Etching a Mark on the Face of Oblivion
In the second part of our “Fifty Years of Ferris” series, Bill Ferris revisits his 1975 documentary Two Black Churches, and discusses how the sacred spaces of the Black church have shaped all of American culture.
Bill Ferris | Two Black Churches | Black church documentary
If you’ve spent any time with the work of Bill Ferris, you know he’s devoted his life to honoring the stories, songs, and sacred spaces of the American South. In the second installment of our “Fifty Years of Ferris” series, we turn to his 1975 documentary Two Black Churches, a film that stands as both a work of preservation and a quiet act of protest.
Ferris’s camera brings us inside two sanctuaries: Rose Hill Church, a rural congregation near Vicksburg, Mississippi, where he first learned the power of hymns sung from memory, and St. James Church in New Haven, Connecticut, a vibrant urban church shaped by families who migrated north from the Carolinas. The film captures not only the differences in worship styles, music, and community life, but also the deep roots and shared traditions that bind these congregations together across miles and generations.
In this conversation, Bill reflects on what drew him to document these churches, the trust and welcome extended to him by their members, and the ways in which Black churches have long served as bedrock for resilience, activism, and cultural continuity. Fifty years on, Two Black Churches remains a powerful testament to the enduring spirit and influence of the Black church in America.
On this page, you can watch Two Black Churches in its entirety and watch my interview with Ferris about the film (and/or read the edited transcript of that interview below).
Bill Ferris | Two Black Churches | Black church documentary
Give My Poor Heart Ease | Bill Ferris interview | Mississippi blues documentary
Watch Two Black Churches, Bill Ferris’s landmark 1975 documentary on the Black church
Watch editor Chuck Reece’s conversation with Ferris about the film.
Give My Poor Heart Ease | Bill Ferris interview | Mississippi blues documentary
Calm & Quiet/Sanctified & Loud
Bill Ferris | Two Black Churches | Black church documentary
Chuck Reece: We are in the second of the series of interviews we’ve been doing with Bill about four documentary films that were released in 1975. And the one we’re going to talk about today is called Two Black Churches. And Bill, know, Two Black Churches documents, you know, worship and faith communities, you know, in both Vicksburg, Mississippi, and in New Haven, Connecticut. And I’m curious, you know, what prompted you to juxtapose those two particular congregations and, know, what did you hope to reveal by contrasting them within a single film?
Dr. William Reynolds Ferris: Well, the first church I’ve known since I was a baby, it’s on the farm where I grew up, Rose Hill Church. And when I was quite young, four or five, a lady who took care of me named Mary Gordon would take me to church. Every first Sunday, the minister would come once a month, on the first Sunday, and we would go to those services. I learned to sing the hymns and I loved the sermons. So it was a part of my life and in many ways when I realized there were no hymnals and everything was sung from memory, I realized that when those families were no longer there, the music would disappear. As a teenager, I began to record and photograph and later film the services to preserve the memory. And that really was the foundation of my life as a folklorist. When I began there quite young, I’ve continued to this moment. I carry my iPhone and will photograph, record, and sometimes film.
So, that church was an obvious place to begin a film that would look at the roots of black religion in the South, the rural South. And this church has since been used by Raven Jackson as the scene for her film, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt. She’s a young, very important filmmaker—trained at New York University—whose mother grew up in Mississippi, and she was looking for a church like her mother’s church. And so that was the anchor of a film that also looked at the migration of Black families out of the South and into northern urban areas.
I happened to be teaching at Yale and was told about St. James’s Church, which is one of those communities—in this case from North Carolina—who moved to the New Haven area. The church represents those families in a very different service, a sanctified service with much more dramatic music and faith healing and sermons. The style of the sermon is similar, but again, it’s an important contrast—geographically, musically and culturally.
“As a teenager, I began to record and photograph and later film the services to preserve the memory. And that really was the foundation of my life as a folklorist.”
The St. James Church is obviously much more affluent, and it’s different. So those are two churches that—side by side in one film—give you a pretty good encounter with the range of traditional black a cappella hymns in contrast to gospel singing with the musical accompaniment and dance. That procession down the aisle was actually used as an inspiration in [the film] The Color Purple by Quincy Jones and Steven Spielberg in the church scene there. The choir marches down the aisle in the same way that they do at St. James.
The film has been used widely in religion courses and it seems to be a success.
