Ferris to Receive Blues Trail Marker

Historian and Vicksburg native Dr. William R. Ferris will receive a Mississippi Blues Trail Marker designation on Tuesday, May 28 at 11:00 a.m. in Vicksburg. The marker will be placed on the corner of Grove and Washington Streets. The Ferris Mississippi Blues Trail Marker was approved in March 2019 by the Mississippi Blues Commission.

Ferris, a native of Vicksburg, is an American author and scholar and former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities.  Most recently he was recognized with a Grammy for his effort  Voices of Mississippi: Artists and Musicians Documented by William Ferris. 

He is a professor of history at UNC-Chapel Hill and an adjunct professor in the Curriculum in Folklore. He is associate director of the Center for the Study of the American South and is widely recognized as a leader in Southern studies, African-American music, and folklore.

Ferris has written and edited 10 books and created 15 documentary films, most of which deal with African-American music and other folklore representing the Mississippi Delta. He co-edited the Pulitzer Prize nominee Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (UNC Press, 1989), which contains entries on every aspect of Southern culture and is widely recognized as a major reference work linking popular, folk, and academic cultures.