Dorothy Scarborough, assisted by Ola Lee Gulledge. On the Trail of Negro Folk-Songs (Harvard University Press, 1925) First Edition. Original cloth binding. 289 pp. Inscribed on flyleaf, “For Ola, a wonderful collaborator, whose help made the book possible, with love from Dorothy Scarborough.” With important supporting material: 2 Typed Letters Signed from Scarborough to Gulledge, New York, April 4, 1926 and Oct. 8, [1926?]; Typed Statement by Gulledge, Los Angeles, May 8, 1927, on African-American music; a 4-page printed leaflet touting Gulledge’s background and accomplishments; and 9 loose newspaper clippings about both Gulledge and Scarborough.
Historians now recognize this book as the first scholarly study of its kind, setting the stage for the popular African-American “ballad-hunting” and “music-collecting” of the 1930s. Scarborough, a young Columbia English Professor from Virginia, had met Gulledge as a Music instructor at Baylor University in Texas. They worked closely together on this book, Scarborough as writer, Gulledge as musicologist. But upon publication, Gulledge felt she had been denied proper recognition. Scarborough’s first letter is a recommendation of Gulledge, “one of my best friends…a young woman of culture and refinement, of education and social charm…of excellent family and social standing…” Her second letter regrets Gulledge’s feeling that “I didn’t give you the recognition you deserved in the book…I love you and we have been loyal friends so long…If you join with me in another volume of the songs… I’ll try to give you what recognition you desire…” No second volume was forthcoming, and Scarborough soon abandoned “song-catching” to become a novelist and poet, dying prematurely in 1935. Though she knew all the famed figures of the Harlem Renaissance, historical criticism of her Southern preconceptions is illuminated by Gulledge’s own unpublished statement, tucked into this volume, on the Negro’s “musical gifts”, depicting the Black man as having “rhythm…in everything he does. He sings as he works, as he plays…countless lullabies that the Mammy sings to her chile, be that chile white or black…” She adds that “the negro is his own worst enemy, in preserving his music. He tries to mimic us and our ways of expressing ourselves”, talented Black composers attempting “to write sophisticated modern music that is in no way akin to his own racial instincts.” Superb association copy of a classic work.