The Society had its beginnings at the A&M-Texas football game in 1909. John Avery Lomax, a forty-two-year-old A&M English teacher from Harvard and Leonidas Warren Payne, a thirty-six year old UT English professor and linguist, met to discuss establishing a folklore society, as had been suggested by George Lyman Kittredge of Harvard. The announced purpose of the society was to collect and make known to the public songs and ballads, superstitions, signs and omens, cures and peculiar customs, legends, dialects, games, plays, and dances, and riddles and proverbs.