Documenting The South

William Ferris never stops exploring the American South. Since the 1960s, the folklorist and scholar—Mississippian and now North Carolinian—has used all his senses in documenting this distinct region. He listens for music and stories. He searches the landscape for images.

His book The South in Color: A Visual Journal presents striking color photography, beginning on his family’s farm in the 1960s, and completes an informal trilogy of the region that began with Give My Poor Heart Ease and The Storied South, both of which feature his black-and-white photography.

Now retired from his position as the Joel R. Williamson Eminent Professor of History, Ferris has continued his work and recently won two Grammy Awards for the multimedia set “Voices of Mississippi: Artists and Musicians Documented by William Ferris”. Curators built the collection from a massive archive that Ferris created and donated to the Southern Folklife Collection at the Wilson Special Collections Library.

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William Ferris is senior director emeritus of the Center for the Study of the American South and adjunct professor emeritus in the folklore curriculum of UNC’s College of Arts and Sciences.

This is story number 197 in the Carolina Stories 225th Anniversary Edition magazine.