This site is a digital collection of selected photographs from the William R. Ferris Collection in the Southern Folklife Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. William R. Ferris (1942- ), born and raised in Vicksburg, Mississippi, is an author, folklorist, filmmaker, professor, photographer, administrator, and scholar chiefly working in the areas of African American and Southern culture. Among his many published works is the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, which he co-edited with Charles Reagan Wilson.
Images in this digital collection document life in Mississippi and the Mississippi Delta; folk, blues, gospel, fife and drum corps music, and other musical types; folk and music festivals; folk arts, culture, and humor; Highway 61; the Ku Klux Klan; prisons, especially Parchman Farm (Mississippi State Penitentiary); auctioneers; and prominent musical and literary figures, including B.B. King, Allen Ginsberg, Alice Walker, Robert Penn Warren and Eudora Welty.