Title page from “On the Trial of Negro Folksongs” ; Photo of Dorothy Scarborough, courtesy The Texas Collection ; Promotional poster for film version of “The Wind”
This post was written by Elizabeth Rivera, Laura Semrau, Bethany Stewart, & Heidi Uhey
1925 proved to be a monumental year for Dorothy Scarborough (1878-1935), marking the publication of two distinct and influential works: her best-remembered novel, The Wind, and her first book-length contribution to folkloric studies, On the Trail of Negro Folksongs. Emily Dorothy Scarborough was the daughter of Mary Adelaide (Ellison) and John Bledsoe Scarborough, Texas lawyer and Baylor board of trustee member. Known by her middle name—or more affectionately as “Dottie” among friends—she and her family moved to Waco in 1887 in pursuit of quality educational opportunities, just one year after Baylor University relocated from Independence to Waco, Texas. Scarborough studied English and earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Baylor in 1896 and 1899, respectively. During her formative educational years, Scarborough developed a keen interest in creative writing and a deep understanding of life in Texas—both Central and West Texas—shaped in part by her family’s time living in Sweetwater from 1882 to 1887. Just as Scarborough’s own lived experiences shaped and informed her research and writing, students and scholars today are drawing inspiration for their own scholarly endeavors through access to the Dorothy Scarborough Collection in Baylor’s Archives. Whether engaging with her published books or exploring her manuscripts, notes, correspondence, and photographs, Baylor has the privilege of preserving and stewarding her creative legacy for future generations. In honor of Women’s History Month, this blog offers a glimpse into Dorothy Scarborough’s world and work a century ago.
The Wind
Scarborough’s The Wind offers a bleak portrayal of the devastating 1880s drought in West Texas through the lens of an 18-year-old girl, Letty, who moves to Sweetwater, Texas from Virginia to stay with her male cousin Beverly after the death of her mother. After meeting a kind but mysterious stranger on the train out West, Wirt Roddy, Letty quickly becomes acquainted with a couple of “crude” cowpunchers, Lige and Sourdough, and Beverly’s capable but ultimately jealous and inhospitable wife, Cora. Letty is shocked by the harsh desert environment of Sweetwater, the manners and expectations of pioneer society, and is most particularly perturbed by the constant wind. The wind blows sand that coats the tables, beds, and dishes, it makes the air brown, it clogs ears, noses, and tarnishes the hair, skin, and eyes. The wind becomes a constant antagonist throughout the novel, and coupled with limiting societal conventions, it forces Letty to make decisions she is unprepared to make, stealing her agency. Letty voices this chief theme throughout the novel: “As she bustled about preparing dinner for her guests, Letty told herself for the hundredth time that girls ought to be trained to work, to support themselves, so that misfortune couldn’t overwhelm them as it had her. To be expected to be a competent pioneer heroine and wife without warning or preparation was like being drowned suddenly, or smothered in an avalanche of sand!” (230).
The Wind, unlike Cather’s O Pioneers! (1913)—another novel critiquing feminine conventions against a Western backdrop—is ultimately a tragedy; Letty is the victim of a society that strangled her potential outside the domestic sphere and even within it—she wasn’t taught to do housework or about the realities of married life. Letty is slowly driven insane by the harsh wind, isolation, and vulnerability to men’s attacks.
On the advice of her publisher, Scarborough published The Wind anonymously and received mixed reviews. Contemporary reviewers living outside of Texas were generally positive, while Texan reviewers were angered by her negative depiction of their state. One wrote that the novel was “a deliberate effort, by disregard and exaggeration and distortion of facts, to deliver a slam on West Texas in the making” (quoted in Grider, “Preface,” vii).
This mixed reception continues through later scholarship. Some later critics interpret the novel as “harshly anti-Western” (Choice, 837; Kollin, 675), but scholars like John Orr note that Scarborough’s demonization of the Western landscape is simply part of a “system of signification” standing in for the erosion of women’s agency (Orr, 112). Similarly, Sandra Myres, writing in 1982, criticize Scarborough for her reproduction of a stereotype of the feminine, tearful woman, unprepared for frontier life. But Sherri Inness argues for a subversive reading, writing that Scarborough “uses the Western novel to condemn social assumptions and expectations about how middle-class women should lead their lives, showing that traditional ideology about women’s acceptable behavior inevitably creates women unprepared to meet the demands of frontier life” (Inness, 27).
