In a go-go town, John Nova Lomax coveted a slower and reflective pace telling Houston...
His connection to the city felt natural, symbiotic and whole. He understood Houston’s history, its eccentricities, its excesses and its deficiencies.Lomax wrote books on dive bars and crime in Houston.
His writing over the past 20 years was an outgrowth of the family business. Lomax was a seventh-generation Texan. He was also a fourth-generation documentarian in a family of famed folklorists, musicologists and writers.writer John Nova Lomax credit: Craig D. LindseyWhether covering crime or culture, streets or songs, Lomax overturned all stones. He flipped those in his own life, too. His “Of Unknown Origin,” a 2013 story for Houstonia, was a devastating piece of writing and reportage about a defining mystery at the center of his own life: the volatile life and early death of his mother. “At various times she will be addicted to codeine and heroin and methadone,” he wrote in the story’s introduction. “To support her drug habits she will enlist her third-grade son in ever more brazen shoplifting schemes, and then almost kill him after drunkenly setting fire to his bedroom. She will stab her husband and lose her children to foster care, and the darkness won’t end until her body is torn to pieces by a car on Interstate 40, as she’s trying to dash across it in the wee hours of a November morning.” She left a space in his life that never got filled, but his attempts to do so — to make sense of our cultural doings — were treasures for readers and friends. He possessed a pressing curiosity about the machinations of people and culture. He also felt deeply. At times, it allowed him to tell others’ stories of struggles. His writing always appeared effortless, even when it carried some toll. His investigative inclination sent Lomax in search of Doug Supernaw, an early '90s country superstar who grew up in the Houston area. Supernaw’s career derailed and his health followed. Lomax’s attempts to track down the singer required patience and days spent staking out a bar he heard the singer frequented. The story of Supernaw’s rise and fall earned him a prestigious Deems Taylor Award from ASCAP.In his book “Houston’s Best Dive Bars,” he described driving to his home at the time, a motel near the Medical Center, when he was approached by former professional basketball player Marvin “Bad News” Barnes. Barnes then led him to the parking lots of several malls to rendezvous with various people of undetermined connection. They eventually settled into Big John’s Sports Bar at Barnes' insistence. In nine paragraphs, Lomax managed to tell an epic after-hours story about promise unrealized, of a life full of detours and dead ends and double backs. Like his famed family, he had a nose for brilliant music made under the radar. Lomax was one of the first, if not the first, writers to laud the gifts of The Woodlands singer-songwriter Hayes Carll. He helped draw attention to the local blues guitar giant Little Joe Washington, who enjoyed a surge in demand for his music in his last years. In this regard, he was carrying on a family tradition. Lomax was the great-grandson of the legendary folklorist John Avery Lomax and the great-nephew of folklorists Alan Lomax and Bess Lomax Hawes. His grandfather, John Lomax Jr., was co-founder of the Houston Folklore Society. His father John Lomax III, wrote for the underground Houston publication Space City!, before shifting to a career managing Townes Van Zandt, Rocky Hill and Steve Earle. A Houston native, Lomax spent part of his childhood in Nashville. He was attuned to and intrigued by regional rites and rituals. He carried a perpetual interest in place and enjoyed burrowing into the soil to understand the twisted roots of a town or a community. Lomax loved musicians like Kevin “Shinyribs” Russell, those whose music expressed something particular to a geographic region. But he wasn’t such a homer that he couldn’t admit one of the great Houston songs was written by a Commonwealther, Virginia native Scott Miller, who compressed the epic and strange life of Sam Houston into three minutes with “Say Ho.” Perhaps it was innate, perhaps it’s because he grew up with Houston’s sports teams, that Lomax loved oddballs and underdogs. He had no time for the Houston Texans — with an antiseptic name and pandering colors — but was often seen in Oiler blue. He loved grackles and possums. I feel like he could convince anybody — maybe not Mick Jagger — that Townes Van Zandt’s “Dead Flowers” is a more effective commentary on class and resignation than the Rolling Stones' recording of their own song. He playfully documented abandoned sofas, a photo series he called the"Street Couches of Houston." The practice proved humorous. But the variety of couches, backdrops and accompanying detritus created a deeper mood than a shallow chuckle. These photos featured some affection for things left behind. Together, they possess a sad beauty.Having hopefully dodged dereliction of duty, I’ll pivot here to where he stops being Lomax and becomes my friend, John, who in the span of minutes could wax rhapsodic about the individual artistries of Z-Ro, Sam Houston, Weldon “Juke Boy” Bonner and Billy “White Shoes” Johnson. He would joyfully seek a correlation between the name “Crystal” and the local crime blotter. He found intrigue in my Kentucky roots: the music, the literature, the beverages. He never showed up to a Kentucky Derby viewing at my home without a quality bottle of bourbon and some other totem he’d found, like a worn copy of Hugh Rodman’s “Yarns of a Kentucky Admiral.” One Kentucky Derby Day years ago, he sat on my patio soaking up too much sun on his face. I asked what size hat he needed. “Irish,” he replied. Sometimes when I felt adrift, he wasn’t the calm captain offering passage back to shore. But he was an exceptional pirate. I say this knowing full well that piracy is not a zero-sum endeavor. In foggier moments, I convinced myself John only hurt himself, but I know that to not be true. I bought an extra Clem Snide ticket for him this year — a band we discussed with some regularity — thinking he’d rally after a health scare last year. It still feels like a circuit left incomplete. One doesn’t teeter and totter without gaining some sense of where the fulcrum rests. To know that place and still transfer weight to one side, for any or all of the reasons, is its own burden. One I hope has been lifted. He leaves behind family and friends and a city that knows itself better for his having worked here. But in a go-go city that sends the old out to make space for the new, I know there’ll be no shortage of abandoned couches on the city sidewalks any time I travel from one place to another. They’ll feel different now. A wave from a friend.
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