cowboys became popular as characters in novels and in Wild West shows. The first movie western was The Great Train Robbery, filmed in 1903. At the height of this romanticizing of the American cowboy, John Lomax published his preeminent work, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads. This work was acclaimed in both academic and popular readership and helped to expand the scope of what constituted folk music, as previous scholarship focused on songs with European ballad ancestry, such as with the Child Ballads. While Cowboy Songs may have opened the door to legitimizing a wider range of vernacular music in the field of American folk music scholarship, in later years it has been criticized for not being a strictly scientific historical endeavor. Lomax himself admitted, "I have violated the ethics of ballad-gatherers, in a few instances, by selecting and putting together what seems to be the best lines from different versions, all telling the same story...Frankly the volume is meant to be popular." cowboy poetry Railroad songs One of the most popular railroad folk songs in American history was The Ballad of Casey Jones, a song about a train conductor who sacrificed himself to prevent a collision. The "Ballad of John Henry (folklore)" is about an African-American folk hero said to have worked as a "steel-driving man". Coal Mining The earliest known coal mine was in Richmond Virginia in 1750. Coal became the primary source of fuel in the United States by the 1880s, beating out wood, with usage peaking in 1910. Coal camps were made up of a largely Irish and Welsh demographic, which is evident in the structure of coal mining songs. Coal mining was fraught with danger that was unmitigated by morally indifferent mining companies. Explosions and cave-ins were a constant fear, as were black lung disease and pneumoconiosis. Songs such as "Don't Go Down in the Mine," "The Dying Mine Brakeman," and "A Miner's Prayer" gave voice to these fears. Efforts to unionize began in the 1930s, creating tunes such as "We Shall Not Be Moved," which was a rewriting of the gospel hymn "I Shall Not Be Moved." The use of familiar hymns made the songs easy for organizers to sing along with, and also imbued the cause with an air of righteousness. "Sixteen Tons" was written in 1946 by Merle Travis about the plight of coal miners and life in company towns. Travis also