William Ferris
1) Bobby Rush: "Blues Singer--Plus": From Southern Cultures, Volume 17: Number 4, Winter 2011: Music
Author
Series
Description
I try to get the people in my hand, for them to love me, and once I get them in my hand, I can then tell them what I've come to tell them. And I come to tell them about the blues. It's just like a preacher."The consummate Chiltin' Circuit performer talks women, finding his crossover audience, and masquerading as two different people on the same stage in one night.This article appears in the 2011 Music issue of Southern Cultures.Southern Cultures is...
Author
Description
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...
Author
Description
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...
Author
Description
Since the moment William Ferris's parents gave their twelve-year-old son a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye camera for Christmas in 1954, Ferris passionately began to photograph his world. He has never stopped. The sixties and seventies were a particularly significant period for Ferris as he became a pathbreaking documentarian of the American South. This beautiful, provocative collection of 100 of Ferris's photographs of the South, taken during this formative...
Author
Description
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...
Author
Description
Southern folklife is the heart of southern culture. Looking at traditional practices still carried on today as well as at aspects of folklife that are dynamic and emergent, contributors to this volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture examine a broad range of folk traditions. Moving beyond the traditional view of folklore that situates it in historical practice and narrowly defined genres, entries in this volume demonstrate how folklife...
Author
Description
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.