The Storied South: Voices of Writers and Artists

• Published in: Eudora Welty review 2014, Vol.6, p.155-158
• Main Author: McHaney, Thomas L.
• Format: Review
• Language: English
• Subjects: Reviews; Seeger, Pete (1919-2014); Walker, Alice (1944- ); Welty, Eudora (1909-2001)
• ISSN: 1947-3370; 2165-266X

A list of the people outside the usual subjects whom Ferris recorded on audio tape or film proves the point: the author of Roots, Alex Haley; the sociologist John Dollard who published Cast and Class in a Southern Town; African-American poet Sterling Brown and painter Romare Bearden; pioneer of African-American studies John Blassingame; contemporary photographers William Christenberry and William Eggleston along with Walker Evans, the master photographer who took the photographs for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; the author of Jubilee, Margaret Walker, and the author of The Color Purple, Alice Walker, both recorded in Jackson, Mississippi; Charles Seeger, the musicologist who collected songs in the South with John and Alan Lomax, and Charles's son Pete Seeger who popularized folk music and helped shape "We Shall Overcome." The Center for the Study of Southern Culture at Ole Miss, which he directed for so many years, has convened not only the still-going annual summer Faulkner Conference, but events ranging from lunch-time learning talks to major international conferences on Civil Rights, Richard Wright, and many other topics. The interviews and film sequences about the photographers and painters with roots and subjects from the South is an especially welcome feature of Ferris's book and related to the broader presentation of trained and folk artists in Lisa Howorth's The South: A Treasury of Art and Literature (1993), sponsored by the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi when Ferris was its director. Ferris's personal archive of his career-or we should say careers-is now in the Southern Folklife Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where, following his role as chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, he came to their Center for Study of the American South and serves as its senior associate director.