Ferris
receives Lifetime Achievement Award
at film festival in Prague
 Dr. William Ferris, a widely recognized scholar of black music and Southern culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, will receive a Lifetime Achievement Award at an international film festival in Prague this fall.
Bill Ferris, center, with family members and festival director John Caulkins in Prague.
Ferris, the Joel R. Williamson Eminent professor of history in the College of Arts and Sciences and senior associate director of UNC’s Center for the Study of the American South, will be honored at the Music on Film–Film on Music Festival Oct. 18-22 at the Palace Lucerna, one of the oldest cinemas in Europe.
 The festival – which includes films, live concerts, photo exhibits, lectures and workshops – will show several of Ferris’ documentary films on B.B. King, the Mississippi Delta blues, black churches and religion, gospel music and African fife and drum music in the United States. There will also be an exhibition of his photography, and he will discuss and perform blues music.
Festival director John Caulkins called Ferris “a pioneering ethnographic filmmaker in the tradition of the legendary Alan Lomax,” referring to the late ethnographer who recorded thousands of blues and folk songs for the Library of Congress.
Ferris, a native of Vicksburg, Miss., has interviewed thousands of musicians ranging from the famous (B.B. King) to the unrecognized (Parchman Penitentiary inmates working in the fields).
 Still from Give My Poor Heart Ease, a documentary film by William R. Ferris.
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 chaired the National Endowment for the Humanities from 1997 to 2001. He was founding director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, where he was on the faculty for 18 years.
His other honors include the Charles Frankel Prize in the Humanities from former President Bill Clinton, the American Library Association’s Dartmouth Medal, the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award and the Richard Wright Literary Excellence Award from the Natchez (Miss.) Literary and Cinema Celebration.
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