Reggie (and others), the use of the word "hootenanny" to describe a folk music gathering has nothing to do with Texas Jim Lewis.

It traces back to a series of monthly fundraising events in Seattle, organized by the Washington New Dealer, a lefty newspaper published by the Commonwealth Federation, and edited by Terry Pettus (after he became unemployable at the mainstream newspapers because he had organized the Newspaper Guild in Tacoma and Seattle). The first one took place in July of 1940 at Polish Hall on Capitol Hill.

Terry Pettus was originally from Indiana, and he called the event a "hootenanny," which is an old Hoosier word similar to "thingamajig," "whatchamacallit" or "dingus." Pettus told the researcher Peter Tamony, "I remembered that in my youth in southern Indiana the word Hootenannny was used to designate a party which just seemed to happen as against being planned."

Those early hootenannnies were flexible events -- they might be a dance or a record-listening party, or if some visiting troubador was in town, it could have been a concert. There was usually beer and food for sale, with the proceeds going to support of the New Dealer.

After these things had been going for about a year, Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie came through Seattle and played at a Hootenanny. They liked the idea, and took the idea (and the name) back to New York, where the Almanac Singers started to hold similar events, which they also called hoootenannies. Those New York hootenannies grew from rent parties at the Almanac House to bigger and somewhat more formal concerts at places like Town Hall. They continued to occur in New York and elsewhere through the postwar years leading to the Folk Boom of the early sixties and that's how the word entered the language.

Meantime, the Seattle events kept going, long after the New Dealer had disappeared. By the early fifties, hoots in Seattle were singing parties among the local folk music community. They still happen several time a year, attended mostly by the same people who were around forty or more years ago.

Quite separately from this sequence of events, Texas Jim Lewis (aka Sherrif Tex on Seattle's KING-TV) created a musical (!) instrument based on a washboard that he called a "hootenanny" and made some records playing it, including one called "Hootenanny Scratch." He apparently believed that his usage had been the one that led to its wider use, but it's well documented that he was wrong.

The definitive history of all this was published in the journal Western Folklore in 1963, and reprinted in 1967 in a book called The American Folk Scene: Dimensions of the Folksong Revival.