon church before she died in Houston in 2008 at age 90. Maggie Gant's maternal grandmother, Lavinia "Lucy" Brown, was born in Wales, "the Land of Song," which has a rich ballad tradition.

Maggie's mother, Sarah Reeves, was born and raised in the Tennessee mountains but moved to Texas before Maggie was born in the East Texas town of Lone Oak in 1893. Lavinia Brown Reeves, the Welsh wellspring from which the songs most likely came, died in Grayson County, about 60 miles north of Dallas, in 1899.

Austin's first family of song

The Gant family's path to Austin can be charted according to where the children were born, starting with oldest son Nephi in the Northeast Texas town of Mineola in 1913.

The next four — Ether, Foy, Adoniron and Ella — were born just a few miles south of Mineola, when the family lived in Kelsey, the largest Mormon colony in the state.