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Deluxe: The Blueprint - How Bill Ferris Defined Southern Folklore
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Join Chuck Reece for an intimate conversation with legendary folklorist Bill Ferris. Explore Southern stories, blues, and the power of listening in this immersive episode on how we preserve the hallmarks of the American South.
TRANSCRIPT:
INTRO
[Fade in on atmospheric field recording: chirping insects, gentle strum of a blues guitar, Mississippi night air]
CHUCK REECE: There’s a certain sound to the American South——a hush, a hymn, blue notes soft in the night air. But to really hear the South, you have to listen with more than your ears. You have to listen with your memory, your pain, your longing, and your joy.
Today, Salvation South follows the journey of a man who taught us how to listen to the South.
Dr. William Reynolds Ferris, known to his friends as Bill.
BILL FERRIS: I grew up on a farm outside of Vicksburg in Warren County, Mississippi. And we were the only white family there for several miles. And all my friends, childhood friends, my world was surrounded by Black families and children my age. And I used to go to a little Black church on the farm every first Sunday when they had a service with a lady named Mary Gordon. And I learned to sing the hymns and to love the sermons.
CHUCK REECE: Rose Hill Church was tiny and had services only once a month, but it was a safe gathering place for the community.
BILL FERRIS: As I grew older, I realized there were no hymnals in that church and that when those families were gone, the music would disappear. And so I decided to record the music and photograph it and later film it as a way of preserving that beautiful world that was my earliest experience with Black music and incredibly intimate and powerful.
CHUCK REECE: He began that work when he was only twelve, in 1954, with a camera and a tape recorder. Later, he got his hands on a Super 8 movie camera and started filming.
BILL FERRIS: In a way, it was the foundation for my entire life as a folklorist.
CHUCK REECE: What a rich and generous life it has been. Bill Ferris is now eighty-three years old. Over his life, he has taught thousands of students to study their home——the American South.
To see it as it is——not as they want it to be.
To tell the stories of all of its people, as they really are——not as characters in some moonlight-and-magnolias fiction or mythology.
AMBIENCE: B.B. King guitar from ‘Give My Poor Heart Ease’
CHUCK REECE: And to listen to it.
AMBIENCE: Prisoners singing work song from ‘Give My Poor Heart Ease’
CHUCK REECE: Welcome to another edition of Salvation South Deluxe.
For fifty years, Bill Ferris’s work has done more than document; it has dignified. He showed the whole world the truth, beauty, and struggle that echo in the stories, the songs, and the prayers of Southerners, regardless of their skin color or background.
I’m Chuck Reece, your host. Salvation South Deluxe, a monthly series of in-depth pieces that we add to our regular podcast feed. Here, we try to shine the light on untold stories of the Southern experience an let you hear our region’s truly authentic voices. And today, thanks to many decades of Bill Ferris’s work, we have a rich abundance of those voices to share with you.
THEME MUSIC OUT
ACT ONE
CHUCK REECE: At Salvation South, our mission is to tell the many and varied stories of the American South——of hardship, of triumph, of faith and family, everything about this region. But to always tell them as truthfully as we can——to show the full measure of who we are and who we hope to become.
No one has blazed the trail we walk quite like Bill Ferris.
Let me take a couple of minutes to walk you through how he blazed it.
Bill found his calling when he was in his teens, filming, photographing and recording in the Mississippi Delta. But through the years spent earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees, professors and advisors kept telling him that following his calling just didn’t fit into any of the standard academic paths. Frustrated, he took a year away from his master’s studies at Northwestern University to work at Trinity College, in Dublin, Ireland——late 1965 through early 1966.
BILL FERRIS: I spent a year at Trinity College in Dublin on a Rotary Foundation fellowship working on James Joyce. But I wanted to study the oral voices, and I kept running into walls at Northwestern. They those musics that you're recording, that's not literature in terms of what we teach.
CHUCK REECE: But while he was in Ireland, he met a professor of folklore from Ohio State University.
BILL FERRIS: I complained to him that English was too narrow. It wouldn't allow the oral literature to be studied in the same way that we looked at Shakespeare and Joyce.
He smiled and he said, “Well, you simply need to be in folklore.” And I said, “What’s that?”
