Folklorist, novelist, and teacher. Scarborough, who used Dorothy as her first name and
was known affectionately as “Miss Dottie” or “Aunt Dot,” was a distinguished scholar
and writer whose brief professional career spanned only seventeen years. While working
as a teacher of creative writing at Columbia University in New York City, she wrote five
novels, including The Wind (1925), which is regarded as a minor classic, and published
two major folksong collections, On the Trail of Negro Folksongs (1925) and A Song
Catcher in the Southern Mountains (1937). She also wrote and edited various other
books, poems, short stories, reviews, and essays.
Scarborough was unusually well educated for her day, receiving a B.A. from Baylor
University in 1896, an M.A. there in 1899, and a Ph.D. from Columbia University in
1917. She also studied at Oxford University in 1910, before that university awarded
degrees to women.
She was elected president of the Texas Folklore Society in 1914, and her presidential
address, “Negro Ballads and Reels,” was the first public statement of her interest and
expertise in folklore. Recognizing the blues as an original, indigenous American art form,
she also interviewed W.C.Handy and published the first known scholarly article about
him and his musicin 1923.
Scarborough was squarely in the tradition of the literary approach to folklore
materials, but she was not exclusively an “armchair scholar.” She gathered the texts and
tunes of many of the folksongs in her collections directly from the informants and then
conducted extensive research and developed voluminous correspondence to annotate her
materials thoroughly and place the materials in the context of other scholarly findings.
She was well known by all of the leading ballad and folksong scholars of her generation,
both in America and abroad. Her collections are exceptional not only for the extensive
contextual data she provided about her informants, but also for her descriptions of her
collecting methods and experiences.
Sylvia Ann Grider
References
Scarborough, Dorothy. 1917. The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction. New York:
G.P.Putnam’s Sons.
——. 1923. The “Blues” as Folk-Songs. Publications of the Texas Folklore Society 2:52–66.