20th Century Southern Folklife Digital Archive

An inter-institutional, collaborative resource for southern life and culture

A multimedia oral history of the American South as documented by William R. Ferris

About the Ferris Collection

The rich and varied career of folklorist William R. Ferris spans four decades. As a young man in the 1960s, he began documenting African American traditional arts in his home state of Mississippi. In 1969 at the University of Pennsylvania he completed one of the earliest dissertations on Delta blues music. From the 1970s to the late 1990s Ferris taught at Jackson State University in Mississippi, Yale University and the University of Mississippi. During this time he documented the lives and work of southern artists—men and women, black and white—from musicians to basket makers, and from fiction writers to embroiderers. more...

B.B. King

Ferris first met blues guitarist B.B. King in the 1970s. While teaching at Yale, Ferris nominated King for an honorary degree in Humane Letters, and King received the degree in 1977.more...



Eudora Welty

Ferris’s association with writer and fellow Mississippian Eudora Welty dates to his childhood. The author was an acquaintance of his parents and grandparents, and Ferris has long held a personal and professional admiration for her. more...