People yearn for connections. We crave relationships with the world around us. We search for links to the ancestors who came before us and cultivate relations with the descendants who will keep our beliefs and culture alive. The Texas Folklore Society—the oldest state folklore organization in operation in the United States—was founded on such yearnings almost 115 years ago. Its members continue to gather, stitching long-told tales, practices, and traditions into a patchwork quilt that unites the people of Texas and the Southwest.
From hosting an annual meeting and attending events across the state to publishing a yearly book, Texas Folklore Society (TFS) members keep the nonprofit organization’s mission alive. The society collects, preserves, and shares the practices and customs (the folklore) of the people of Texas and the Southwest.
“Folklore is traditional expressive culture,” explains Secretary-Editor/Executive Director Kristina Downs, Ph.D. “Folklore can include legends, folksongs, pottery, folk dances, festivals, and superstitions. It also includes jokes, slang, cryptids, graffiti, memes, your grandmother’s chili recipe, and gameday traditions. Anything created by the folk, for the folk.”
TFS is headquartered on the campus of Tarleton State University in Stephenville, a growing college town about 65 miles southwest of Fort Worth, and has members throughout the Lone Star State and beyond. Members are planning for the future while reminding folks of the organization’s storied history, revived presence, and ongoing preservation efforts. The home office, a pair of suites that includes a folklore library with TFS first editions, also has general folklore publications from around the globe, a Texana Collection, a J. Frank Dobie Collection and more among the stacks.
“The TFS library is a research library, not a lending library,” Downs explains. “We hope that members, students, and our Tarleton family will utilize our holdings for research purposes, or at least come explore our unique, and in some cases rare, collections. It really is impressive.”
If the past is any indication, TFS membership offers good company. John Avery Lomax (1867–1948), pioneering musicologist, folklorist, and Texas A&M educator, and Leonidas Warren Payne (1873–1945), University of Texas (UT) English professor and editor of A Survey of Texas Literature, the first anthology of Texas literature, in 1928 co-founded the society.
“FOLKLORE CAN INCLUDE LEGENDS, FOLKSONGS, POTTERY, FOLK DANCES, FESTIVALS, AND SUPERSTITIONS.”
– KRISTINA DOWNS, PH.D., EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
Like many things linked to TFS, its origin story is quintessentially Texan. After being spurred to organize a state organization by leaders of the American Folklore Society, Lomax and Payne met to devise an organizational plan. The customary 1909 Thanksgiving Day (American) football game and gridiron rivalry between UT and Texas A&M served as the backdrop. TFS was officially chartered in Dallas on December 29 of that year, with Payne serving as president. As it is with members and leaders today, the founders had complementing interests— Payne was a collector of stories and folk speech, while Lomax was a collector of songs.
In the beginning and still today, TFS has a membership base with widely diverse interests, according to Meredith Abarca, 2023–24 TFS President. Some members are academics and scholars. Still, some members are musicians, poets, authors, librarians, farmers, ranchers, students, and businesspeople, to name a few. Some are professionals, some are community folklorists, and some are enthusiasts. They bring their distinct cultures, beliefs, traditions, and experiences to the society through the stories they share, the papers they present, and the songs they sing.
