The Storied South features the voices--by turn searching and honest, coy and scathing--of twenty-six of the most luminous artists and thinkers in the American cultural firmament, from Eudora Welty, Pete Seeger, and Alice Walker to William Eggleston, Bobby Rush, and C. Vann Woodward. Masterfully drawn from one-on-one interviews conducted by renowned folklorist William Ferris over the past forty years, the book reveals how storytelling is viscerally tied to southern identity and how...

This Omnibus Ebook for the first time brings together pioneering folklorist William Ferris’s books on the music and arts of the South.Included in this ebook are:Give My Poor Heart Ease: Voices of the Mississippi Blues:Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Ferris toured his home state of Mississippi, documenting the voices of African Americans as they spoke about and performed the diverse musical traditions that form the authentic roots of the blues. Now, Give...

Renowned folklorist William R. Ferris has captured the voices of southern musicians, artists, writers, and thinkers for forty years—and we have been proud to publish his work in Southern Cultures for nearly half of that time.To celebrate Southern Cultures' 20th anniversary, we present our inaugural special omnibus ebook, The William R. Ferris Reader. Collected here for the first time are all 20 of Bill Ferris’s essays and interviews as they have appeared ...

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, folklorist William Ferris toured his home state of Mississippi, documenting the voices of African Americans as they spoke about and performed the diverse musical traditions that form the authentic roots of the blues. Now, Give My Poor Heart Ease puts front and center a searing selection of the artistically and emotionally rich voices from this invaluable documentary record. Illustrated with Ferris's photographs of the musicians and their communities...

Follow the evolution of the vision and career of one of the South’s foremost photographers.“Santa Claus had brought me and my sister a small Brownie camera in the late 1940s, and I just loaded it with color film and went out to that Alabama landscape and began to photograph what caught my eye.” This article appears in the Summer 2011 issue of Southern Cultures:The Photography Issue.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, folklorist William Ferris toured his home state of Mississippi, documenting the voices of African Americans as they spoke about and performed the diverse musical traditions that form the authentic roots of the blues. Now, Give My Poor Heart Ease puts front and center a searing selection of the artistically and emotionally rich voices from this invaluable documentary record. Illustrated with Ferris’s photographs of the musicians and their communities...

ALEXANDER CRUMMELL AN APOSTLE OF NEGRO CULTURE.A noted English lawyer-author has declared that the twelfth chapter of Ecclesiastes is the final word of the world's philosophy; that no ancient or modern thinker has uttered a profounder word. And in the seventh verse of that chapter it reads, "Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was; and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it."Metaphysicians tell us that through his five senses, man is in touch with and in rel...

In the American South, the civil rights movement in the 1960s and the struggle to abolish racial segregation erupted in dramatic scenes at lunch counters, in schools, and in churches. The admission of James Meredith as the first black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi; the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama; and the sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis—where Martin Luther King was assassinated—rank as cardinal events in black Americans’ fight for their civil rights.

Readers captivated by this book will be happy that Bill Ferris found Ray Lum and that he thought to turn on a tape recorder. Lum (1891-1977) was a mule skinner, a livestock trader, an auctioneer, and an American original.This delightful book, first published in 1992 as “You Live and Learn. Then You Die and Forget It All,” preserves Lum's colorful folk dialect and captures the essence of this one-of-a-kind figure who seems to have stepped full-blooded from the pages of Mark...

The tintype is rooted in more than 150 years of photographic method. In this collection of extraordinary portraits, Timothy Duffy brings new vitality to this old form, capturing powerful images of musicians who represent the roots of American music. These American blues, jazz, and folk artists are living expressions of a cultural legacy, made and remade by everyday people and passed down through generations. In the hands of the people in Duffy’s portraits, centuries-old traditions find new...

Deep Inside the Blues collects thirty-four of Margo Cooper’s interviews with blues artists and is illustrated with over 160 of her photographs, many published here for the first time. For thirty years, Cooper has been documenting the lives of blues musicians, their families and homes, neighborhoods, festivals, and gigs. Her photographic work combines iconic late-career images of many legendary figures including Bo Diddley, Honeyboy Edwards, B. B. King, Pinetop Perkins, and Hubert ...

Blues Book of the Year—26th Annual Living Blues AwardsContributions by Luther Allison, John Broven, Daniel Droixhe, David Evans, William Ferris, Jim O'Neal, Mike Rowe, Robert Sacré, Arnold Shaw, and Dick ShurmanFifty years after Charley Patton's death in 1934, a team of blues experts gathered five thousand miles from Dockery Farms at the University of Liege in Belgium to honor the life and music of the most influential artis...