Fifty Years of Ferris
As renowned folklorist Bill Ferris celebrates 50 years since the release of four landmark documentaries, we present those films and begin a series of interviews about the cultural connections that should unite all Southerners.
Give My Poor Heart Ease | Bill Ferris interview | Mississippi blues documentary
Few people have contributed more to the preservation, documentation, and study of Southern culture than Bill Ferris.
A Mississippi native, Ferris was part of the team that, in the early 1970s, established the first African American Studies program in the Ivy League at Yale University. From there, he returned to Mississippi and in 1978 became the founding director of the University of Mississippi’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture—the first academic center in the nation where scholars could study the South’s literature, history, and music, focusing specifically on race relations. During the presidency of Bill Clinton, he headed the National Endowment for the Humanities. From there, he moved to the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill to become part of that college’s Center for the Study of the American South.
Dr. William Reynolds Ferris and I have known each other for a decade now. He formally retired from his post at the Center for the Study of the American South in 2018, but he hardly rests on his laurels. At age eighty-three, he still works every day on various projects to ensure the study of Southern culture remains strong.
As a teenager, Bill began documenting Black life in Mississippi, on his family’s farm south of Vicksburg, through film, photography, field recordings, and oral histories. When he joined the faculty at Yale in 1972, he worked with the university’s Media Design Center to release four documentary films from the material he had collected.
All four films were released in 1975. The most widely known is Give My Poor Heart Ease, a study of blues culture that includes a historic interview with the late B.B. King. That film lent its title to Bill’s 2009 book, Give My Poor Heart Ease: Voices of the Mississippi Blues. The other three 1975 films were Two Black Churches, which focused on religion, Made in Mississippi, which put Black Mississippi craftspeople and artists in the spotlight, and I Ain’t Lying, which featured storytellers.
The vast trove of materials Ferris has collected over the past seven decades continues to fuel not just the culture of the South, but also the popular culture of the entire world. Fans lucky enough to see Beyoncé on her Cowboy Carter tour will see, among the images of Black culture she has licensed for the show, Ferris’s photograph of the legendary bluesman Bobby Rush in his youth. Her husband, rapper and impresario Jay-Z, used Ferris’s films of Mississippi penitentiary inmates in his 2023 documentary, Exposing Parchman.
With the golden anniversary of his four Yale films’ release looming, I approached Bill and asked if Salvation South could present each of those films in its entirety, accompanied by a conversation about the film between him and me.
We’re calling this special project “Fifty Years of Ferris,” and we kick it off today with Give My Poor Heart Ease, a video of our conversation about the film, and a transcript of our chat (below) for folks who’d rather read than watch.
We’ll repeat the process monthly, through August.
Give My Poor Heart Ease | Bill Ferris interview | Mississippi blues documentary
Watch Give My Poor Heart Ease, Bill Ferris’s landmark 1975 blues documentary
Watch editor Chuck Reece’s conversation with Ferris about the film.
Give My Poor Heart Ease | Bill Ferris interview | Mississippi blues documentary
Chuck Reece: We’re talking with Bill Ferris about his 1975 film, Give My Poor Heart Ease. And you made this film, Bill, about the blues in Mississippi at a time, you know, in the seventies when there was a lot of backlash from white people in the South against the civil rights gains that had happened in the 1960s. So, you know, I wonder—and I’m sure everybody who’s going to watch this is wondering—how your upbringing as a white Mississippian shaped your determination to document blues culture and the Black culture of Mississippi at the time.
Dr. William Reynolds Ferris: Well, first I grew up on a farm outside of Vicksburg in Warren County, Mississippi. And we were the only white family there for several miles. And all my friends, childhood friends, my world was surrounded by Black families and children my age. And I used to go to a little Black church on the farm every first Sunday when they had a service with a lady named Mary Gordon. And I learned to sing the hymns and to love the sermons.
As I grew older, I realized there were no hymnals in that church and that when those families were gone, the music would disappear. And so I decided to record the music and photograph it and later film it as a way of preserving that beautiful world that was my earliest experience with Black music and incredibly intimate and powerful. In a way, it was the foundation for my entire life as a folklorist.
