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Who better to narrate a new audio book of stories from Texas than the author and narrator of “Stories From Texas”?
Bear with us.
W.F. Strong, Falfurrias native, Brownsville resident, Fulbright Scholar and professor of communications at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley is known for having a voice as deep as a West Texas canyon and gravely as the riverbank below.
His “Stories From Texas” program can be heard on National Public Radio stations across the state — except in the Valley, which hasn’t had public radio since 2019 when the Catholic Diocese of Brownsville sold its license for 88FM to a Spanish-language religious talk-show programmer.
Strong previously narrated both volumes of his “Stories From Texas” for Audible and just recently finished narrating “The Essential J. Frank Dobie,” an anthology of stories, essays and letters from the legendary Texas folklorist, writer, storyteller and columnist.
Dobie was born on a ranch in Live Oak County in 1888 and died in Austin in 1964. The anthology, edited by Steven L. Davis, longtime literary curator for the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University, became available on Audible a few weeks ago.
Dobie, a UT-Austin professor until being forced out in 1947 over his outspoken support for integration and civil rights, and who also taught American history at Cambridge University in England, was a major influence on famous Texas writers like Cormac McCarthy and Larry McMurtry.
“He’s kind of Texas’ premier folklorist,” Strong said in a recent interview. “He’s the one who you might say decided Texas is an interesting place, but it doesn’t have a great deal of respect for its own literature. … This was back in the ’20s and ’30s.”
While at UT, Dobie created a folklore society to collect stories from the old-time cowboys while they were still living — tales of longhorns, cattle drives, rattlesnakes “and all the things that make Texas Texas,” Strong said.
“He decided that he would make it his career ambition to go out and talk to these guys. … Treasure hunters, the cowboys who drove the longhorns up to Dodge City,” he said. “You know, the cattle drives only went on for about 10 years before the barbed wire came in and shut it all down.”
Dobie’s work provided much of the background for some of McMurtry’s books, Strong said, noting that both were “men of the soil” raised on ranches and around cattle and horses. All the same, McMurtry early in his career attacked Dobie for allegedly bad writing and retelling tales that might not have been strictly true, though Dobie was more concerned with preserving the stories, not fact-checking, Strong said.
“If you want to make a name for yourself you’ve got to kill the giants,” he said referring to McMurtry, author of “Lonesome Dove” and “The Last Picture Show,” who died in 2021.
Dobie was also a champion of intellectualism and an early environmentalist not afraid to take on Texas icons, Strong said.
“Like he criticized Davy Crockett, who said that he killed 84 bears in one season,” he said. “(Dobie) said here’s a guy who probably knew more about bears than anybody, but we’ve learned nothing about bears from him. All we know is he liked to kill them. … He got onto people for killing just to kill.”
Dobie’s titles included “The Longhorns,” “The Mustangs,” “Rattlesnakes” and “Coronado’s Children: Tales of Lost Mines and Buried Treasures of the Southwest,” the only one of Dobie’s works on Audible.
“One thing cool about Dobie is he felt that professors stayed in their offices too much,” Strong said. “He went hunting for a lost silver mine in Mexico. He spent about four months on horseback riding through central Mexico and in the mountains looking for this silver mine.”
For Dobie, the point wasn’t finding the mine; it was the adventure that mattered, Strong said. To find out whether Dobie and C.B. Ruggles ever managed to locate the Lost Mine of Tayopa, read Davis’ book or download Strong’s Audible version. The 320-page anthology, published in 2019, is basically a “greatest hits,” said Strong, who confessed that narrating the book took a bit longer than he’d anticipated.
“It’s 10 hours of listening time,” he said. “It’s a really long book. It took me about eight months to do it. It’s nice that it’s in short pieces. I think the longest one is like 40 minutes. Most of them are 12 minutes, an essay or a story.”
One of his favorite Dobie tales concerns “Sancho, the tamale-loving longhorn,” who supposedly found his way back to Texas after being driven as part of a herd all the way to Montana.
Davis, whose several other books include “J. Frank Dobie: A Liberated Mind” and “Texas Literary Outlaws,” said Dobie fell out of literary fashion soon after his death — in part thanks to McMurtry — and was unfairly branded a racist by some academics but that it’s important that he be read today.
“What I love about Dobie, and what I think other people love when they read him, is that this is a voice that tells us what Texas used to be. But it’s a voice that still speaks to us today because he writes about so many timeless things, like people’s relationship with the land and animals,” he said. “And I think what I really love about Dobie is that he distills the ageless wisdom from an earlier era and that wisdom is still relevant today.”
No matter how much Texas changes, longhorns, coyotes, cowboys and the like will always be very much a thing, Davis said.
“When I put together the ‘Essential Dobie,’ my thought was this is a person who wrote about so many adventures that people had, and he was often part of those adventures,” he said. “He’s just a great storyteller, honestly, and he tells these stories of Texas that still resonate today.”
As for the choice of Strong to narrate the anthology, it was a Texas-sized no-brainer, Davis said.
“W.F. Strong is such a force of Texana, really,” he said. “When you hear him on the Texas Standard he’s so erudite and enthusiastic in sharing his stories from Texas. He’s a great proselytizer for Texas stories and folklore.”
None of the royalties from the sale of Dobie’s works go to the author’s family but rather to the Dobie Literary Trust, which provides grants to Texas libraries to buy books. The same goes with the money from Davis’ book, he said, while Strong volunteered his narration services.
“My feeling about W.F. Strong is it’s the next best thing to hearing J. Frank Dobie himself tell these stories,” Davis said. “He just has that great Texas voice and a great delivery. … When Dobie was writing these stories they were meant to be spoken aloud. And so they’re coming back out into the open air again, where they’re best heard. W.F. Strong is the perfect guy to do that. His Spanish is much better than Dobie’s, by the way.”
