Ferris said that the voices in the collection are interconnected, that they have a "choral power," because, he said, "they all connect to both a geographic state and a state of mind called Mississippi."
"Black and white, old and young, men and women, together their voices capture what Balzac called his comedie humaine," said Ferris. "Faulkner created a similar world in his Yoknapatawpha County. Recording these voices was my way of building a bridge across troubled waters.
"The recordings are both a political and an artistic statement because they recognize the humanity of each person. While in time they all will disappear from the landscape, their voices will endure. I refused to acknowledge the barriers of race, gender, and age into which I was born, and these recordings are my way of opposing them. While I saw my work in the sixties as intimately linked to the Civil Rights Movement, today it has clear ties to Black Lives Matter."
Ferris, who established the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi in the mid-1970s with frequent collaborator Ann Abadie, has long understood music to be an intensely effective way of communicating culture and experience.
"Music is our oldest, most primal language. Human life as we know it began in Africa, and that continent also gave us the 'talking drum' which communicates speech through drum beats. The voice of B.B. King’s guitar Lucille is just as important as that of Mr. King, and he allows each voice to do solo performances in his songs," he said.
"Music communicates a story in a deeply emotional way, and each of us associates periods in our life with music. As a teenager in the late fifties, blues and rock and roll were the music of my generation, and those songs always resonate with me in special ways.
"Music also inspired our writers, as we see in Ernest Gaines’s Mozart and Leadbelly: Stories and Essays, Barry Hannah’s Airships, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, and Eudora Welty’s 'Powerhouse.' All of the writers whom I recorded shared a deep love for music," said Ferris.
The box set includes a book with complete transcriptions of both the music and the stories, as well as photographs of the singers and speakers, explained Ferris. "The care and artistry with which this work was done by the amazing team of writers – Scott Barretta, David Evans, and Tom Rankin – and assembled by Lance and April Ledbetter at Dust to Digital is why the project received two Grammy Awards in 2019."
“The work Bill did as a young documentarian captured music and stories few others thought to record,” said show host Nancy Maria Balach. “He honored his subjects with his recordings because he felt called to it, and it is amazing that they continue to resonate so strongly in today’s political and cultural climate.”
“It speaks to the power of these voices and our continued need to listen to them,” said Balach.
Hear more from Ferris and guests Thomas and Barretta next Monday, September 13th at 1:00pm on the LMR Live livestream. The show will be available afterwards in the LMR Live Archive section of the website: www.livingmusicresource.com.
