A Word on Words; 3818; William Ferris

fb liz from nashville studio way celebrating offers literature and ideas for more than three decades this is word on words with john c johnson intolerant and welcome once again to warlords yesterday william ferris is as joe are williamson eminent professor of history at the universe evolved atlanta chapel hill throughout the latter half the nineteen sixties and the nineteen seventies with him toward his home state of mississippi document the voices of african americans

as they spoke about and perform the diverse musical traditions that was the authentic works of the blues is a brand new book give my party's voices of the mississippi blues foley's engaging narratives about black life and blues music and the harley americans out bill welcome the word or words it's great daddy era and to talk about this book that has absolutely concerned as so much of the earth career as a folklorist as a law professor is a distinguished professor of understory and on and the book is loaded with wonderful story in one of our narratives he has a dvd and for people who want to see you know how you put it on film in yemen both and then have a cd

i had the cd in the car this morning listening to that that one about highway sixty one a wonderful film are revered discography and they have everything you were wrapped up in one one bookend a sudden actually joy unless it'd be on that but isn't that the harbor free the graphics aren't ripping and i know you dedicate the book to embroider it new induced due to photography as a us just begin by looking at some places that you photographed and some the personality is primarily personalities you photographed and there's a very familiar person out there right there that's bb king is you know pretty well we've known each

other since the early seventies when i first met him and brought him to speak to my students at yale then later we got him an honorary degree at yale on regardless the way to address that idea the degree that a loving but there are the photographs there's a fanny belt chapman a gospel singer of faith healer for the senate bill mississippi at their fears he'll a second bring their wealth through her music and special spiritual power and then the sun for thomas pierce and his guitar he was my blues glue and we travel whenever i taught it jackson's a video at the university of mississippi at the smithsonian we traveled together and i would speak and he would perform and we were close team until his death may and gordon i'm not sure she's a blues singer

issue is in the congregation of the church's the day for the picture leonard fighters says a lady who raised me it's a religion and beautiful she sang the dr watts he owns the old archipelago hamza came from isaac watts originally and this church had no handles they were all sung from memory and she was the acknowledged colder the choir and seeing these assignments in that city i listen to now also in addition to how we fix you on iron skillet but it really lovely music by archipelago earliest church or years and theres got done more here's scott dunbar was a song spirit from lake mary mississippi and lives were

cut off and that is this if you ever and he sang what were called khat fargo's songs that mix story and performance of music together and he was a great raconteur of stories of went back to slavery and brought it right up to his life in the sixties and then there's tom douglas was an amazing musician and played a fiddle and a banjo know the photographs of another photograph or won't strain our budget and they're there with on the banjo well he grew up in the mississippi ailes plain old time music on the banjo and fiddle and then when he moved to the mississippi delta where the blues dominated no one wanted to hear his music but when i came along he dusted off his fiddle and banjo and play the songs for me and talk to me about that world that you know you've your latest collection from long ago

i take it the story of indian art now finally we've got in our heads and in your hands and you shouldn't have any interest in the blues and injuries on you haven't heard immediately just think of you want the second call home to your country at a time when that was a question that made very little differences nineteen fifty four you tell a story about contacting a plan although i guess it's a sharecropper on the phone to try to inform then trump white men with you

there's some resentment on the part of the first of the reviews you'll hear he comes on the porch and owns a sentence early bird they perform body let you know when you're singing the incomes in the interim governing body else and talk a little bit about the challenge to get inside the culture to get that stuff that meeting was my lesson that i never again went through the local white community to visit with black families i went straight to those families have left dc james son for thomas and knocked on his door for the first time and his wife came to the door and said what you want i said well i'm looking for some for thomas and she say that you have

here what you want with me and i said oh i'm doing a book on the blues and i want put a minute and she said well you'll be back you know so what i found isn't what she unlocked and explained that he wanted to honor the life and music of the community they got it real quickly and you are welcomed in very deep and special ways you say that better than sacred music for wired at the hip and then i don't remember which one of these fabulous characters senate insurgents my god is and that it's not a bit in the blues and my baby talk a bit about that joining that they have to come back to it the literal well every child in the black community grows up willingly or unwillingly

