Filmmakers

William R. “Bill” Ferris is a folklorist, filmmaker, photographer, and scholar whose work has brought the music, art, stories, and religious traditions of the American South to a wider audience. Growing up on a farm near Vicksburg, Mississippi, he developed a lifelong interest in the people and cultures of his home state. His fieldwork in the Mississippi Delta became the basis for films that let blues musicians, gospel singers, storytellers, and folk artists speak and perform for themselves.

Folkstreams streams many of Ferris’s films, including Sonny Ford, Delta Artist, Parchman Penitentiary, Mississippi Delta Blues, Black Delta Religion, Ray Lum: Mule Trader, Fannie Bell Chapman, Give My Poor Heart Ease, I Ain’t Lying, Made in Mississippi, Two Black Churches, and Hush Hoggies Hush. He made several of these with collaborators, notably Josette Ferris and Judy Peiser. Together, the films form a record of Southern African American life and expressive culture in the late 1960s and 1970s.

Ferris co-founded the Center for Southern Folklore and was the founding director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. From 1997 to 2001, he chaired the National Endowment for the Humanities. During Ferris’s NEH chairmanship, Tom Davenport proposed a curated site for films about American folklife—an ambitious idea when streaming video was still new. Ferris supported it, and Davenport received an NEH grant to build what became Folkstreams.net.  

William Ferris continues to advise Folkstreams.