But in the teenage years in the ’50s, blues was part of my culture as a white Mississippian. We dated and danced and listened to the radio to not only Elvis Presley, but to John Lee Hooker and Big Boy Crudup, B.B. King. Every Saturday night, we listened to WLAC, “Randy’s Record Shop,” with the two DJs, John R. Richbourg and his partner, would be on every Saturday night playing all blues. And so this was, to my mind, my favorite music. It was side by side with rock ’n’ roll. It was part of our dance culture. And then as I grew older, I was increasingly aware of social injustice, of civil rights. When I was an undergraduate student at Davidson College, I was actively involved with desegregating the college, with participating and working with children in the area, teaching Black children. And I felt an obligation and a commitment to somehow reach out and make a difference.
“I saw the film as the ultimate way of immersing an audience in the experience of a juke joint or a face-to-face conversation with a blues singer or a prison inmate at Parchment Penitentiary that’s virtually impossible to recreate.”
And for me, from childhood on and teenage years on, recording and preserving music and voice, the stories of first the community on the farm where I grew up, and then later all over the Mississippi Delta and other areas, I saw it as a work of protest. The voices of Black families had been omitted from the books and the records historically that we were taught in school. I saw these voices and recording them as a political act. It was not marching in civil rights marches, but it was in many ways to me just as important because without those recordings, the voices would be forgotten.
I’ve lived to see a day today when young Black filmmakers like Raven Jackson, who did All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, to see Jay-Z and Beyoncé, using my photography and film. My films are in the documentary Jay-Z did on Parchman Penitentiary. And Beyoncé has licensed my photograph of Bobby Rush to use in her Cowboy Carter tour, a photograph I took decades ago. And so in many ways it’s like good whiskey. It improves with time. And I love seeing how these materials, some of which I didn’t really think a lot about at the time when I photographed or filmed them, have become very valuable for essentially the grandchildren of the generation in which I worked.
I feel like Give My Poor Heart Ease is the pinnacle of my work on blues. I saw the film as the ultimate way of immersing an audience in the experience of a juke joint or a face-to-face conversation with a blues singer or a prison inmate at Parchment Penitentiary that’s virtually impossible to recreate. And there you have it face to face on the screen with the audience. They are essentially able to put themselves in the shoes of people who are speaking.
CR: I know that you grew up essentially within a Black community, but I’m curious, when you went into these places and did your filming, did you face skepticism from these communities and these people at all? And if so, how did you build trust?
WRF: Well, I think, first of all, as a Mississippian, a white Mississippian, I spoke a language, a dialect, and I knew the state’s places. I could talk about towns. But they always questioned me as to what I wanted to do. The first time I knocked on the door of James “Sun Ford” Thomas, the blues singer I worked with for many years, his wife came to the door, and she said, “What do you want?” And I said, “I’m looking for James Thomas.” She said, “He doesn’t live here.” And I said, “Well, I’m sorry.” I turned around to walk away, and she said, “What do you want with him?’ And I said, “I’m working on a book on the blues and I want to put him in it.” And she said, “Well, he’ll be back in about a half hour, sit down there on that chair.” So I sat down and his children immediately came up and held my hand and asked me what I was doing. But there was always wariness. But once people understood you were there to tell their story, they wanted their story told. And often people would say, “Now, if I tell you about this, do you promise to put it out so the world will know how they’ve treated us here?” And I said, “I promise.” And this book or film, whatever the product, will be my way of telling the world about your life in a true and clear way. And that was a bond that I’ve tried to keep. And I think it’s worked.
CR: And as we go on through the series, we’ll talk about the other films that you made as part of the Media Design Center at Yale when you were on the faculty there fifty years ago when you were in your thirties. But one of the interesting things to me is that in Give My Poor Heart Ease, you feel this juxtaposition between the academic setting of Yale and the raw energy that you feel when you’re driving down Highway 61 in Mississippi. I’m curious, how did you balance the scholarly rigor that was required because you were in a university setting with this sort of visceral authenticity that’s part and parcel of the blues? Maybe the right question to ask is, did you feel any tension between your role as a folklorist and your role just as a Mississippian.
“Often people would say, ‘Now, if I tell you about this, do you promise to put it out so the world will know how they’ve treated us here?’ And I said, ‘I promise.’”
