Talking with folklorist William Ferris about a live adaption of his Voices of

MUSIC VOICES OF MISSISSIPPI ft. William Ferris, Cedric Burnside, Shardé Thomas, and Luther & Cody Dickinson of the North Mississippi All-Stars Memorial Hall, Carolina Performing Arts, Chapel Hill | Wednesday, April 6 | 7:30 pm, $15-$40

The Mother Lode

The folklorist William Ferris brings his Voices of Mississippi work to life at Memorial Hall.

BY NICK MCGREGOR music@indyweek.com

William Ferris’s reputation and résumé make him the preeminent scholar of folklore and the American South.

He founded the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, cofounded the Center for Southern Folklore in Memphis, and spent decades at the Center for the Study of the American South here at UNC-Chapel Hill. He chaired the National Endowment for the Humanities for four years. He even won a Grammy for Voices of Mississippi, the 2018 box set that collected his life’s work.

Still, Ferris, who is 80, is far from done yet. He’s spent the last two years collaborating on a live adaptation of Voices of Mississippi, combining his sound recordings, photographs, and documentary footage with original music performed by the descendants of the Mississippians with whom he worked in the 1960s and ’70s. After a hometown debut in Oxford, followed by four shows at Lincoln Center in New York City, the multimedia Voices of Mississippi event comes to UNC-Chapel Hill’s Memorial Hall soon, courtesy of Carolina Performing Arts.

“Being here at UNC is special for me,” Ferris told INDY Week over the phone on a recent Tuesday morning. “My archive is here. This is the mother lode of what I do as a teacher and scholar.”

The following conversation with Ferris about the work has been edited for length and clarity; a longer version is available online.

INDY WEEK: What motivated you to start recording Voices of Mississippi as a young man? And what helped you realize that it could eventually be a vocation? WILLIAM FERRIS: It started as a young child, when I was four or five years old, at Rose Hill Church. I learned to sing the hymns, but as I grew older, I realized that there were no hymnals in the church. All the music was sung from memory, meaning that when those families were no longer there, the music would stop. So I began to record, photograph, and later film the church as a way of preserving that very personal experience.

Then, in the sixties, I began to see this as a political act. These were voices that had been left out of history—there were no books that captured their lives. At Northwestern University, the English department told me I could not study this music as literature. But I had a fellowship from the Rotary Foundation at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, and over breakfast one day I met a visiting folklorist named Francis Utley. He was the chairman of the English department at Ohio State, and I complained to him that English departments were not open enough to allow me to study these voices that I thought should be studied alongside our writers.

He smiled and said, “You should be in folklore.” That changed my life. I applied and was accepted to the University of Pennsylvania, and when I arrived in the fall, I met my adviser, Kenneth Goldstein. I brought a box of my tape recordings and photographs and said, “Dr. Goldstein, can I continue to do this work here?”

He smiled and said, “That, my boy, will be your dissertation.” The work I’d been doing as a sort of instinctive love now had an academic foundation that gave it legitimacy.

In addition to recording music, you committed to collecting everyday stories, jokes, asides, and explanations. How important is that?

It’s central. Everyday things, the spoken words that pass that we barely notice— An archival image of William Ferris at work. PHOTO COURTESY OF THE SUBJECT

what the French call la vie de quotidienne— are the foundation of life itself. They’re also the foundation of our region’s literary achievement and the backbone of music in the 20th and 21st centuries.

For me, seeing these voices not only recorded but transcribed in the Voices of Mississippi book was a major step. Ironically, it’s very rare that you can read the text of music and stories and feel like you can see the quality of language as you would in a novel or a short story. This is the wellspring of our language as Southerners and as Americans.

You always placed your subjects in their appropriate social and cultural contexts. But does the context of the farm you grew up on in rural Mississippi feel long gone to you today?

Well, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Faulkner talked about the old truths and verities that you learn, whether it’s on a farm, in a ghetto, or in Chapel Hill and Durham. Growing up, you learn the basics. Alex Haley referred to it as “you were raised right.” You were taught to deal with life.

Those are lessons that in the South are very important. You learn politeness, to respect elders, to define and understand the society in which you live so that you can survive. Our nation is moving from a dominant white male culture to a much more diverse culture that reflects the world. And these Voices of Mississippi are a celebration of the life and culture in which we live, along with an affirmation that earlier generations will not be forgotten but will continue to live and speak to us.

Where do you see folklore going in the future? How will today’s voices speak to us tomorrow?

Our students [at UNC] are on a mission. They come here essentially break-

“That’s how I’ve seen my work: embracing and walking in the shoes of others that are different from you but have much to teach you.”

ing out of the traditional confinement of academia, seeing the field of folklore as a liberating body of knowledge. These students cut to the quick. They go deep into the music, food, and lives of the people with whom they work.

They are also helping elevate the voices of what we might think of as the New South. Diverse Hispanic, Asian, Indian, and Native American families are transforming the face of North Carolina. A lot of work is being done to study those worlds by UNC’s folklore students. It’s the perfect place to find a home within the academy that allows you to also work in the dynamic, changing world around us.

In Voices of Mississippi, you mention being driven by an “interest in understanding this different world.” How critical is that kind of empathy in today’s polarized America?

It’s absolutely critical for the future of our nation. That’s how I’ve seen my work: embracing and walking in the shoes of others that are different from you but have much to teach you. Rather than being threatened by differences, we should celebrate them. One of the things that makes us great is our newly arrived families from all over the world—some fleeing the Holocaust, some fleeing despots in South America, and some now fleeing the violence in Ukraine. When they find their way to our shores, you can be sure that they’re going to contribute in ways that we desperately need to survive as a people. W

RESOLUTION TO ADOPT A POLLING PLACE CHANGE IN DURHAM COUNTY

At a meeting duly called and held on the 10th day of March 2022, at the Board of Elections Operations Center (2445 S. Alston Avenue), the Durham County Board of Elections passed the following resolution:

WHEREAS the county board of elections shall have power from time to time, by resolution, to establish, alter, discontinue, or create such new election precincts or voting places as it may deem expedient, under G.S. 163-128(a);

WHEREAS Precinct 25 Polling Place was located at the Northern High School, located at 117 Tom Wilkinson Road, Durham, NC 27712;

WHEREAS the location at Northern High School has accessibility/voter access issues and offers limited space in the available voting enclosure;

WHEREAS Lucas Middle School, located at 923 Snow Hill Road, Durham, NC 27712 has agreed to allow usage of their facility as a polling place for Precinct 25;

WHEREAS Lucas Middle School is within the prescribed boundaries of Precinct 25, and is permitted for use as a polling place consistent with G.S. 163-128(a);

WHEREAS a Polling Place Accessibility Survey has been completed for the new site and was found to be ADA compliant; and

WHEREAS the Board of Elections shall notify all voters of the polling place change.

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT

RESOLVED that the Durham County Board of Elections hereby unanimously approves the relocation of Precinct 25 Polling Place from Northern High School to Lucas Middle School located at 923 Snow Hill Road, Durham, NC 27712.

This the 10th day of March 2022.

—Dawn Y. Baxton, Chairman