A college professor once told William Ferris that Ferris had “more
degrees than a thermometer.” And to prove the point, consider Ferris’
schooling at Davidson College, Northwestern University, Trinity College
(Dublin), and the University of Pennsylvania.
Now factor in Ferris’ teaching career — at Jackson State
University, Yale University, the University of Mississippi, and the
University of North Carolina, where he’s today a professor of history
and senior associate director of the Center for the Study of the
American South.
In addition, Ferris was founding director of the Center for the
Study of Southern Culture at Ole Miss, once chaired the National
Endowment for the Humanities, and co-founded (with Judy Peiser)
Memphis’ Center for Southern Folklore. He also hosted a weekly blues
program on Mississippi Public Radio for nearly a decade. And as for
publishing, he co-edited the mammoth Encyclopedia of Southern
Culture and wrote the study Blues from the Delta.
Rolling Stone named Ferris one of the Top 10 professors in
the United State. But Ferris’ late brother Grey had a teasing way of
summarizing Ferris’ accomplishments: “I never knew anyone who went
further on less than my brother.”
Grey Ferris should know. He taught his brother how to use a camera
and to develop the pictures Ferris took on the family farm outside
Vicksburg, which led Ferris to photograph and tape-record the secular
and sacred sights and sounds around Vicksburg, the Delta, and
beyond.
Thus was Ferris the folklorist born, and the music of black
Mississipians was his passion. And now, Give My Poor Heart Ease:
Voices of the Mississippi Blues (The University of North Carolina
Press) is here: an autobiographical account and, more importantly, a
transcription of the recollections, which Ferris recorded in the 1960s
and ’70s, by blues and gospel musicians, preachers and Parchman
inmates, radio disc jockeys and, in the case of Robert Shaw, a salesman
for Lansky’s on Beale.
And it’s not only a written document. The book comes with a set of
Ferris’ original field recordings on CD: songs by the individuals
featured in the book — from Ferris’ childhood housekeeper, Mary
Gordon, to Otha Turner.
There’s more: The book also comes with a DVD that collects the
documentary films Ferris shot in the ’60s and ’70s — films that
include a scene inside a rousing church service, the work chants of
prisoners, a rollicking house party in Clarksdale, B.B. King in concert
at Yale, and the verbal dexterity of Shaw, that salesman from Lansky’s.
Leave it to Shaw to explain:
“This talk is what you call ‘born with it.’ You must be born with it
before you can get with it. And once you’re born with it, you’re
already down to the beat, the beat in the street. Understand, it’s
down, hip, what they call hip. Understand?”
Thanks to Professor Ferris, yeah, we do.
William Ferris will be in Memphis for two events on Saturday,
November 7th. He’ll be signing and discussing Give My Poor Heart
Ease at Davis-Kidd Booksellers at 2 p.m. and at the Center for
Southern Folklore at 7 p.m.
Memphis:
A Case Study
“Charlotte? Charlotte doesn’t have the characteristics of place that
Memphis has,” says Wanda Rushing, who grew up outside Charlotte and who
today serves as an associate professor of sociology at the University
of Memphis. “I knew that from the time I interviewed at the University
of Memphis in 1998. I knew then that Memphis is where I wanted to
be.”
It’s also a city she knew she wanted to write about, and she does in
Memphis and the Paradox of Place (The University of North
Carolina Press). And she does the city proud — as a site of
entrepreneurship and cultural innovation and as a city that can hold
its own globally. How so? By reworking its local products into a
worldwide identity. Rushing calls that process the “production of
locality.” Readers will recognize it as, more simply, Memphis’ unique
sense of place. “An important place,” Rushing would add.