WRF: Well, I was at Yale. I came from an HBCU in Mississippi where I taught for two years—Jackson State University. And I was a conscientious objector. In 1970, I was processed out of the military, and I found a teaching position at Jackson State. It was a few months after the shootings there when several students were killed, right after Kent State. It was a tense time, and I was very close to my students and to colleagues there. Then I was white hired outside of Yale into Afro-Am, and that was an incredible honor for me—as a joint appointment in Afro-Am and American Studies. And Yale was in a process of transition. It was creating the first African-American studies program in the nation. I was part of the team that taught the first team talk course on Afro-American studies with Willie Ruff, a jazz musician, Larry Neal, a Black poet in Harlem who was part of the Black Arts Movement and Robert Farris Thompson, a Black art historian. The four of us taught that. So this was radical that Black studies was on the books as a curriculum at Yale.
The Media Design Studio was created at that same time at Yale by Howard Sayre Weaver as a film counterpart to the Yale University Press, which published faculty books. The Studio produced films, and they approached me because they knew I was a filmmaker and said, “We’d like to film your course on Black folklore.”
I was thrilled, and we got the support, and the team began to work. They filmed my lectures. We brought in B.B. King to perform and speak and James Thomas. We filmed in Harlem and in New Haven and then I took a crew to the Mississippi Delta for a week, and that was powerful, radical material. We got an honorary doctorate of humane letters at Yale awarded to B.B. King. So these were sort of foundational steps that shook the foundations of the traditional academic world. These were people who had very little academic training, if any, but they could play the guitar, they could tell the stories, and the students adored them. So it was a very important period.
And the films were produced during that time. One of my students who worked on this film was Warrington Hudlin, who is a major filmmaker. He and his brother, Gerald, partnered in Hollywood on Black films, Black Westerns. His brother went to Harvard; Warrington was at Yale. And so we were blending into this extraordinarily important university curriculum, the new worlds of Black studies and film as equal partners to the more classic traditions.
CR: When you took this crew from Yale down to the Delta, is that when you made the film that’s part of Give My Poor Heart Ease inside Parchman Farm, the penitentiary in Mississippi?
WRF: Yes, we revisited a number of people and places that I had worked with in the ’60s. I had filmed early Super 8 film in Parchman Penitentiary and I had worked with James Thomas in the ’60s. In many ways, I kept going back to the well in those Mississippi Delta worlds in the classroom teaching I did at Yale and in the field work that we did with the documentary film.
CR: I can’t imagine that: getting access to interview people, to interview incarcerated men inside Parchman, which is a notorious penitentiary. How did you gain access to Parchman, and what sort of ethical considerations kind of guided your portrayal of the stories you filmed of those men?
WRF: Well, I had always knocked at the door of homes. And at Parchman. I didn’t expect to be allowed in—in the ’60s or in the ’70s. But I said, “I’m developing a book, now a film, on music.” Parchman was especially important as the location where John and Alan Lomax recorded work chants and blues decades earlier. And I said, “I’m here to record work chants and to do interviews.” And the warden there seemed pleased with the idea. I mean, it was a non-threatening kind of request. And the inmates were all too happy to talk. And we spoke with them in private—in rooms where it was simply us and them—in very moving conversations about their lives, their experience. And the whole thing was totally unscripted. No one could have anticipated the people we met and the power…they poured their heart and soul out in front of the camera. We just felt every moment was a priceless kind of document that we were able to carry back and share in the film itself.
“I complained to him that English was too narrow. It wouldn’t allow the oral literature to be studied in the same way that we looked at Shakespeare and Joyce. And he smiled and he said, ‘Well, you simply need to be in folklore.’ And I said, ‘What’s that?’”
CR: There are some really powerful scenes like the ones you’re just describing in the movie. To me as a viewer and a student of the same stuff that you teach with this film, the link between [the incarcerated men and] the experiences that drove the creation of blues music, which you then see people like James Thomas and B.B. King playing in the film, they get really, really clear, right?
