Jean Schnitz

Born in Spur, Texas, Jean Granberry went to schools in Victoria and Alice, graduating from high school in Raymondville in 1948. She graduated from Texas College of Arts and Industries in Kingsville, Texas in 1952 and married Lew Schnitz in 1953. Their first home was at Kelsey Bass Humble Camp, in the Brooks County brush country 45 miles from the nearest town. She learned to love the brush country of Texas and the writings of J. Frank Dobie. She grew up in a home that provided the best traditions of folklore. Jean’s Grandmother Scudder played a hammered dulcimer inherited from Jean’s great-grandfather. Almost every evening for many years old time music was played and sung. She inherited that old dulcimer in 1967 and by the 1970’s provided musical programs in many places around Kingsville and Beeville. In 1981 she was invited to participate in the Texas Folklife festival in San Antonio – where she performed many times every day and jammed in the barn on the “back forty” until midnight every night -- for the next 31 years. Meanwhile, Jean and Lew Schnitz enjoyed raising three sons in Refugio, Kingsville, Pleasanton, and Corpus Christi. She started back to work in 1974 as a Legal Secretary and worked a 30-year career. In Kingsville, she began to write dozens of poems, many of which were published in local newspapers. She joined the Texas Folklore Society in 1990, after which she wrote and presented fourteen papers and participated, sometimes as emcee, at the nightly hoots that were part of the TFS experience and became President of TFS in 2006-2007. She represented TFS with three papers for the Texas State Historical Association. She presented a paper about cowboying and wrote Some Were Cowboys, a book with Pat Reagan that won the Will Rogers Award for Best Western Nonfiction in 2009. Jean has written several books and papers researching various aspects of her family’s music background and family history, along with a cookbook, and dozens of articles, essays, and poems. She has been able to visit the ranch where Dobie grew up because her brother’s father-in-law led the group that bought the Dobie ranch in (whatever year). Lew retired from Exxon and Jean and Lew have lived near Boerne since 1989. Jean still plays that hammered dulcimer and autoharp and plays with a group called “The Riverpickers” which played for various festivals in Boerne, Comfort, Fredericksburg, and Castroville. Named FELLOW of the Texas Folklore Society in 2022.