Bess Lomax Hawes (January 21, 1921 – November 27, 2009) was an American folk musician, folklorist, and researcher. She was the daughter of John Avery Lomax and Bess Bauman-Brown Lomax, and the sister of Alan Lomax and John Lomax Jr.

Born in Austin, Texas, she excelled at classical piano as a child under her mother's tutelage. Later, she learned to play the guitar. She learned folk music from a very early age since her father, a former English professor and twice president of the American Folklore Society, was Honorary Curator of American folk songs at the Library of Congress from 1935 to 1948. He collected and published cowboy songs as early as the 1900s. He and her brother, Alan, traveled the South for the Library of Congress recording rural musicians who had not been influenced by the radio. At the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola during their first trip, they recorded Huddie Ledbetter (“Leadbelly”) who went on to become a successful and influential performer of traditional African-American music.

During the years that followed, her father and brother worked with many other folklorists, musicologists and composers from all over the world and recorded more than 10,000 records of vocal and instrumental music.

They were responsible for introducing American audiences to other folk musicians and blues artists such as Muddy Waters, Woody Guthrie, Josh White and Burl Ives.

She entered the University of Texas at fifteen and the following year assisted her father, John, her brother, Alan and modernist composer Ruth Crawford Seeger with their book, Our Singing Country (1941). She went on to graduate from Bryn Mawr College near Philadelphia with a degree in sociology. Later, during the 1960s, she was among the first group of students to receive an M.A. in folklore at the University of California at Berkeley, under the guidance of professor Alan Dundes.

In the early 1940s, she moved to New York City, where she was active in the folk music scene. She was an on-and-off member of the Almanac Singers She and fellow Almanac singer, Baldwin "Butch" Hawes, an artist, were married in 1943. Another Almanac member, Woody Guthrie, taught her mandolin.

During World War II, Bess Lomax Hawes worked for the Office of War Information preparing radio broadcasts for troops overseas. After the end of the war, she and her family moved to Boston where she wrote songs for Walter A. O'Brien's 1949 mayoral campaign including "M.T.A.," co-written with Jacqueline Steiner. The song became a hit for The Kingston Trio in 1959. While her children (Nicholas Hawes, Corey Hawes Denos, and Naomi Hawes Bishop) were attending a cooperative nursery school organized by graduate students at MIT and Harvard:

She frequently brought her guitar to the school to perform for the students. Some of the parents, mostly the mothers, asked her to teach them how to play guitar, banjo and mandolin. Bess agreed to charge them one dollar each for each lesson, which lasted several hours, what she called "a whole evening." She would keep 50 cents for herself to pay for a babysitter and she'd donate the other 50 cents to the nursery school. Word soon spread, and others began to join her classes.