An Interview with William Ferris

William Ferris, 2016. Photograph by Marcie Cohen Ferris.

Used with permission.

Born in Vicksburg, Mississippi in 1942, Ferris has written and edited ten books, created fifteen documentary films, and through his long, steady work helped define the study of the American South. A folklorist with a lasting influence in blues scholarship, he is the co-editor of the award-winning Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (U of North Carolina P, 1989). He served as founding director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, leaving in 1997 to become Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Ferris has been an indefatigable documentary fieldworker throughout his long career. His field recordings, films, and photographs have profoundly expanded the aural and visual culture of the American South. That work, along with his scholarship and writing, has led to many awards, including the Charles Frankel Prize in the Humanities, bestowed by President Clinton, and France's Chevalier and Officer in the Order of Arts and Letters. The Blues Hall of Fame named his book Blues from the Delta (Da Capo, 1988) as one of the "Classics of Blues Literature." Ferris is currently professor of history and folklore where he is also senior associate director of the Center for the Study of the American South.

A hallmark of his work has been his interest and work in photography. One of the many joys of his photographic work is the deeply considered reflection, his collection of powerful images that bear witness to the range of places, people, and moments Ferris has found resonant and relevant. His is the photographic work of a great listener and observer. Ferris's images—both his color and his black and white—artfully reveal nuanced sequence in place and time, leading us to feel we are learning our own history yet again, while simultaneously discovering brand new territories we had no idea existed.

In his books Give My Poor Heart Ease (U of North Carolina P, 2016) and The Storied South (U of North Carolina P, 2013), Ferris published many of his now canonical black and white images of blues musicians, Southern writers, and scholars. His photographs of Eudora Welty, Ernest Gains, Alice Walker, Cleanth Brooks, and C. Vann Woodward—to name just a few—accompany transcribed interviews to provide a lasting portrait of Southern creativity and narrative.¹ Bill and I sat in his office at the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina and talked one afternoon about his long work as a photographer. A selection of his recently published color images appear throughout this interview providing a sample of his photographic vision.

TR:

Let's begin by talking about pictures in your house when you were growing up, what would we find there if we could see it now?

WF:

There were always photographs on the walls in our home. There is a hallway that runs through the house, and there was always a gallery of photographs there. And in my parents' bedroom, there were intimate family members and close friends whose photographs were there. We also had an album of the farm that the Vicksburg photographer Charles Faulk had made for my father, before my parents were married. Those are eight-by-ten black and white photographs that are beautiful. There were always photographs around our house on the walls and on the tables—people, some of whom I never knew. I always felt the presence of photography there.

TR:

Did people talk about those photographs, tell about the people in those photographs?

WF:

Yes. My parents would speak about them and it was like those people in the photographs were present in the room. Even if you weren't speaking about them, you felt they were looking at whatever was going on, and there was a kind of a dynamic of the photograph being a part of your life in an active way.

TR:

Were your mother or father carrying around a camera at different times, making their own pictures?

WF...