CHUCK REECE: Although Bill had been doing what folklorists do for a decade, he had never heard the word.
BILL FERRIS: And he said, well, there's several PhD programs. And he basically opened the door to my graduate study at the University of Pennsylvania, where I went and met with my advisor, Kenneth Goldstein.
CHUCK REECE: Goldstein by then had spent a decade roaming North America and the British Isles, recording folk singers. In America, he had recorded Lead Belly and Lightnin’ Hopkins, in Ireland, the Clancy Brothers. Kenneth Goldstein was a major influence on the folk-music revival of the fifties and sixties that spawned Bob Dylan and other artists.
Bill Ferris says his first meeting with Kenneth Goldstein was one of the best days of his life.
BILL FERRIS: I brought a box of recordings and photographs in at that first meeting and put them on his desk. And I said, “Dr. Goldstein, this is what I have been doing. Can I do that here?” He smiled and he said, “That, my boy, will be your dissertation. Keep doing it.’
Well, that was the most wonderful moment of my life.
CHUCK REECE: After he finished his doctorate at Penn, he took his first teaching job at Jackson State University, the historically black college in Mississippi’s capital city.
By then, it was the early seventies. In Connecticut, Yale University was on the verge of launching the first graduate program in African American Studies in the Ivy League. Ferris soon got an invite to join that faculty.
And that box of recordings and photographs? Of course, he took that to New Haven with him.
The university at that time was also in the middle of building the Yale University Media Design Center, which was meant to be the film-production counterpart of the Yale University Press, which had published the books of Yale faculty since 1908.
BILL FERRIS: The studio produced films and they approached me because they knew I was a filmmaker and said, “We’d like to film your course on Black folklore.” AND I was thrilled and we got the support and the team began to work. They filmed my lectures. We brought in B.B. King to perform…. We filmed in Harlem, in New Haven and then I took a crew to the Mississippi Delta for a week. And that was powerful, radical material. We got an honorary doctorate of humane letters at Yale awarded to B.B. King. So these were sort of foundational steps that shook the foundations of the traditional academic world.
CHUCK REECE: Working with the Media Design Center, Bill took the footage he had shot and the recordings he’d made for the previous two decades, combined them with the new footage they captured, and transformed it all into four separate documentary films. About a half hour each.
All four were released at the same time in 1975, when Ferris was thirty-three years old. Each one covered a different facet of Black life in Mississippi. The first focused on the blues and featured B.B. King. It was called “Give My Poor Heart Ease.”
Watching that film today, fifty years on, you can see a younger Bill Ferris’s journey to understand a uniquely Southern and uniquely Black art form——blues music.
B.B. KING [from ‘Give My Poor Heart Ease’]: This is B.B. King. Makin’ a statement. And a natural fact. All you gotta do is sit back. And dig where it’s comin’ from. Listen! Not only with your ears but with your heart.
CHUCK REECE: You follow his camera as he goes to the sources.
Front porches …
MAN [from ‘Give My Poor Heart Ease’]: You can get the blues about a woman. Go kissin’ her, you don’t see her for three or four nights, you can get the blues there.
CHUCK REECE: Juke joints…
CHUCK REECE: Mississippi’s infamous state penitentiary, Parchman Farm…
MAN: [from ‘Give my Poor Heart Ease’]: Well when you’re working and singing, it helps get your mind off everything else and get it on your workin’.
CHUCK REECE: And inside a Manhattan hotel room with the late, great B.B. King, who was at that moment riding the biggest radio hit of his career, “The Thrill Is Gone.”
B.B. KING [from ‘Give My Poor Heart Ease’]: Everything leads me back to the feeling of the blues or the feeling I get from playing or singing the blues or hearing others sing and play it. In fact, I think life itself is the blues
CHUCK REECE: The second film released that year by Ferris focused on the Black church, and it combined the black-and-white footage Bill had shot at Rose Hill Church back in the Delta with new color film he shot at St. James’s Church in New Haven, whose congregation was Black Southerners who had fled Jim Crow and moved northward in the Great Migration. That one was called “Two Black Churches.”
