Ruby Terrill Lomax Boardroom. Marriage Ruby Terrill became the second Mrs. John A. Lomax in 1934. "Miss Terrill," as John Lomax called her even during their fourteen years of marriage, first met her future husband in 1921. She was dean of women and classical languages instructor at East Texas State Teachers College in Commerce, Texas, when John Lomax gave a lecture on his cowboy song research. After she gave him and his young son Alan a tour of Commerce, he enlisted her as a babysitter. Over a decade later, the widowed John Lomax met Miss Terrill again, at the University of Texas at Austin. An alumnus and former employee of the university, he was visiting this time in his role as a parent, and she was Alan Lomax's Latin instructor. Field recordings Throughout the summer of 1933, while John and Alan Lomax toured the Southern states collecting folksongs, John courted Ruby Terrill by mail, engaging her interest while simultaneously describing to her his life's work. Perhaps she saw an aspect of her passion for the classics in his passion for preserving near-extinguished American folk expressions; perhaps it was their mutual love for Texas that transformed their acquaintance into romance. After receiving the blessing of John Lomax's two adult children, Shirley and John Jr., they announced their engagement at a grand fête in Austin on March 31, 1934. As "an event of statewide interest," it was reported in all of the major Texas newspapers the next day. John and Ruby Lomax married on July 21, 1934, in Commerce, Texas, the site of their first meeting. They honeymooned in the West, then resettled in Austin, where she resumed her duties at the university and assumed the new duties of parenting the Lomax teenagers, Bess and Alan, who affectionately called their stepmother "Deanie." She managed to teach and administer at the university, remain involved in myriad organizations, oversee the home and family, and take care of a number of duties for her husband's research, while he resumed collecting, lecturing, and meeting with publishers and funders. In 1937, she exchanged the academic pursuits and frenetic schedule of her life in Austin for the intellectual pursuits and equally frenetic pace of life on the road with a ballad hunter. The Lomaxes moved to the "House in the Woods" outside Dallas as their permanent residence, then drove away in her Plymouth on a scouting tour of