Ferris
Receives Guggenheim Fellowship
 The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has awarded a fellowship to support research and artistic creation to Dr. William R. Ferris, senior associate director of the Center for
the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill. Last fall he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award at an international film festival in Prague (click to read more).
William R. Ferris, senior associate director of the Center for the Study of the American South.
Guggenheim Fellows are appointed based on distinguished past achievement and exceptional promise for future accomplishment. The 2007 winners include 189 artists, scholars and scientists selected from almost 2,800 applicants for awards totaling $7.6 million. (Click here to read about additional UNC Guggenheim Fellowship recipients.) The Guggenheim Fellowship program considers applicants in 78 different fields, from the natural sciences to the creative arts.
 Still from Black Delta Religion, a documentary film by William R. Ferris.
Ferris is a widely recognized scholar, author and filmmaker on black music and folklore and Southern culture. A former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, he has written or edited 10 books and created 15 documentary films. He co-edited the massive Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (1989), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. His films include Mississippi Delta Blues, Black Delta Religion, and Give My Poor Heart Ease. You can sample more of Ferris' documentary filmmaking at Folkstreams at ibiblio.
Ferris will use his Guggenheim Fellowship for a book and multimedia project, Mississippi Blues: Voices and Roots, that will feature musicians and their worlds that he photographed, recorded, and filmed in the 1960s. He will juxtapose the lives and music of these Mississippi musicians with post-Hurricane Katrina musicians “to underscore how poverty, music, and black culture shape our national experience,” Ferris wrote in his Guggenheim proposal. He will also consider how water-related tragedies — from enslavement and the Great Passage to natural disasters such as the Mississippi River Flood of 1927 and Hurricane Katrina — are powerful backdrops for the blues.
As companion pieces to the book, Ferris will develop a CD that will feature recordings of music and stories by each musician and a DVD that will feature both photographs and documentary films of the artists.
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