The Texas Folklore Society was thirty-five years old in 1944, having come into existence under the hands of John Avery Lomax and Leonidas Warren Payne in 1909. J. Frank Dobie held the reins of the Society from 1922 to 1943, when he turned the direction to Mody Coggin Boatright. Allen Maxwell and Wilson Hudson followed as editors of Society publications.

These were the years when the Society lost J. Frank Dobie and Leonidas Payne, but it gained such notables as F. E. Abernethy, Jim Byrd, Ed Gaston, William Owens, Américo Paredes, Mabel Major, LaVerne Harrell, Elithe Hamilton Kirkland, John Q. Anderson, George Hendricks, Martin Shockley, James Ward Lee, Faye Leeper, and Ruth Dodson.