in the church you can't sit through the services and that as your first experience with music and then as you grow up many musicians in quotes crossover from sacred to the secular and i asked a musician i said how does that happen to go from spirituals to blows he said it's not hard to just change my lord and put in my baby you keep the same music so when you look at the blues you need to look at the sacred music as fabulous book because they're closely connect this one and i can't remember which interview it was but michelin gravelly great voice on the cd talks about how we don't feel really write about going to church on sunday morning and sing in a blues that night because he thought of thinking about the blues and down and

darien searchers but it is a natural marriage isn't culture it is it's part of our whole picture to put the two together but there is a tension between the preacher and the blues singer because the preacher will say to his congregation you should not go blues joints and the blues singer will say whoa if we're more honest because we tell the truth we don't reach one message on sunday and go out and do something else on monday so this is a theme that runs through the hole and some of these interviews an interview with mary gordon me is almost musical honoring the song jesus and then a room on jacob onion and in jesus' prison symon and its poetry and the narrative is portrayed on i can't understand what the magnet was a good

writer it was the same thing that drew me to eudora welty and alice walker's produce their dramatic monologues and what i saw in these voices was a similar kind of artistic louis expression that is closely it can to our greatest songwriters who listen to these voices and low lows well both music and narrative into their works of fiction plot is a night professor devlin port little of what i was drawn to chorus and just as i was drawn to the balloons it's slightly go to the edge of the world and this is the dropping off place where once you're in there you are forgotten your life is no longer your own hand going in there with a

camera and tape recorder for a folklorist is a rare opportunity and those voices have a power that this book really needed you went there points sixty eight minutes in the forties for a long menu cable way after listening to music recording it became a way that isn't something like this for inmates the music is a means of that's right and i found that as a metaphor for the whole book from slavery through jim crow food portmanteau of history the one way these voices and people were able to survive and as for crew would say endure and prevail was through the music they could say things in the music that they couldn't say in a normal way about the

boss they could voice their anger and expression musically in ways that could not be done without suffering severe repercussions liam that that life in prison again it's gospel as well and the balloons only men to me to have you say that they acknowledge that you know good news about the lien on it can rely on a narrow kitchen church and gibson and tim along and to sit to acknowledge as well at that bridges come from slavery which of one form presumed to portland which is another sort of punishing them from world really i think

where else would you find the blues them more appreciated well the nsa about what the blues on the inlaid support from colic the inside world but some of them whom i met on the outside said that for blacks life on the outside was really not much different they felt they were in prison because of the color of their skin no matter where they were and they had to constantly be aware of being careful and again music is a way of bringing him through the struggle was as black people in those worlds you know you talk about willie dickson and bb king and the legends in a very real sense and the ball as they i thought i would hear from either of them to come to

know rick lamb and great recognition and great success the last thing i thought they won't talk about mississippi and yet they deny that they acknowledge that their natal was nurtured vision in that racist culture and acknowledge that it's not surprising you did not found it very beautiful and healing that they never ever left their roots in tv told me that when he's performing onstage with a large audience is off he goes back in his memory to his childhood in the mississippi delta and he revisits those worlds and those continue to inspire him as a performer so they've never let go of their roots and mississippi and for me that was a very powerful discovery nightlife

the good lie the only live on all the big gay that's the and that's mississippi blues that's a bomb how about willie dixon how much access did you get to well i had a tooth dave is it wants so i went one night to hear him perform and the next day i was at yale and he performs haven and the next day you came to my apartment and calhoun college and we sat and talked and we both grew up in vicksburg mississippi and i did and i was working on a book on a new trailer has a lamb taught him to ride horseback so we bonded on a lot of levels and then he started i think it was very powerful in his tailored to vicksburg guys sitting there in his role in the new haven was talking about things that we shared in

