William Ferris’s The Storied South is based on recordings (including film) from interviews that he conducted with a number of prominent Southerners or people who discuss their connections to the South. Ferris is a noted folklorist, and his recording technique might be seen as a folkloristic one, or at least as one with which folklorists are thoroughly familiar. He notes that his archive of recordings is part of the Southern Folklife Collection at the University of North Carolina and that his early interviews were “informed and inspired” (xi) by fellow folklorist Judy Peiser and her staff at the Center for Southern Folklore in Memphis. Yet this is not a folklore book. Folklorists will primarily be interested in it for its folklore connections, including the fact that it is a book done by a prominent member of their profession. Its having been done by a folklorist doubtlessly influenced its ultimate form and its ultimate suggestion that folk culture and “high” culture overlap and closely relate, certainly in the American region that is its focus. Folklorists will certainly be interested in Ferris’s introduction, in which he discusses not only his own progress into the study of culture and the study of the South but also what he sees as the intimate connection between the southern fine arts and the southern oral tradition. But the book may ultimately interest those concerned with the South, with the region, more than it will those concerned with the study of folklore, with an aspect of culture generally. Ferris’s storied South is in part the South of stories (and he writes vigorously about the importance of oral narrative to the region and to understanding the region) but it is also very much the famous South, that is, the American region which has a particular self-consciousness and which has fascinated, for better or for worse, many Americans who have thought about our nation and its cultural parts.
The book involves many artists of several kinds, and Ferris does not hesitate to include both those who come out of or who have been embraced by the more formal, “fine” arts traditions (who indeed predominate in the book) and those who relate more to vernacular ones (like blues musician Bobby Rush and even Pete Seeger). Writers and scholars (who are, after all, a kind of writer) make up a large number of people interviewed, as do visual artists (painters and photographers both). Ferris sees his writers as artists “who constantly draw on the voices and stories of their region” (22) and notes that each of his painters “wrestles with the southern story and how to tell it using paint and canvas” (197), even though the end-product may be abstract in form (“A vast array of southern artists are abstract. The abstract form…is just as southern as the exact images that we know,” says painter Sam Gilliam [200, 203]).
Of course Ferris is conflating the southern story with southern stories and both with the storied South. That is clever usage, but it may give folklorists pause as they wonder just what Ferris is presenting. Do his interviews reinforce his idea that storytelling is central to the southern consciousness, and is storytelling really at the heart of regional identity?
Certainly many of Ferris’s interviewees make comments relevant to these questions. This may be the part of the book of greatest interest to folklorists generally (and, though Ferris’s questions are not included in the text, one assumes that he may specifically have asked his subjects about this). For example, Eudora Welty says, “It is interesting to me to use the spoken word to drive a story…. You do that…by having heard people talk and noted in your mind all your life the way people say things” (37). Ernest Gaines notes that various writers “showed me how to use the oral tradition I had grown up in” (50). He adds that “the relationship between storytelling and writing is definitely an American thing” and that he himself was “influenced by jazz and blues and spirituals and storytelling.” Nor is this interest limited to those whose art is rooted in language. Ferris’s painters may evince similar concerns. Sam Gilliam says, “I am fond of stories” (203) and sees his “work as being an extended consciousness of visual narration” (204). Ed McGowin declares that “The southern verbal tradition. . .is heavily loaded with a surreal, ironic, macabre view of the world” (208). He says that he himself “grew up in a setting where storytelling was highly prized, highly developed and highly cultivated” (208) and speaks of his own “need to tell stories” (211) in his art. Carroll Cloar says that in his paintings he likes “to tell stories and show character instead of merely decorative things” (217). Drawing on her own comments, Ferris says that Rebecca Davenport “views her paintings as a visual extension of the southern narrative tradition” (221).
Unfortunately, none of these artists gets any more specific about just how they have tapped into oral stories for their art (though several of them tell stories, Welty, for example, a personal narrative about going sailing with William Faulkner). And, though they may also speak of their attachment to the South and its influence upon them, they do not try to explain how they see storytelling as essential to the region (though they may indeed think that it is). In his conclusion Ferris less directly reiterates his point about the significance of story when he writes that his interviewees have produced “literature and art… drenched in it.” He is right about that, but the point that storytelling informs and even defines the South is more asserted than demonstrated in The Storied South. That was inevitable, for this book is not an analysis of culture but a collection of some of the things people have said about themselves and about their relationship to where they come from or to a place they have interacted with. Still, folklorists may on that account find the book not especially of use to their understanding.
The Storied South is a fine book of interest to those who are concerned broadly with southern culture and who will be interested in reading what a number of artists have had to say about this and about themselves as Southerners or as people who have worked in the South (and who will enjoy Ferris’s lovely photographs of them). The CD which accompanies the book and includes portions of the interviews is an excellent addition that allows us to do the same thing without the mediation of print. Folklorists generally may find the book of less interest, however (though they may be intrigued by Ferris’s interviews with ethnomusicologist Charles Seeger, with Pete Seeger’s comments on the development of the song “We Shall Overcome” and his role in that, or William Christenberry’s comments on his sculptures of vernacular buildings). Folklorists may be looking for more demonstration than The Storied South provides of how folklore has evolved into literature or painting or photography in an American region, though the book does call their attention to the influence the oral tradition has had on other art forms, and provides for readers the voices of artists commenting on the fact that this has happened and is important.
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[Review length: 1206 words • Review posted on February 26, 2014]