While Americans have always performed music, serious study of American musical forms only begins in the 20th century.  John Lomax, beginning as a graduate student at Harvard, was among the very first to take interest in traditional American music, and he began his work with “cowboy” songs, which detailed the lives of what he felt were “authentic” Americans and their experiences.  Although his viewpoint could comfortably be considered naïve today, his work, along with that of anthropologist Franz Boaz and, slightly later, poet Carl Sandburg, became the foundation for American folk music studies.  It is from folk music that the protest music movement stems.  The very first protest singer/songwriter was a Swedish immigrant, born Joel Hagglund in 1879.  After his … Continued