John Lomax III

John Lomax III (born August 20, 1944) is an American journalist, music distributor, and manager who has worked with many country music and folk music musicians, such as Townes Van Zandt, Steve Earle, David Schnaufer, The Cactus Brothers, Kasey Chambers, and others. In 2010, Lomax received Country Music Association's Jo Walker-Meador International Award for marketing country music outside the United States.

Biography John Lomax III was born on August 20, 1944, in Geneva, New York. Shortly after he was born, the Lomax family moved to Houston, Texas, where he spent his childhood. Lomax attended West University Elementary, Pershing Junior High, and Lamar High School. After Lomax graduated from high school in 1962, he headed to University of Texas at Austin to study history. He graduated with a B.A. in 1967 and a MS in Library Science in 1970.

He grew up in a family of folklorists and music researchers, so Lomax spent a lot of time listening to music and exploring the Houston music scene when he was younger. He knew Lightnin' Hopkins, Mance Lipscomb, and many others through his father, John A. Lomax, Jr. Alan Lomax, John's uncle, was a documentarian of folk music whose recording work exists in the Library of Congress. Alan received the National Medal of Arts in 1986 and a National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences in 2003.

Music career After a brief stint in New York and a return to Houston, Lomax moved to Nashville, Tennessee, in 1973. By the time he moved to Nashville, he already knew most of the Texan singer-songwriters living there who hung around Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt; he also met artists like Rodney Crowell, Steve Young, and Richard Dobson. He originally went to Nashville for a recording session with Rocky Hill. Later, he worked as a publicist with Jack Clement's Information Services Incorporated, a division of Jack Music Incorporated.

Lomax saw Townes Van Zandt play for the first time in Austin, Texas, when he was attending college. In the mid-1970s, he worked with Guy Clark to encourage Van Zandt to move from Colorado to Nashville. Lomax became Van Zandt's manager when he finally arrived, though he had no management experience. Lomax gathered fans for "America's greatest songwriter" through an ad in Rolling Stone. The letters he received in response to the ad were "eloquently written", some said his songs had saved their lives. Lomax managed Van Zandt from 1976 to 1978, during which time Tomato Records re-released five of Van Zandt's old albums from the Poppy label, released the long-awaited Live at the Old Quarter, and produced the Flyin' Shoes album. During this time, Lomax and his brother Joe compiled For the Sake of the Song, a book of lyrics, sheet music, photos, and essays on Van Zandt. Guitar Town also brought Earle his first Grammy nominations for Best Male Country Vocal Performance and Best Country Song. Guitar Town was certified as a "Gold" album by the R.I.A.A. in 1999.

Lomax continued to manage acts after separating from Earle. These groups include David Schnaufer (1986-1994), The Cactus Brothers (1991-1996), Kimber Clayton (1996-2000), Kasey Chambers (1996-2001), and began working with Texas singer-songwriter Bianca De Leon in 2020.

In 2011, Lomax released Texas Guitar Legend, an album of Rocky Hill's unreleased 1977 recordings. Issued on his SFL label, Lomax licensed the album to England's Floating World Records in a project helmed by Pete Macklin.

SFL was begun in 1988 and released two CDs by "America's Dulcimer Champion", David Schnaufer and two multi-track singles by Kimber Clayton, "Jose Cuervo" and "Addicted to Love", both in the late '90s.

In 2017, Lomax III re-discovered tapes of his father singing old folk songs that had since faded out of public memory. He released a collection of sixteen of the solo, a cappella recordings on SFL as a CD titled FOLK.

Lomax works to distribute country and other music overseas through Roots Music Exporters in Nashville, a business he has been running since 1996.

He opened Lomax Global Music, an Amazon Marketplace enterprise with the assistance of Ryan Schemmel, in 2011, selling mainly single copies of hard-to-find CDs, DVDs and lps mainly to U.S. customers.

Journalism & books Lomax started a long career of music writing while he was attending college in Austin. While in Houston, he wrote for Space City!, an underground newspaper. In Nashville, he met Harvey Magee, who had started Hank, the only music magazine in the city at the time. Lomax cowrote The Country Music Book in 1988. Texas Monthly; Amanda Lomax is a photographer and artist now living in Nashville.