Trust, Intimacy, Community Bedrock
Bill Ferris | Two Black Churches | Black church documentary
CR: I would say that it has! The film captures both a full immersion baptismal service in Mississippi. You know, having grown up in a small Baptist church and having been baptized in a river in North Georgia, that brought up some feelings for me.
Church spaces are, by their nature, intimate. Right? And you also had intimate conversations with, with the congregation members and preachers.
What was it like to gain the trust of these communities and to be present in these sacred moments. Were there any challenges or surprises during the filmmaking?
WRF: Well, since I was a child, I have always felt privileged to be allowed into those spaces. The church is a safe haven for Black families. The Black church is. And it’s like a Black town or a juke joint. These are Black spaces, owned and controlled by Black families.
As a child and later as an adult folklorist working in them, I felt privileged to be welcomed in and the minister, Rev. Isaac Thomas at Rose Hill, in one of his sermons addressed me and he said that the doors of the church would always open on the hinges of welcome to me when I came there. A way of saying, we are happy to have you with us.
In both churches, we spoke with about what we were doing with this film and they were happy to welcome us with our camera and equipment. And they spoke with us off-camera about religion.
The baptismal ceremony [in Mississippi] was shot earlier, in the late ’60s, with a Super 8 camera, when I was just beginning to make films. Super 8, black and white, very grainy with wild sound, but it works quite powerfully as the procession crosses a cotton field to a little pond, and then the baptism is conducted there.
So that’s a segue into the color film in the 1974 production of Two Black Churches, but it fits.
“The church is a safe haven for Black families. The Black church is. And it’s like a Black town or a juke joint. These are Black spaces, owned and controlled by Black families.”
CR: We were talking earlier, when we began this chat, about the differences you saw in the worship styles and the theology and the community life between Rose Hill Church in Mississippi and St. James in Connecticut. What similarities between the two places struck you?
WRF: Well, one similarity is the powerful presence of the preacher, who is a man in both churches. Traditionally, men have been advantaged within Black religion as ministers. They are the heads of the church. And they are surrounded by the mothers of the church, who basically are like the sergeants in the army. They see that the doors are opened on time, that linen cover is on the table where the sacraments are going to be served, and they are the force that keeps the church together. So you have a kind of common structure within the churches.
And it is a celebratory moment. The dress at both churches is elegant, colorful, beautiful. And the hymns. There’s no question that the St. James’s service has its elaborate choir and music. But also, if you were to ask, they would be quite familiar with the a cappella Dr. [Isaac] Watts hymns—traditional hymns and spirituals that would be sung in the rural Southern churches like Rose Hill. So there’s a continuum. The roots of black religion are deep in both churches. They are both rooted in rural Southern worlds. That can be felt in both services, but they’re also quite different.
Bill Ferris | Two Black Churches | Black church documentary
Migration, Memory, Cultural Blending
CR: I grew up in a small rural church like that in the South, you know, and my dad was a song leader in the church. So, I was always surrounded by different songbooks, both old and new ones that came out every year. There was a song sung [at Rose Hill] in your film. It was called “He Will Remember Me.” There’s a website I go to called hymnary.org that generally always has facts about the writers of various Southern hymns. I found it, and it was interesting to me because that song was written in the 1930s by a white man named E.M. Bartlett. My dad actually taught me when I was a kid which of the hymns were written by white writers and which were written by Black writers, which were written by women, which were written by men. The churches were strictly segregated. I mean, people still say that Sunday is the most segregated time in America. But there was all this musical crossover that I don’t think many people were actually aware of.
WRF: Well, that’s the nature, we could say, of culture. mean, here you have African slaves who came to this country whose religion in many areas was Vodun, West African voodoo. And they are introduced into a slave culture here that had Christianity as the dominant religion of the slave owners. So some of the oldest and most beloved hymns in the Black church are the Dr. Watts hymns, which were composed by Isaac Watts, a British hymnist. And you have all sorts of white compositions that are sung by Black choirs and congregations. You also have many Black compositions that are sung by whites. And that gets much more interesting in the 20th century as gospel music becomes commercialized and the marketing of hymnals as part of the performance of gospel singers. Singers like Sam Cooke, who left gospel singing and Al Green, who left and then came back. There was a whole marketing in which religion and music were joined at the hip. But “He Will Remember Me,” I think, is the same hymn that is sung in Rose Hill as “Will the Lord Remember Me?”
CR: You’re absolutely right.
