The Storied South: Voices of Writers and Artists by William Ferris (review)

The Storied South is a good title, for despite some arguments to the contrary, a phenomenon referred to as “The South” exists. And it exists in part through being “storied” in all of that word’s senses: legends and lies of its own making, an enormous body of scholarship and reinterpretation from many disciplines about it, and of course the music, literary works, and art created by what is now happily seen as coming from a wider-than-ever range of minds and voices of the South.

Bill Ferris’s book derives from decades of Ferris’s recording and filming of not just some of the most prominent southern literary artists, but also of musicians, painters, and scholars who have enlivened the subject. The list is not exhaustive, of course, but that is not the point. The Storied South is both a celebration of Ferris’s subjects and a celebration of his lifelong pursuit of a broad-minded southern studies, something he began as a young student in the 1960s taking photographs in his home state, Mississippi, and continued after graduate degrees in English and in folklore studies. His work shows that he understood very early the significant contributions to southern culture by all of its creative people, down home or settled elsewhere: mule traders and Pulitzer prize-winners, painters and blues singers, historians and literary critics, photographers and short story writers, novelists and singers of the blues.

Ferris did not invent southern studies, but he did imagine a better mode for it, one more inclusive than early efforts focusing only on literary productions primarily by white writers. A list of the people outside the usual subjects whom Ferris recorded on audio tape or film proves the point: the author of Roots, Alex Haley; the sociologist John Dollard who published Cast and Class in a Southern Town; African-American poet Sterling Brown and painter Romare Bearden; pioneer of African-American studies John Blassingame; contemporary photographers William Christenberry and William Eggleston along with Walker Evans, the master photographer who took the photographs for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; the author of Jubilee, Margaret Walker, and the author of The Color Purple, Alice Walker, both recorded in Jackson, Mississippi; Charles Seeger, the musicologist who collected songs in the South with John and Alan Lomax, and Charles’s son Pete Seeger who popularized folk music and helped shape “We Shall Overcome.” Ferris also conducted recorded interviews or filmed Eudora Welty on several occasions, so that we hear and see her at four different periods in her life. He recorded Robert Penn Warren on two different occasions and Ernest Gaines at his San Francisco home in 1980. Lifelong friends Warren and Cleanth Brooks were visited both together and alone and recorded and filmed at different times.

Many of Ferris’s interviews are transcribed in The Storied South, and there are photographs of his subjects there, as well, but the volume also includes a compact disc recording of thirty-two of his subjects—writers, scholars, musicians, photographers, and painters—and a DVD with filmed interviews (with Welty, Warren, Brooks, C. Vann Woodward, musicians Bobby Rush and Pete Seeger) and the documentary Painting in the South, narrated by actor James Earl Jones, that includes sections on Benny Andrews, Bearden, Julien Binford, Carroll Cloar, Rebecca Davenport, William Dunlap, Maud Gatewood, Sam Gilliam, Ed McGowin, and George Wardlow.

The Storied South is a genial book, something to dip into time and again not only by turning its pages but by playing the recordings and films, thus experiencing these important southern voices talk about their work in two different ways. It is a personal book, and a personable one. As Ferris writes in his acknowledgments, the book “tracks my intellectual and artistic growth through friendships with the individuals featured in the book.” The interviews, transcribed or as audio or film, reflect a clear bond of respect between the collector and...