WRF: I began as a student of literature. I majored in English at Davidson. I did an MA at Northwestern, and I spent a year at Trinity College in Dublin on a Rotary Foundation fellowship, working on James Joyce. But I wanted to study the oral voices. And I kept running into walls at Northwestern. They said, those musics that you’re recording, that’s not literature in terms of what we teach. And in Ireland, through a stroke of luck, I met a folklorist named Francis Utley, who was chairman of English at Ohio State, over breakfast at my building where I was living with this family. And I complained to him that English was too narrow. It wouldn’t allow the oral literature to be studied in the same way that we looked at Shakespeare and Joyce. And he smiled and he said, “Well, you simply need to be in folklore.” And I said, “What’s that?” And he said, “Well, there’s several Ph.D. programs.”
He basically opened the door to my graduate study at the University of Pennsylvania, where I went and met with my advisor, Kenneth Goldstein. I brought a box of recordings and photographs in at that first meeting and put them on his desk. And I said, “Dr. Goldstein, this is what I had been doing. Can I do that here?” He smiled and he said, “That, my boy, will be your dissertation. Keep doing it.” Well, that was the most wonderful moment of my life!
CR: Just like he opened the door to what you wanted to do.
WRF: Yes. I’ve always wanted to have my cake and eat it too. I never wanted to leave my roots on the farm, but I wanted to be part of an academic world, where I could be working with students and teaching in the way that I’d been inspired by my teachers. Which meant bridging these oral traditions—these things, as someone told me, that grow like weeds down here on the farm—with the academy. And I was privileged to work at the Jackson State University, one of the great HBCUs, at Yale University, one of the great Ivy League universities and at the University of Mississippi. And in each place and now at UNC, I have done the same thing. I have taught in a more traditional way about oral traditions. And I always would lecture in my class and then do a PowerPoint and end the class with a documentary film in the sense that film was the pinnacle. You don’t want to follow a film because it is so powerful theatrically, but you mix the more academic lecture with the powerful emotional film and you have the consummate class on the blues.
CR: Right. And you know, I remember one time about ten years ago when you and I first got to know each other, you invited me to sit in on one of your blues seminar classes at UNC in Chapel Hill. I found it very heartening to see these young people who were so curious about the roots of Southern culture. I think one of the things I’ve always found myself struggling with in my own work is, you know, so many of the tensions we feel in the South that have been so exacerbated for so long, so much of that has to do with white people not understanding what our Black brothers and sisters have gone through in this nation—and in the South in particular. If we make the effort to go and learn that and get in touch with it—and not just learn it in an academic way, but to feel it—lots of things open up, including new attitudes.
“That’s the dream of our republic, of democracy—life, liberty and pursuit of happiness for all people. And we have moved slowly but surely in the right direction.’
WRF: That’s right. I think of Fannie Lou Hamer who said, “If you want to keep me down in the ditch, I’m going to grab your foot and pull you in with me.” Instead of trying to be working against other groups, if we work with them, particularly Black and white, you’re using your full power of creative and political energy. You can see that in the studios at Muscle Shoals and at Stax Records and at Sun Records, where music was being produced with Black and white musicians like the Memphis Horns. When Aretha came down to record at Muscle Shoals, she said, “Where’s that backup group?“ Thinking they were Black. And they said, “They’re sitting right here.” And you have this kind of blending of power that is unparalleled. And slowly but surely our nation has been moving toward that dream, Martin Luther King’s dream. And it’s been said we’re halfway home and a long way to go.
CR: Beloved communities like Dr. King talked about were built in those studios.
WRF: That’s right. That was the dream he voiced on the mall in that great speech, that one day our children, Black and white, even in the state of Mississippi, he said, we’ll play together and work together. And that’s the dream of our republic, of democracy—life, liberty and pursuit of happiness for all people. And we have moved slowly but surely in the right direction.
I think, as a folklorist, that’s been the kind of subtext of everything that I’ve done. You unveil the power and beauty of music and of stories and art that come from the heart of people who’ve suffered so much and continue to struggle in ways that are unimaginable to white citizens, myself included. We have to try to build those bridges across troubled waters. And the arts and the classroom are where we have the young future leaders. We want to prepare them to think about the blues in the same way they think about Beethoven. Right. To think about the stories as just as important as the written word. And all of this is, it’s like liberation ,to open the minds and hearts to a partnership with people that are different from you and learn to walk in their footsteps.