WRF: It’s a religious hymn that is not based on race. It’s simply voicing belief and hope. “Will the Lord Remember Me?” or “He Will Remember Me” can go in any church—Black or white—and that gives you hope for the future the congregations might follow. And in fact, in the Sacred Harp sings that I recorded, there were both Black and white. I was very pleasantly surprised in Black Sacred Harp sings to see some of my friends from White Sacred Harp communities, big leaders in that, who had come across the state to join the congregation in an all-day sing. So you see, it’s a very rich blending of traditional music that is equally at home in a white or a Black church.
“‘He Will Remember Me’ can go in any church—Black or white. It’s a very rich blending of traditional music that is equally at home in a white or a Black church.”
CR: I find myself so tempted right now to take us off on a tangent about Sacred Harp singing, because it’s a whole other animal. But I want to stick to our business on Two Black Churches here. You were talking earlier about the Black church being a safe space. It has long been called the bedrock of African-American survival and resilience and activism.
When you shot both of these—Rose Hill in the late ’60s and then St. James in the early ’70s, in two very different regions—segregation was still very much at play, although in different ways in those different places. So I’m curious, how did you, in the two different churches, notice that community bedrock role play out?
WRF: I think the church in both instances is the safe haven. It’s where both communities, and in the case of Rose Hill, while many of the members lived within a mile or two of the church, many others lived in Vicksburg, fifteen miles away, and some lived in Aurora, Illinois, know, many, many miles away. But when their family members died, they were brought back and laid to rest in the churchyard. So it is kind of the home place in every sense. It’s a place where—both when you’re alive and when you finally die—you feel you want to be. It’s a place of communing with relatives and friends who come together and linger after the service. And often they’ll bring fried chicken and baskets of food and eat either in the church or outside. And there’s a sense of communing with nature. When I taught at Jackson State, one of our friends was Alice Walker, who wrote The Color Purple. And she came over and visited Rose Hill Church. There was no service. She just went there, and she was deeply moved by the view from Rose Hill and wrote a poem called “View from Rose Hill” about the power of that church and all churches to shape the Black experience, how it gave you a view of life as well as a literal view across fields and roads nearby. So it’s a perspective on life that the church creates.
In the same way, that moving from that rural site to a very urban site in New Haven, Connecticut, a very different world, the church is your way of at least recreating that feeling of security and the power of religion and a service in a distant land. The diaspora, we might think of it, of rural Black families who moved out of the South. In the case [of], Rose Hill, the central migration was to Chicago. The Eastern migration from the Carolinas was to New York, Philadelphia, and New Haven. And the Western migration—Louisiana, Arkansas—was to California.
So wherever those families moved, you would find churches like St. James’s Church. And where they came from, you would find churches like Rose Hill. I befriended Ernest Gaines, who grew up in a small community in Louisiana and went to a little church like Rose Hill.
CR: Right.
WRF: Which was also used as a schoolhouse. He learned to read and write there. And then his family sent him to California with a shoebox full of food, biscuits. And he grew up out there. When I met him, he was living in San Francisco. And then he came back and lived in Louisiana. His life in many ways symbolizes that Western migration in the same way that the Rose Hill Church’s migration was to Aurora, Illinois. And I sometimes thought about going to Aurora, Illinois, and interviewing and photographing those worlds because I knew that people whom I knew as children had moved there. There’s a deep connection, but you just don’t have the time and resources to do all these things you wish you could do. And the same with the North Carolina church in New Haven, I would have loved to have come back to North Carolina and captured some of the roots of those families here.
CR: There was a connection. Did you ask any of the people at St. James Church specifically where their roots in the South were? Were they all concentrated in a particular part of the South? I know you didn’t do a poll of all of them, where their roots were, but I’m just curious.
WRF: We spoke about that. I don’t remember specifically. I want to say High Point, but I’m not sure. But they were from a general part of North Carolina. Usually one or two families would move, and then other relatives and friends would follow. So it’s a pattern in migration. Usually one or two sort of brave souls go first.
CR: Okay.
WRF: They feel like it’s an accepting place to be, so others will follow.
Honoring the Black Church Is a Political Act
Bill Ferris | Two Black Churches | Black church documentary
CR: You know, when we were talking about Give My Poor Heart Ease, the last time we had one of these chats, one of the things you said to me that really stuck with me was that you felt like the documentation you were doing was both a form of protest against the racism that you saw people subjected to and a form of preservation. You were giving voice to stories that are left that were generally left out of the historical record. And I’m wondering, did that philosophy come to play when you were making Two Black Churches at all?
