Oakwood Cemetery in Austin will host the inaugural Lomax Legacy American Music Concert on Saturday, September 27. The event begins at 12 p.m. at the Oakwood Cemetery Chapel, 1601 Navasota Street, and is presented in partnership with Austin Arts, Music, Culture and Entertainment and Save Austin’s Cemeteries. The concert is free and open to the public.
The program is designed to honor John Avery Lomax Sr. and his family, whose work preserved a wide range of American music genres. According to the City of Austin’s announcement, local acoustic musicians, including Xavier Shannon and Jess Ledbetter, will perform songs recorded by the Lomax family, such as blues by Lead Belly, ballads from the Gant Family, and traditional Hispanic and Caribbean music.
John Avery Lomax Sr., buried at Oakwood Cemetery, traveled across the United States with an early portable recording device to document the music of rural and working-class communities. His son, Alan Lomax, commemorated at Oakwood with a cenotaph, continued this work by recording music across continents. Bess Lomax Hawes, Alan’s sister, helped establish the Smithsonian’s 1976 Bicentennial Festival of American Folklife and created the National Heritage Fellowships.
The concert will also feature a tour of the Lomax Family Lot, where attendees can place guitar picks on the family monuments as a symbolic gesture. Organizers note that chapel seating is limited, though free parking will be available along the cemetery’s main road. Light refreshments will be served.
Save Austin’s Cemeteries, a nonprofit partner for the event, works to preserve historic cemeteries as cultural and educational resources. The organization documents burial grounds, promotes awareness, and advocates for their recognition as part of Texas’s historical landscape.
The Lomax Legacy American Music Concert is intended to celebrate the family’s contributions to documenting traditional music and to highlight cemeteries as community heritage spaces.
