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Contact: Sasha Steinberg

STARKVILLE, Miss.— “Anywhere you go in Mississippi, at any moment, people are telling stories. All you have to do is listen,” 2016 Scholar-in-Residence William R. “Bill Ferris” said during his Monday [March 21] presentation at Mississippi State.

“As you listen, you begin to understand the greatness of a state like Mississippi and a region like the South because stories are the driving force behind who we are,” added the Vicksburg native and nationally recognized leader in Southern studies, African American music and folklore. “They are our deepest identity, and what you are doing at Mississippi State is deepening that understanding in ways that will enrich our lives and those of future generations.”

Currently serving as senior associate director for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Center for the Study of the American South, Ferris attributes his love for stories and those who tell them to his late grandfather and agronomist Eugene Ferris.

“In his eighties, Grandad milked two cows, tended a large garden and wrote his memoirs. He also was a great storyteller,” Ferris recalled. “He would tell my siblings and me wonderful tales, like Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and at the end of that long tale, I would say ‘Grandad, tell it again,’ and he would patiently tell it again.”

By emphasizing that “the key to each of our lives is the story,” Eugene Ferris inspired his grandson to pursue a career as a folklorist with a dream of capturing the stories of Mississippi and the South.

Now the Joel R. Williamson Eminent Professor of History and Curriculum in Folklore adjunct professor at UNC-Chapel Hill, Ferris explained that as a child, he made a concerted effort to “reach beyond my worlds in a white family to understand the black community and see the ways in which Mississippi and its stories had interwoven with our lives.”

Ferris, who has written and edited 10 books and created 15 documentary films, recounted the times when he visited different communities—with tape recorder and camera in tow—to make films of “the world in ways that would change my life forever.”

“I began to look at the everyday life…the roadside worlds that we pass often unnoticed and to look more deeply into those worlds,” he said. “I began to connect those worlds to storytellers who were weaving great literary work out of those stories.”

Ferris said one of those literary figures was Eudora Welty (1909-2001), who was best known for her short stories and photography.

“Eudora was a friend of my family, and she was a natural storyteller,” Ferris said of the late Jackson native and