Though The Wind has largely fallen out of the literary canon, Inness argues for the strength of the novel. She writes, “Scarborough’s text deserves recognition as one of the earlier woman-authored texts in a tradition of using the West as a location for social protest that continues to strengthen even today” (Inness, 37).
On the Trail of Negro Folksongs
After about a decade of work collecting songs by and about Black southerners, Scarborough published On the Trail of Negro Folksongs through Harvard University Press. In it, Scarborough sought to preserve lullabies, ballads, and reels (dance songs) of Black Americans. Scarborough wrote, “if they are lost now, they can never be recovered. There’s no game more fascinating than the study of old songs, no adventure more entrancing than to go in search of them. And there’s no closed season, – though the season will be closed for songs permanently if we don’t hurry up, for many precious songs are dying for lack of attention” (Lecture Notes, Dorothy Scarborough papers, Accession #153, Baylor University, pp. 4–5).
Scarborough was one of many working in this area, collecting, recording, and publishing on folksongs, believing they were saving a vanishing practice. The most famous folklorists in this domain were the Lomaxes. John Avery Lomax (1867-1948) was a Texan who studied at Harvard under professor George L. Kittredge—a mentor of Scarborough who is credited for reading the proof of On the Trail (288). Known for his collection of Texas cowboy songs (1910), John Lomax published intermittently between 1910 and 1934 before beginning a nationwide collection tour with his teenage son, Alan (1915-2002). The two are known for their extensive recordings, including such great voices as Lead Belly, Ferdinand ‘Jelly Roll’ Morton, and Muddy Waters (Porterfield, 2001; Thieme, 2001). Alan Lomax went on to record folksongs across the world and collaborated with Zora Neale Hurson in documenting Black folklore and music for the Works Progress Administration Federal Writers’ Project. As scholars in the early years of folklore studies in the United States, John Lomax and Scarborough saw folklore as a “science of tradition,” (Hartland, 1899). They each took a positivist stance to folklore collection and problematically positioned the people they collected from not as contemporaries or equals, but as relics or “survivals” of a pre-modern past.
As a Texan and descendent of two plantation owners, Scarborough saw herself as an insider to Black southern traditions. She traveled the South meeting people in kitchens, laundry rooms, and cottonfields to collect the words and rhythms of Black folksong. But, as discussed by Marybeth Hamilton, the majority of her narrators were white southerners with similar familial legacies. While Scarborough goes to great lengths to acknowledge and credit her white informants, aside from her interview with W.C. Handy, Scarborough seldom names her Black informants in the text. While this degrading practice is telling of Scarborough’s racist vantage point, it also makes it impossible to trace the songs back to the people from whom they were collected and leaves a tremendous archival gap behind.
While she may have sought to preserve Black culture by assembling this book, which was a massive feat in the 1920s, reading On the Trail of Negro Folksongs reveals demeaning and racist portrayals of Black southerners. Scarborough romanticizes slavery, belittles Black culture, and elevates white cultures frequently. Karl Hagstrom Miller has analyzed her constructions as essentialist and essentializing, and notes the ways in which they mirror racist depictions from the blackface minstrelsy tradition. But, Miller writes, through her work, Scarborough believed she “could uncover buried folk songs by reverting to the [supposed] racial intimacy of the southern plantation and ignoring the racial violence and segregation surrounding her” (258-259).
The Legacy of Scarborough’s 1925
While on the surface Scarborough’s two 1925 publications could not seem more disparate—one criticizing the societal constraints placed on women and the other restating stereotypes about Black southerners—there are some commonalities. Her lifelong interest in folk music finds its way into most of her novels, and her love of story-telling infiltrates On the Trail. In The Wind, cowboy songs and Black folk songs appear throughout; the cowpunchers use cowboy songs to comfort and compel their cattle and Letty frequently recalls Black folk songs remembered from her youth to console herself in her own nostalgia whenever the wind picks up. This is a common literary device for Scarborough; folk songs are quoted throughout her earlier novels From a Southern Porch (1919) and In the Land of Cotton (1923). And while On the Trail acts as an anthology of Black folk music, organized by genre, it is broken up by Scarborough’s stories of obtaining the songs—either through field work or through correspondence with friends.