CR: What you just said to me makes me think of a particular scene in Give My Poor Heart Ease, where we see B.B. King playing in a theater at Yale, where I understand he was the first non-classical musician ever to play on that stage. And as he’s playing, there’s a voiceover of him. And he says, “This is another thing that makes the blues singer and the blues musician continue to go on, because this is his way of crying out to people.” And I’m not sure B.B. himself would have used the word “oppression” fifty years ago, but do you think he was talking about his community crying out against the centuries of oppression that they had suffered?
WRF: I do. I think musicians like B.B. King…it’s embedded in their music, and it’s embedded in soul music and in hip-hop and rap. The struggles that each generation has faced are done and articulated in music with the hope that a better day is coming, as Sam Cooke said. That is so powerful. And B.B., who had no formal education, was a lecturer and an honorary doctorate degree recipient at one of the greatest universities in the world. The students wanted him, when they heard he was getting the degree, if he’d be the commencement speaker. And he said, “Well, Bill, I’m not educated. I can’t give a lecture.” And the student said, “Just bring Lucille.” And so he brought Lucille, his guitar, and performed. And it was the most moving, memorable graduation commencement presentation ever. This is what we’re talking about. The students adored him in Sprague Hall, the great music venue at Yale. It was standing room only for his presentation there. It was so powerful, and it was a moment that all of us faculty and students will never forget.
B.B. was like Louis Armstrong before him, the ambassador for the blues—and a great voice for America. And a much more enduring voice than the political leaders whom we read about, prominently discussed in the news.
CR: Well, you know, we’re having this discussion in 2025, which is the fiftieth anniversary of Give My Poor Heart Ease. And it also happens to be the 100th anniversary of B.B. King’s birth. How do you reconcile like the truly global fame that the man had with this really intimate portrait we see of him in your film? Do you think that any aspects of his legacy are still undervalued in any way? Because you got to know the man during his lifetime.
WRF: I feel they will always be undervalued because you can never fully recognize the power of the blues. But I was thinking about B.B. now with the death of the Pope. Because B.B. met and had exchanges with the Pope, with the Queen of England, with numerous presidents. He traveled to Russia. He traveled all over the world. He was like Louis Armstrong before him, the ambassador for the blues—and a great voice for America. And a much more enduring voice than the political leaders whom we read about, prominently discussed in the news.
If we look ahead a hundred years or however long, the blues will loom more and more prominent as America’s greatest music. It was born, bred, and grew up here in our nation and has transformed not only future generations of musicians, but writers and artists.
There’s a wide array of art forms that are inspired by the blues. Romare Bearden’s collages are blues inspired. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man has been called a blues novel. And there is no musician who does not know and often perform a form of the blues in whatever they do as a musician. And B,B, was the great blues performer for some eighty-plus years. He was playing and traveling until he literally could not walk. This was his life, as he sang, “Nighttime is the right time / It’s the right time for me.” And his concerts were night after night. He loved it. That was his life. And people loved him, generations of them.
I went to a concert when I was at Yale that he gave in Boston at a place called Lucifer’s Club. He played two gigs there, and between those gigs I followed him backstage and was with him as he was seeing some of his fans. There were several young women there who said, “Our grandmother told us that if B.B. King came to town, we had to come hear you and try to get you to sign our records.” Well, here’s the third generation of people in Boston with roots in the South, Black women who were having a very special audience with the King of the Blues, Mr. B.B. King. That’s amazing.
CR: Has your understanding, in the fifty years since you finished Give My Poor Heart Ease, of the themes of that movie and the messages in that movie, have they changed at all over fifty years? Like, when you look back at it now versus how you felt about it when you finished it?
WRF: Well, every time I watch that film, I love it. It’s not as though I feel like, “I’ve watched this before. I’m going to have to watch it again.” I want to watch it because it’s like, these are people you love. And you notice little details, how someone takes a deep breath or scratches their head or glances to the side as they’re talking. And you realize that film captures all of this information and you can watch it a hundred times. I probably have watched it a hundred times and you still see something that you never noticed or thought about before. And it leaves you with a very good feeling, a satisfaction, of having been with these amazing people in such powerful places, from the Mississippi Delta to Yale University. And there’s something really heartening that the blues is welcome in both of those worlds.