WRF: Absolutely. Absolutely. It came to play in all four of these films. Anytime you document and show respect for and preserve the Black experience, that’s a political act, because many people would prefer to see it erased from our history. And we’re doing the opposite. We’re etching a mark on the face of oblivion for the Black voice, the Black face, and the Black tradition, culturally, in these films. And when we look at the church, we’re looking at a powerful kind of voice and secure space for political movements like the civil rights movement and the abolitionist movement. Frederick Douglass and all of the leaders of Black freedom, from the beginning to the present, have religion deeply embedded in that movement.
CR: Right.
WRF: And the churches physically were where organizing was often done. They were often burned by the Ku Klux Klan and others because of that. And you see the church as a monumental structure that stands out on the landscape in both rural and urban worlds.
CR: I want to bring this down to the personal level for a second. Earlier in this conversation, you were talking about Mary Gordon at Rose Hill. And I know she appears in this film. I remember conversations when you and I were first getting to know each other a decade ago, you talking about how Ms. Gordon was someone who brought you into that church when you were a young man.
What kind of impact did Mary Gordon—looking back on it fifty years later—have on your life as it has played out? How do you remember her?
WRF: I don’t think words can express the full extent of what she did to open my eyes and to expand my awareness of life. I spent many, many hours with her in our home. She often sang. No matter what she was doing, you would hear music that she would be singing. It was usually a hymn she would be humming. And she had a sense of humor. After celebrating the New Year, she would sometimes say, “Well, it seems like I haven’t seen you for a year!”. We would laugh. She had little jokes that were familiar, and you were always happy to hear them.
And she had a deep knowledge of both her family and my family. And her stepfather had a photographic memory. She came from a tradition of memory and she was also a very gifted, athletic young woman. I didn’t know her then, but there were stories of how she would ride a horse and climb trees. She was known in the community and respected for many, many things, but especially for her memory and her deep roots in the church.
“Anytime you document and show respect for and preserve the Black experience, that’s a political act, because many people would prefer to see it erased from our history. And we’re doing the opposite. We’re etching a mark on the face of oblivion for the Black voice.”
Part of her family had moved to Aurora, Illinois. When she was dying, she was in a nursing home in Vicksburg. And I went to see her there, and all of her family were with her. I was sitting by the bed and holding her hand. And she looked at me and she said, “You’re my Black child.” And I said thank you. To me, that was a recognition of a kind of bond between us. And in many ways, my career as a folklorist has been dedicated to her and to the worlds that I saw as so important to me, but also threatened by the loss of memory of those people and their music and stories. It was something I did not want to allow to the degree that I could. And I think the career I’ve followed as a folklorist has been part of that effort to preserve memory and to encourage my students to do the same in their families.
CR: You have spoken to me more than once—and certainly in the last interview we did about Give My Poor Heart Ease—about the idea of building bridges through your work as a folklorist between different communities, and how important documenting these vanishing cultural landscapes is to you. And
I wonder, when you look at those specific goals of your long career as a folklorist, how do you feel that Two Black Churches specifically speaks to that larger mission?
WRF: I think two things really rise when you see these two services. One is the power of religion. Regardless of race, you’re moved emotionally and inspired by the voices and the power of the music, the sermon. The other is the power of the music itself. And we could argue that out of these two musical traditions, the rural spirituals and hymns and the urban gospel. Well, gospel and rural are mixed in both places, but the gospel tends to be associated with the urban. But out of those musical traditions came the jazz, the blues, hip hop, rap, rock ’n’ roll, white gospel. I mean, America’s musical legacy is shaped and defined by the Black voice. And in these two churches, you dip deep into that tradition. It’s easy to see the kind of power that goes far beyond the walls of these churches—into Lincoln Center, into the academic worlds of literature, and beyond. There’s no limit to how these two little services can be understood as keys to who we are as Americans and as citizens of the planet. Because the ripple effect of that music and that experience from slavery to the present is beyond measure.
I just think we will look back in fifty to 100 years and we will see far more clearly perhaps than we do today how our culture as Americans is, in many ways, Black culture. And we don’t acknowledge it, but visitors to this country see it. Carl Jung was traveling around and he said, I’m struck by how these white Americans talk and walk like Blacks. They don’t acknowledge it, but their culture is so Black. And Robert Farris Thompson, the art historian with whom I was privileged to work, devoted his life to looking at the Blackening of American culture through African and Black American music and religion.
