AUSTIN, Texas -- 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 repertoire included jailhouse ballads, play ditties, cowboy songs, minstrel tunes and more.
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 that 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 have been lost forever.
The Lomax family, based in Austin, lived to keep such songs of the working-class people alive, lugging a 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, the Lomaxes found a treasure in their own backyard.
In a note in the Lomax family papers, archived at the University of Texas Center for American History, John Lomax wrote, "The Gant family in Austin, Texas has a repertoire of about 200 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 "among the most important informants on traditional music that no one's ever heard of," said Minnesota musician/folklorist Lyle Lofgren.
The Gant mystery
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 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.
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.
Georgia came next in Altus, Okla., in 1925, and the youngest, Trovesta Mae, was born in 1929 in the Texas Panhandle town of Shamrock, from which the family moved to Austin after a severe drought dried up farm work. It's unknown when and where Glida Koch, Maggie's daughter from an earlier marriage, was born.
Father George, Maggie and the kids arrived in Austin in 1933 looking for work and, according to Lomax, went on relief at times.
The two oldest kids, Glida and Nephi, started families and lived together in a house on Third Street. The rest of the family lived in the riverside shack where the recordings were made, about a half-mile west of Deep Eddy Pool.
The Gants recorded only for the Lomaxes, in four sessions spread out over two years. Maggie and the kids never recorded together again after 1936.
The Lomaxes' role
The Lomax family background - patriarch John got his master's degree in the arts from Harvard University - was different from the Gants', but the families had the Great Depression in common.
John Lomax made his mark as a folklorist with his 1910 anthology "Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads."
In 1933, John, who had become unemployed after the 1929 stock market crash, and an 18-year-old Alan Lomax began collecting songs for the Library of Congress, which named John Lomax the head curator of its Archive of American Folk Songs.
The Library of Congress provided the Lomaxes with a bulky recording machine that cut grooves onto a disk as the songs were sung. Lomax could play back the recording immediately. According to John Lomax biographer Nolan Porterfield, the Lomaxes became aware of the Gants through budding folklorist John Henry Faulk, then a 21-year-old UT classmate of Alan Lomax's.
Soon the Gants were starting to become well-known to many in the Austin area.
But in 1936, tragedy hit the singing family hard. Oldest boy Nephi, 22, was murdered after a fight in a beer joint.
According to a never-published story by Alan Lomax, Nephi, who had two hungry babies at home, had gone to Ollie's to try to borrow money from a bartender friend or "maybe he could pick up a few nickels singing ... because he was the best singer in the family."
At Ollie's, Nephi was challenged to fight by a man who'd just gotten out of prison 24 hours earlier and was "already crazy drunk and looking for trouble," according to Alan Lomax. Nephi got the best of 21-year-old Howard Armstrong, who went out to his car, got a gun and shot Nephi in the head through the glass door. Sporting a black eye, Armstrong turned himself in to police the next day and claimed self-defense.
But the jury deliberated less than an hour before convicting Armstrong and sentencing him to 30 years in prison.
At Nephi's funeral, Alan Lomax noted that the family "cried so much that their eyes and cheeks were red with salt burn." Calling the Gants "a lovin' bunch of poor people," Lomax wrote of the incredible pain they surely felt at losing a brother and a son.
"They knew what it was like to be hungry and cold and not have a place to call home, but they'd been strong under all this suffering and sorrow because they loved each other so much."
After her children's father, George, died in 1943, Maggie Gant remarried twice and eventually moved to Arizona, where she ran a trailer court. She died in 1977 in Houston.
Lofgren, the Minnesota folklorist, said the Gant family singers had "arrived seemingly from nowhere and disappeared again, at least as far as the folk song community was concerned."
