Dirty Linen

This is an excerpt from the print edition of Dirty Linen #129 (April/May 2007).
The full article is in the magazine, available on newsstands, by subscription, and at the Dirty Linen webstore.

Romaine Lowdermilk

Unearthed

Treasures and Oddities from the American Folklife Center Archive at the Library of Congress

by Steve Winick

One of the most interesting pieces of cowboy lore in the American Folklife Center Archive is a 33 r.p.m., aluminum-based acetate disc containing 13 songs by the pioneering cowboy performer Romaine "Romy" Lowdermilk (1890-1970). Although known as a singer, a songwriter, and an author of Western yarns, Lowdermilk never made any commercial recordings of his music. We assumed that this disc, like other known Lowdermilk recordings, was a one-off recording made at the request of a friend or collector. But on Nov. 29, 2006, an unlikely event occurred: Its twin, another disc by Lowdermilk, with identical content, cut some years after ours at the same studio, was identified in Safford, Arizona. Further research revealed that we were dealing with two discs made from the same master recording, and led to the discovery of even more material by Romaine Lowdermilk.

Like many of the treasures in the archive, our Lowdermilk record arrived through the personal connections of a staff member, in this case automation specialist Stephanie Hall. In the mid-1990s, she received an email from her brother, Geoffrey. A resident of Austin, Texas, Geoffrey owned a copy of the AFC's CD release Cowboy Songs, Ballads, and Cattle Calls from Texas [Rounder CD 1512], and knew that the Archive collected cowboy lore. When a friend at work mentioned a recording, owned by an uncle, of an unusual cowboy singer named "Romy Lowdermilk," he contacted Stephanie by email.

"From my brother's email, this recording sounded like it might be appropriate for our archive," Hall remembered. "We do have quite a good representation of traditional cowboy songs in our collection, but I didn't know anything about this singer. I went to see the director of the American Folklife Center at the time, Alan Jabbour, and I asked him if we might want a recording of a cowboy singer called Romy Lowdermilk. 'Romy Lowdermilk!' he exclaimed. 'Who's got a recording of Romy Lowdermilk?' "

[The American Folklife Center Archive at the Library of Congress is home to many unusual artifacts related to folk music. This is one in a series of reports on unusual musical materials in the Archive. Steve Winick, contributing editor to Dirty Linen, is also a folklorist, writer, and editor for the American Folklife Center.]

[cover #129]