The third focused on Black artists and artisans in Mississippi. From homebuilders and quilters to painters and sculptors. That film was “Made in Mississippi.”
The final film in the set focused on Black storytellers from Ferris’s home state, whose stories ran from the hilarious to the somber, from the sacred to the profane. It was called “I Ain’t Lying.”
For the fiftieth anniversary of these films, Salvation South, the magazine I edit, has revisited those films. We’ve shown our online readers all four movies, start to finish. And I have interviewed Bill about each one, asking to recall their making and to reflect on what they mean today, a half century later.
After this short break, we’ll be back to give you a taste.
You’re listening to Salvation South.
MIDROLL BREAK
ACT TWO
CHUCK REECE: In Bill Ferris’s documentary “Two Black Churches,” we see the contrasts between Rose Hill Church in the Mississippi Delta of the 1960s and St. James’s Church in the city of New Haven, Connecticut, in the 1970s.
The film opens with black and white footage of Rose Hill’s members marching toward a pond for a baptismal service, singing a slow, a cappella hymn.
MUSIC UP [from opening of ‘Two Black Churches’]
CHUCK REECE: Then the movie jumps into the 1970s in full color, into the forceful choral music of St. James’s Church in Connecticut, accompanied by piano and drums.
The contrast in styles is apparent, but what you see more clearly is what the congregations share.
BILL FERRIS: The dress at both churches is elegant, colorful, beautiful. And the hymns. There’s no question that the St. James’s service has its elaborate choir and music. But also, if you were to ask, they would be quite familiar with the a cappella … traditional hymns and spirituals that would be sung in the rural Southern churches like Rose Hill. So there’s a continuum. The roots of black religion are deep in both churches. They are both rooted in rural Southern worlds. That can be felt in both services, but they’re also quite different.
CHUCK REECE: The most important point the film makes is how important the church has been, throughout the history of Black America, because the space is sacred and inviolate. The churches are mighty fortresses against the physical violence of Jim Crow and the hatred and prejudice outside their doors.
PREACHER [from ‘Two Black Churches’]: What I love about one whom the blood has been applied. He has a telephone. And when trouble rise, he can call on his God. What I love about him. The line is never busy. You can call in the morning. And you can call at high twelve.
BILL FERRIS: Since I was a child, I have always felt privileged to be allowed into those spaces. The church is a safe haven for Black families. The Black church is. … These are Black spaces, owned and controlled by Black families.
CHUCK REECE: In “Made in Mississippi,” the artwork of everyday survival takes center stage—quiltmakers, sculptors, blacksmiths. And importantly, we learn how these art forms and skills are passed down through the generations.
PECOLIA WARNER [from ‘Made in Mississippi’] Sometimes when all the women used to be together, they'd be quilting at night, have little lights to sit all over the quilts, you know. Little tin lamp. Little tin light. Now everybody would sit around and then we couldn't see how they'd thread the needle. They would get the children to come in, thread the needles for them, and then, that's why they'd get up and go to eatin'. Drinking, maybe have a little wine, and everybody feel good, and start to go back quilting again.
CHUCK REECE: A Mississippi quilt maker who became a central character in Ferris’s earliest documentary projects, Pecolia Warner, called it “fireplace learning".
BILL FERRIS: Fireplace learning was a powerful way of sharing and preserving knowledge that goes back in every generation to Africa. And for thousands of years our first knowledge was oral. And in the black community it has a deep and sacred kind of value.
CHUCK REECE: The beauty is functional, and the function is beautiful——the stuff of life, preserved in fiber and fire, reflecting the spirit of a people who despite facing horrendous oppression, created beauty.
You also see a deep level of community in the creation, how the people of a certain place supported each other and held each other up.
BILL FERRIS: There is a sense of community and shared knowledge and shared responsibility. If you kill a hog, the whole community comes and they help and they share the meat with each other. If you make a quilt, you will often give it to a neighbor who needs a quilt.
And to me, film is essential because all too often when we see a quilt in a museum or a work of folk art, it's labeled as anonymous. The creator is not remembered.
But in the film, we cannot forget the voices of people who made the quilt or sculpted the skull or face or built the house.