Both works served to cement Dorothy’s position at Columbia as the highest-ranking woman faculty member, a serious novelist, and a folklorist at an institution at the forefront of a more progressive direction in the study of the expressive practices of everyday people. Interestingly, Franz Boas, who became Columbia’s first professor of Anthropology in 1899, ardently pushed against the scientific racism that infused ethnographic study during this time period, instead arguing for context-based analysis and reflexivity in anthropological work. His impressive cohort of graduate students included Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Zora Neale Hurston (King, 2019).
On the Trail received high praise from contemporary folklorists, while The Wind’s reviews, as we’ve seen, were mixed. But due in part to the problematic portrayals of Black narrators in On the Trail, The Wind’s legacy remains the larger of the two. In 1928, MGM adapted the novel into one of its final and best silent films, directed by Victor Seastrom with screenwriter Frances Marion and with one of MGM’s biggest stars, Lillian Gish, in the lead role of Letty. Mary Lea Bandy and Kevin Stoehr write that this film is not the typical filmic Western; it has “the edginess of a psychological drama” in which “Letty must rescue herself” (Bandy and Stoehr, 47). Many critics have bemoaned the film’s changed ending from tragedy to redeemed happiness, but Scarborough was reportedly happy with the changes. Sylvia Grider wrote that “the movie and her association with Gish were the high points of Scarborough’s life” (Grider, “Women’s Networking,” 77). Examinations of these works, Scarborough’s archives, and her reception over time reveal important insights about regionality, identity, and folklore in the 1920s U.S.
___________
Join us April 14, 2025 at 5:30pm in the Arts and Special Collections Research Center on the 3rd floor of Moody for a screening of The Wind with live score, as it would have been viewed when it was released 1928.
Bibliography
Bandy, Mary Lea and Kevin Stoehr. “Not at Home on the Range: Women Against the Frontier in ‘The Wind.’” In Ride, Boldly Ride. University of California Press, 2012.
Dorothy Scarborough papers, Accession #153. The Texas Collection, Baylor University. Waco, Texas.
Grider, Sylvia Ann. “Forward.” In Dorothy Scarborough, The Wind. University of Texas Press, 1979.
Grider, Sylvia Ann. “Women’s Networking in Researching the Biography of Dorothy Scarborough.” Southern Folklore 47, no. 1 (January 1990): 77-83.
Hamilton, Marybeth. “On the Trail of Negro Folk Songs.” Journal of Popular Music Studies (April 2006): 66-93.
Hartland, Edwin Sidney (1899) 1968. “Folklore: What is It and What is the Good of it?” In Peasant Customs and Savage Myths, Richard Dorson, v.1, 230-251.
Hartley-Kong, Alli. “Her Eyes Were Watching Everything: Zora Neale Hurston at the Library of Congress.” blog.loc.gov. 2025.
Inness, Sherrie A. “‘Good Enough for a Man or a Dog, but No Place for a Woman or a Cat’: The Myth of the Heroic Frontier Woman in Dorothy Scarborough’s ‘The Wind.’” American Literary Realism, 1870-1910 28, no. 2 (Winter 1996): 25-40.
King, Charles. Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century. First edition. New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2019.
Kollin, Susan. “Race, Labor, and the Gothic Western: Dispelling Frontier Myths in Dorothy Scarborough ‘The Wind.’” Modern Fiction Studies 46, no. 3 (Fall 2000): 675-694.
Miller, Karl Hagstrom. Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow. Duke University Press, 2010.
Myres, Sandra L. Westering Women and the Frontier Experience, 1800-1915. University of New Mexico Press, 1982.
Orr, John C. “When East Meets West: Rethinking the Domestic Heroine and the Western in Dorothy Scarborough’s ‘The Wind.’” Pacific Coast Philology 31, no. 1 (1996): 107-119.
Porterfield, Nolan. “Lomax, John Avery.” Grove Music Online. 2001.
“Review of The Wind, by Dorothy Scarborough.” Choice 16 (September 1979).
Scarborough, Dorthy. On the Trail of Negro Folksongs. Harvard University Press, 1925.
Scarborough, Dorothy. The Wind. Harper, 1925. Reprint, University of Texas Press, 1979.
Thime, Darius L. “Lomax, Alan.” Grove Music Online. 2001.
The Wind. Directed by Victor Seastrom. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1928.