The Church Is a Blender
Bill Ferris | Two Black Churches | Black church documentary
WRF: When we look at religion, one of the things we see is a blending. We talked about the blending of white and Black compositions within both churches, but the blending of African derived voodoo with its sacred use of the snake as the chief god, Damballa, and the spirit possession where the believer is possessed and ridden like a horse. That is part of the Black, quote, “Christian” tradition as well. So the parallels within these two churches of both African and European religious tradition is quite powerful. So there are many ways to approach these two services.
It’s a rich body of experience that film allows us to walk into and experience in the deepest way. In some ways, it’s more powerful than actually being there, because film foreshortens and brings you face to face with this kind of material.
CR: Watching this film makes me particularly think about the role of the church in the cultural crossover there. Right? It’s the mixing of the music that we were talking about before. It’s always felt to me like—particularly in studying the music of the South, which after all is the music of America—here are common roots in both Black churches and white churches. The thing I keep thinking about is, after Aretha Franklin died, I had the opportunity to interview Spooner Oldham. Spooner was one of the Muscle Shoals musicians who played with Aretha. He came up with that famous Wurlitzer piano riff on “I Ain’t Never Loved a Man (the Way That I Love You).” That was Aretha’s first album that was full of hits. When I was asking him about how you guys got the musical chops you had, he was like, well, we all grew up in church doing music like this.
WRF: That’s right. Well, you see that in Jerry Lee Lewis, in Elvis Presley, in Johnny Cash, and Carl Perkins, that Million Dollar Quartet that just by happenstance were all at Sun Records hanging out with Elvis at the piano. And they started singing and Sam Phillips wisely turned on the recording machine to capture it. And what they sang was not rock ’n’ roll. It was all religious. That became the greatest of all the recordings they issued. And it was not rehearsed in any sense. It was simply sung by memory because they all grew up in Tennessee and Louisiana, in different places, but listening and going to church and learning to play instruments in the church in the same way that Black musicians did. B.B. King coming out of Mississippi, Al Green, they all could play the guitar.
“They were young children, you know, maybe six to ten. And they stepped up and sang a little gospel song. The power of that, the innocence of those voices singing with such clarity.”
B.B. commented once to me, he said, you know, when I learned to play music, I had a choice of churches. You could go to a traditional Baptist church that forbid the playing of instruments, or I could go to the sanctified church where they encouraged you to play the guitar and the drums. And he said, you can imagine which church I decided to go to. I wanted to learn to play the guitar.
So all of that folds together in a beautiful way. We talked about Black and white composed hymns. No doubt the most famous of all is “Amazing Grace,” which was composed by a white British person [John Newton] who had enslaved Africans. He was haunted by the memory of their voices calling out for mercy, and he created that composition. Alex Haley said it was his favorite of all hymns, as it is for so many. But he would talk about the irony of it being loved by Black churches. It was composed by someone who’d been part of the slave trade and was trying to somehow reclaim his soul through music.
Music becomes really a key part of religion. And when we look at it carefully, it offers the whole history of our people coming to these shores from Africa, from Europe, and other parts.
CR: Yeah. I got one last question for you. Looking back at Two Black Churches fifty years later, is there a particular moment or image from the film that has stayed with you the most across the last five decades, a scene that maybe captures the heart of what you were hoping to convey when you made that film?
WRF: It’s in Rose Hill Church. And there was a family there, some of them still live there, the McGowan family. And they have, no matter which generation, they call themselves the McGowan Family Gospel Singers. In this case, they were young children, you know, maybe six to ten. And they stepped up and sang a little gospel song. The power of that, the innocence of those voices singing with such clarity. And the very last note, this young girl tilts her head and looks up at the camera in a very knowing, beautiful way. And that just sort of summarized it. That is the note on which we go from this rural Baptist church to the urban sanctified church because it really carries through and it’s a moment that you just can’t get out of your mind and your memory. It’s a perfect kind of note to capture everything in the church—what that means for the families.
CR: I am so glad you captured that. And I’m so glad that we have the opportunity to sit here and talk about it fifty years later. I’m very much looking forward to our conversation next month, when we will talk about your film Made in Mississippi.
Chuck Reece is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Salvation South, the weekly web magazine you're reading right now. He was the founding editor of The Bitter Southerner. He grew up in the north Georgia mountains in a little town called Ellijay.