I give the maker a lot of credit because they're like the master storyteller or the consummate gospel singer who leads the choir. They are recognized in the community as the most gifted at what they do.
CHUCK REECE: Ferris’s fourth film from 1975, “I Ain’t Lying,” is a testament to the determination that lived in Mississippi’s rural Black communities, even in the early 1970s, when white Southerners were still desperately trying to ostracize and discriminate against them, despite the passage of the Civil and Voting Rights Acts.
Many years ago, an old man in Appalachia told me, “Son, never let the truth get in the way of a good story.” It’s clear in “I Ain’t Lying” that Ferris had made friends with some master storytellers. People who understood the freedom they could find in telling their own stories their own way.
BILL FERRIS: We really tried to pick the best of a broad range of oral tradition. From the classic animal stories, animal tales like Brer Wolf, Brer Rabbit that are African in origin.
Many of these are trickster tales where a weaker adversary uses their head to outwit a stronger adversary.
CHUCK REECE: This is James “Son Ford” Thomas, a blues musician who also appears in “Give My Poor Heart Ease,” telling the story that opens “I Ain’t Lying.”
JAMES “SON FORD” THOMAS [from ‘I Ain’t Lying’]: The lady was going to be baptized, and the preacher, as the old timers, the preacher that they got together and all of them went down to the creek, you know, they used to baptize in the creek now, they baptize the church, or the pool, but at that time they all were baptizing in the creeks and rivers, you now, and so they had they’d baptized two or three. And this lady... She saw an alligator out behind her. And the preacher said, ‘Come on sister to the water and be baptized!’ ‘No, I don't like that thing behind you!’ He said ‘Don't let the devil fool you come on and be baptized it's your only time to be saved!’ ‘I don't like that thing behind you’. So the preacher said ‘Don't the devil to fool you!’ He said ‘Come on down to the water and be baptized!’ ‘I just don't like that thing behind you!’ She finally come on down to the water and she looked and saw him again and said ‘I just don't like that thing behind you!’ And so the preacher look back he said ‘No by god, I don't either!’
CHUCK REECE: [laughter]
CHUCK REECE [from interview]: The sense of humor is really finely honed because the way it integrates, you know, a very familiar image from scripture, the idea of get thee behind me, Satan. This woman sees the alligator, but the preacher who's about to baptize her doesn't. And so every time she says, I don't like that thing behind you, it plays off…that bit from scripture until the surprise comes at the end of the story.
BILL FERRIS: It's true. And I think there's a kind of sheer beauty of the voice in each of these stories. While a story is a powerful focusing device, they all are sort of like a chorus. Old and young, these voices have a lyrical quality. There's a sense of beauty about the entire fabric of all of these stories woven together in the film. Yes, you can just go through the film in that way and just enjoy the power of these voices. And each of them is telling a dramatic story, but together they're really almost like a symphony.
CHUCK REECE: These stories are bridges. They teach us not just how Black Southerners endured, but how they triumphed——through wit, faith, and endless invention.
It has been a tremendous pleasure for me over the last several months to ask Bill Ferris questions about these films.
If Ferris had never made another film, had never conducted an interview, had never taught another class, those films alone would stand in tribute to a life well lived.
But there’s more. Much more.
In the late 1970s, Ferris left Yale and came South again, and in 1978, he became the founding director of the first graduate program in Southern Studies at any American University. The Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi in Oxford.
Today, Southern students can study the region that shaped them——for better or worse——at many universities around the South. Arguably, Bill Ferris deserves a lion’s share of the credit for that.
In the twenty years he remained in Oxford, Ferris, his fellow faculty members and their students gathered thousands of photographs, field recordings, and films. The Center became a hub for multidisciplinary research and teaching on Southern history, literature, music, folklife, and social relations.
In 1989, I was living in New York and spending more time every day trying to make sense of the region I loved and had left. And that was the year when a very large book——almost two thousand pages——appeared in bookstores.
It was called “The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture,” and its co-editors were Bill Ferris and his colleague at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, Charles Wilson Reagan. That book defined the field of Southern Studies, and it sold more than a million copies.
And it lit a fire inside me. I came home to Georgia, first working in journalism and then in politics and finally in corporate communications. But the fire kept getting bigger until I finally realized about a dozen years ago that making a place for Southern stories was my calling.