those worlds that produced this we looked at pictures and for thomas alito and they're these lions god forgive a black man most innovative god forgive a black man most innovative and dark complexion to look like you to give me two there isn't there is a religious tone to it again makes the case that merger with the sacred and the secular which takes up one for a section of your book and you're just joining us i'm talking with william ferris about his latest book give michael forties sources of the city blues i i can understand what is taking so long for this book

inherent and goes we just can't on this program book they can sit down and write caprica chapter syria it's a book that represents along the deed culture on stage and on our white mississippians feel about the blues it's not surprising given the culture that state that the blues emerged from where the roots go deep in a state and it food culture is black culture and i think there isn't sort out you as a folklorist reactor that i think blues is the touchstone of black culture in our movies we see

gospel rock hill today is hip hop paula great musics of the twentieth century are shaped velvet violent movies as well as a literature of figures like eudora welty alice walker ernest gains of the blues really defined twentieth century american culture powerful and what goes beyond the sample recordings of these musicians let me let me read it a fully divorces my home in portland ore and mississippi as robbery and these tin pan on the wall though they're doing is something that going to balance the most are plenty of the online at their planes going south well i mean it's that sort of

that's subtle rhetoric that is musically in another so it is really speaks is in musical terms and as you go through these interviews that you get and recording if you listen to them there is music and it is almost as an independent and preachers then there's almost the area staccato resonant we just knew that going in and i would say no but it's the hair on meeting where we you know jon is a folklorist her earliest language laws music if we go back to the very beginning of communication david within the language of these artists is i think an inner music that their voices

have not only when they're singing when we're speaking there's a lyrical power and that's what i tried to capture in this book you have a section in which a tiny towns and cities banned them the city's name looms for modern rejection and economic opportunity but for most then from both lawyers and i guess that's a natural but you know there is also there was also they a deep sense of hostility and towns and cities for black people in mississippi economy and i guess of their movement in couple world on and still

the music it is the same vibe this is if you went back to mississippi today despite the change that's taken place than the musicians recorded and the previews with only until it would sound very much the southern blues isn't changing gears and the language isn't changing when i go home fly into jackson i turn on black radio and those of dj khaled away than just tearing up they'll lose his language and it's the same kind of voice is that i included in the book of the jayson you know your home when you hear these voices to smell of barbecues hear the blues as my wife likes to say they're having fun here you come to that roseville church and they're allowed to tomlinson and a great photograph of him and

looked and it strikes me is that for you personally there is a special affection for the comedian and that church talk about why that well as a child mary gordon took me to the church on for sunday's and i would sit in the service and he began to learn the handsome later it was that there were no hymnals and that unless these hymns were recorded in the photograph eventually with all disappear and at the end of her life mary gordon was in a retirement home and i visited her there and she was surrounded by her family and we've is thin and as i was leaving i leaned over to give her a login she looked in my eyes and she said you know you're my black chow and i said i know and

this book is in many ways a legacy of her and all that she instilled in me as a kid and pledged not to forget her life and culture at all that these artists represent you know of come to respect a measurably the nursing old carlo gross their publication of this book really he convinces me and that there is somebody there with sensible so long ago a wonderful job of bruce's book and i hope they marketed well because it really deserves well the press to publish the first books ever written on balloons eugene fodor and howard wrote a man guy johnson and they have consistently been on the cutting edge of books on the american south and with this book they include

a cd of field recordings in a dvd of my documentary or their homes and they've mounted a website which is extraordinarily beautiful and so i'm in all of how well willie they treat the book how much respect and karan the designer rich handle swan the finest designers in the nation who wanted this book i came out of retirement to do it and get a superb job you know you work with what is that it will be a companion to this book it will be interviews with seven writers artists musicians with a sound recordings of their interviews and films and they will include robert penn warren eudora welty cleanup works alice walker alex haley many of my heroes dan walker evans the

photographer william eggleston the inventor of color photography not going to be here you will help your home by bill how did it so great to have you we've run out of time thank you for coming so it's an honor to be with you think all of you for watching the dosing over word on words keep reading