“It leaves you with a very good feeling, having been with these amazing people in such powerful places, from the Mississippi Delta to Yale University. And there’s something really heartening that the blues is welcome in both of those worlds.”
CR: That’s right. And you know, you bring up something else that’s very interesting to me: looking at all the footage in Give My Poor Heart Ease of the people and places along Beale Street in Memphis. Beale Street, you know, has had a complete makeover. since you did that. So this footage you have of Beale Street before that revival, that remaking of the place, it’s now a historical artifact, right? So how does preserving, you know, vanishing cultural landscapes inform your work as a folklorist or how should it inform the work of younger folklorists. We don’t think about places now as being historical artifacts, but someday they will be. So, what should younger folklorists be like thinking about?
WRF: Well, they should think about following their heart and listening and documenting, filming, the things that touch them most deeply. For me, that was always the blues. And knowing that if you do that work well, keep it in focus, get good, clean sound, and capture the performance, the story, you will, without even knowing it, capture the context, the room in which or the performing arts center in which it’s happening, the road or street outside. You capture what I call the sense of place, be it a little shotgun house in the Mississippi Delta or Sprague Music Hall at Yale. These are jarringly different in terms of affluence and, but you have one little modest room that inspired a music that at some point is on the stage of this great music venue at Yale.
America and the South have powerful musical traditions that thankfully we have recorded in various ways over the years and hopefully will continue to do so. The repositories—the Blues Archive at the University of Mississippi, at the Southern Folklife Collection at the University of North Carolina, at the Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, all over the country—we are preserving and capturing these musics. And thankfully, with the digital world, we all have an iPhone in our pocket. We can record, photograph, and film with state-of-the-art quality without having to pay a penny if we’ve got that device. You don’t any longer need to have a trunk full of equipment as I used to have in the ’60s.
CR: That sort of leads me to my last question for you. You’ve created some pretty extensive notes about Give My Poor Heart Ease that are now accessible on the Folkstreams website. In those, you talk a little bit about the challenges you faced back then because of technological limitations. Here’s what I want to know. If you were thirty-three again and you were filming in today’s digital age, is there anything that you would do differently? Or does it just make you think about principles that remain?
WRF: Well, you can do it today as a single individual. When I started my work, I was working alone. I had a reel-to-reel analog tape recorder, a Super 8 camera, and 200-watt bulbs that I would clip on walls at night. That worked fine in many ways. That was the best filming I ever did. It’s sort of a timeless piece of recorded and film music, blues and sacred. So I think what [digital technology] does is it liberates you, in the sense that you don’t have to spend, you know, the money that for me I didn’t have. But with grants, eventually I was able to get better equipment. But we have that now. Technology has made every man a potential filmmaker and documenter of his or her world. And so I tell my students, you have no excuse.
“Start with your grandparents. Record their memories, so, for your grandchildren, you’ll have a treasure to pass along to them. We often neglect those worlds that are our own, thinking that they couldn’t be as important as someone down the street.”
And start with your grandparents. Record their memories, so, for your grandchildren, you’ll have a treasure to pass along to them. We often neglect those worlds that are our own, thinking that they couldn’t be as important as someone down the street. But it’s opened doors that are dramatically more accessible now. I’m all for technology. The iPhone with every new generation improves the camera. For a folklorist, they’re really thinking of our métier, making it easier and more effective to do what we do.
CR: The stories of your grandparents, we might be trained to think of those things as just scrapbook material, but that’s folklore, too.
WRF: Absolutely. We are the stories we tell. And if you talk to your grandparents or to a blues singer about the stories they remember, that frames their life and their music in ways. It offers a context, a backdrop for ”The Thrill Is Gone,” that classic music and vocal of B.B. King, when you think about his life and how he struggled as a musician and tractor driver in the Mississippi Delta to become an iconic voice for music and for American culture. The thrill was gone, but he certainly nurtured it over the years, not just for himself, but for everyone that was privileged to hear his music. All of us.
CR: Bill Ferris, I always love talking to you. Thank you for being so generous with your time, and I look forward to our next conversation.
WRF: I do too, Chuck. Thank you so much.
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.
