My Story

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From the course by The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

The American South: Its Stories, Music, and Art

250 ratings

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

The American South: Its Stories, Music, and Art

250 ratings

From small farms to urban neighborhoods, from the region itself to the more distant worlds of the southern diaspora, we discover the stories, music, and art of the American South.

From the lesson

Introduction to the American South

Reflecting on geography, the diaspora, the mythic and the global South as ways to approach the contested memory of the region.

Welcome to the American South3:52

The Region, the Diaspora, and the Mythic4:17

Contested Memory and the Global South5:23

Race, Class and Gender5:14

Meet the Instructors

Dr. William Ferris
Joel R. Williamson Eminent Professor of History; Senior Associate Director of CSAS; Adjunct Professor in the Curriculum in Folklore
Department of History

[MUSIC]

My story, as a person, is that I grew up on a farm.

And the families there, other than my family, we're all black.

And the little church of Rosehill Church was the center of those worlds,

working in the fields, fishing, hunting, celebrating and

loving a very beautiful world, shaped me from my earliest memories.

And then I went away to school.

I left the South when I was a teenager, and

went to North Andover, Massachusetts, to Brook School.

It was a shock.

And it made me realize that I

was different from others around me, because I was a Southerner.

It made me realize that I loved and missed my family and

friends and the places that I knew so well.

My friend, Robert Penn Warren, the novelist who wrote All the King's Men,

once told me that a fish never thinks about water until he's out of it.

And that was the case for me.

Once I left the South, I realized that it was my heart and

soul, and that I had to go back, I had to reconnect.

And I began to do that with a sense of urgency.

The sense that I needed to somehow preserve the voices and

the faces of people whom I loved in my own family and

community, and later further afield in the Mississippi Delta,

and in other places that I visited.

And I became engaged with the Civil Rights Movement.

I was very upset by racial injustice that I'd seen from childhood and

I knew it was wrong, that when I was five years of age and left to go to the little

school in our part of the state, my black friends went to another school.

And that to me was wrong.

So I began to use my tools as a folklorist

to record music, stories, arts, and

crafts of black people, feeling that they had been denied a voice.

And that as a folklorist, my contribution would be to capture those voices,

and to share them with people all over the world who loved

what I agreed was true and very beautiful.

So a lot of the work I've done has been with a sense

of conscience, a sense that injustice has been done.

And, whatever I can do in a small way to address

that injustice is something that I would be proud to see.

So my work in Blues as a white Mississippian, studying the blues and

black culture, has been deeply connected to my earliest memory as a child.

And to my sense of the importance of civil rights,

the importance of the voice of Martin Luther King, and

the importance of the voices of Blues artists like BB King,

of nameless unknown inmates in Parchment Penitentiary,

all of who became my teachers.

All of whom helped me lead myself along a journey in life.

And that is what my father taught me

that you should learn to walk in the shoes of other people.

And learn lessons from the other people you meet along the way.

And the people we're going to meet in this class are some of my teachers.

Some of those voices, storytellers, musicians,

craftspeople, whom I think of as national treasures.

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