Goodman, Mississippi, Birthplace of a Folklorist

You are passing through Goodman, a quiet Holmes County town named for the first president of the Mississippi Central Railroad. It was settled around eighteen sixty and chartered just after the Civil War. Most travelers pass through without a second thought, but Goodman is the birthplace of one of the most consequential listeners in American musical history.

John Avery Lomax was born here in eighteen sixty-seven. His family moved to Texas when he was a toddler, but his Mississippi origins stayed with him. Lomax went on to collect cowboy songs, field hollers, prison work songs, and blues across the South, helping establish the Library of Congress Archive of Folk Song. He also discovered Lead Belly in a Louisiana prison camp in nineteen thirty-three. American roots music owes an enormous debt to a man who started in this small town.