High lonesome is listed in J. Frank Dobie's compilations of Texas folk idioms as meaning a drunken spree. John A. Lomax was President of the Texas Folklore Society during the 1940s and J. Frank Dobie was a friend and protoge his. If Dobie wrote about it, chances are good both Lomaxes knew about its meaning as a noun.

I have just been looking at The Folks Songs of North America and I see where Alan Lomax refers to the Appalachian singing style as high, "almost effeminate" -- he also identifies the predominant emotion of American folk music as a whole as "loneliness". So it seems almost inevitable that he would join the two words.

In the Appalachian chapter of FS of NA Lomax links the Western European love lyric to the songs of the French troubadours, who in turn got it from the Arabs (this is the standard interpretation, see "Love in the Western World" by Denis de Rougemont), and he seems to feel that the constricted, ornamented Appalachian style is rooted in solo Eastern performance practice. He quotes amusingly from Davy Crockett's 1834 memoirs of falling ln love as a young man in Eastern Tennessee.