I am hardly alone. It would be easy to find hundreds if not thousands of others——former students of Ferris or those simply inspired by his work—who would say the same thing.
So, to spend this summer as I have, frequently in conversation with Bill Ferris, has been eye-opening.
As a result, I now understand the driving force behind Bill’s lifetime of work.
BILL FERRIS: From childhood on and teenage years on, recording and preserving music and voice, the stories of first the community on the farm where I grew up and then later all over the Mississippi Delta and other areas, I saw it as a work of protest, where the voices of Black families had been omitted from the books and the records historically that we were taught in school. I saw these voices and recording them as a political act. It was not marching in civil rights marches, but it was in many ways to me just as important because without those recordings, the voices would be forgotten.
Anytime you document and show respect for and preserve the Black experience, that's a political act because many people would prefer to see it erased from our history. And we're doing the opposite. We're etching a mark on the face of oblivion for the Black voice, the Black face, and the Black tradition culturally in these films.
CHUCK REECE: In 1997, President Bill Clinton called upon Ferris to head the National Endowment for the Humanities. For four years, he worked to spread the gospel of documentation and preservation of local folkways across the entire nation, not just the South. When Clinton left office in 2001, Ferris became the Senior Associate Director of the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Today, he is retired from the field, still living in Chapel Hill, but deeply involved in the work of encouraging young people to collect the stories of their ancestors, and, by so doing, honor them.
BILL FERRIS: Technology has made every man a potential filmmaker and documenter. Of his or her world. And so I tell my students, you have no excuse and start with your grandparents and parents record their memories. So for your grandchildren, you'll have a treasure to pass along to them.
CHUCK REECE: In a decade of knowing Bill and recently working more closely with him, I have come to know a special person. He is——and I say this with no cheese whatsoever——one of the most considerate and polite people I have ever known. He waves no flags and metes out no harsh words.
But his work, make no mistake, is radical. Radical because it makes the everyday sacred. Radical because it makes overlooked people unforgettable. Radical because it reveals the extraordinary spirits that live within ordinary people, ordinary Southerners.
At Salvation South, we follow in his footsteps. We can tell the South’s hardest stories, its most beautiful ones, and every kind of story in between, because Bill Ferris blazed that trail for us.
OUTRO
CHUCK REECE: Bill, this episode——and Salvation South’s entire “Fifty Years of Ferris” project——is for you. We’ll never be able to show gratitude commensurate to the time and patience you have offered us over this year.
We have a long list of people who have been helpful as we have assembled this materials for this project. They are too numerous to mention here, but we must shout out the good people in the Special Collections Unit of the Wilson Library on the University of North Carolina campus, which houses the large archive of work from Bill’s career.
Visit SalvationSouth.com—right now—where you can watch my complete interviews with Dr. Ferris about each of these four extraordinary films. You can also watch all four of the 1975 documentaries from start to finish. Don’t miss your chance to see the faces and hear the voices of the people we’ve been talking about.
You’ve been listening to Salvation South Deluxe, proudly produced in cooperation with Georgia Public Broadcasting and its network of twenty stations around our state. Every Wednesday, we add a new three-minute commentary about Southern stuff to our podcast feed, and every month or so, we add longer, dee-luxe stories, such as the one we’ve just told you.
I’m Chuck Reece, your host and the editor-in-chief of Salvation South, which you can find twenty-four-seven at SalvationSouth.com.
Our producer is the mighty Jake Cook, who also composed our theme music. GPB’s director of podcasts is Jeremy Powell, and none of this could have happened without the support of GPB’s Sandy Malcolm, Adam Woodlief, and Bert Wesley Huffman.
We’ll be back next month with another full-length episode of the Salvation South Podcast.
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You can read Chuck's unabridged conversations with Bill Ferris as part of Salvation South's Fifty Years of Ferris series at SalvationSouth.com.
Salvation South editor Chuck Reece comments on Southern culture and values in a weekly segment that airs Wednesdays at 7:45 a.m. during Morning Edition and 4:44 p.m. during All Things Considered on GPB Radio. You can also find them here at GPB.org/Salvation-South.
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