My Mouth Fly Open Like the Mockingbird

by

Nicki Leone

 

In the late fifties Bill Ferris did something that his parents, family and friends thought would guarantee he’d never see gainful employment. He got his doctoral thesis at the University of Pennsylvania in folklore studying the African American myth, music and culture of his native Mississippi Delta country. Much to the shock of everyone, even Ferris, he got a job right away, and he’s been studying it ever since.

But “studying” perhaps gives the wrong impression. It implies research and libraries and a certain academic aloofness. What Ferris has done for most of his life, really—from the time he was old enough to drive right on through the ‘60s and ‘70s—was hoof it up and down the highways and byways of the Mississippi Delta with a Sony half-track reel-to-reel tape recorder, two Electrovoice directional microphones, a Pentax 35mm camera, and eventually when he scrounged the money for it, a Sony Super 8 movie camera and two snap-on 200 watt light bulbs. Armed with this battery of equipment and an old Chevy Nova, Ferris traveled around the Delta, visiting black communities and recording the voices, stories and songs of the people who invited him in. They all invited him in.

“When I was introduced to Thomas’s friend Shelby Brown, who was known as “Poppa Jazz” because he had run a blues joint in Leland for over thirty years, we shook hands. Afterward a friend of Shelby’s asked me, “Do you know what you just shook?”

“No. What?”

“A handful of love.”

The results of this life-long . . . well, mission doesn’t seem to be too strong a word for it . . . have been brought together into an incredibly powerful book called Give My Poor Heart Ease: Voices of the Mississippi Blues. A collection of oral histories,  the book looks at some of the people and places at the roots of blues music, starting with the churches in his own community of Rose Hill, and spreading outwards into the countryside filled with people who farmed and fished during the day and played music in the evenings, the men in the prison camps and on work detail in the cotton fields, and the men who ran the radio stations and nightclubs in the towns.

It was dangerous work, to some extent. This was the Deep South in an era of transition. And by “transition” I mean “simmering with suppressed violence and likely to explode at any moment.” Just by walking into some of these communities Ferris was breaking a serious taboo. In some cases, he was outright breaking the law. But for a book that is full of stories, there are actually very few that feature the author. I’m sure he has them. I’m sure he could tell them. But the great strength of Give My Heart Ease is that he gets himself out of the way and lets other people do the talking.

Other people like Fanny Bell Chapman, who says “All my songs come in an inspiration. My mouth fly open just like a mockingbird and I sing, though I ain’t never heard that song in my life,” and then goes on to tell a story about how as a little baby girl she used to take her dinner plate and toddle outside to sit by a well and feed the snake that lived in it. (“My daddy said he like to have fainted when he seen that.”)

Other people like Otha Turner, who is a farmer and a musician and makes his own cane fifes: “I learned myself to make a cane fife. I was thirteen years old, and there were these old drum players around here, Bill and Will. I would stand there and look at the them. They had a player that blew a cane too. I said, “I wished I could do that.” . . . He said “Now look. What you see somebody else doing, there’s no way to make a failure but to try. If you think that you can do it, and you believe that you can do it, try.”

And other people like Johnny Lee “Have Mercy” Thomas, who picked up his nickname in the Parchman Penitentiary when he pleaded with a guard to stop whipping another prisoner and “have some mercy.” And who didn’t try to escape because the day before he was planning on running, another man tried and was shot and killed right at the fence.

Give My Poor Heart Ease is not a book about racial politics or injustice. It’s a book about life. The racism is there, of course, as are the churches and preachers, the cotton fields and the nightclubs and the parties. Ferris says in his introduction that “Though we rarely think about it, every member of my family loves to tell stories. Storytelling runs in our blood, and when we gather for the holidays, the stories begin. They start over breakfast and do not stop until we retire to sleep. We push back the sleep, not wanting to miss the end of a story.” I think it is this—the author’s determination not to miss the end of a story that is the drive behind his life filled with decades of wandering in and out of towns, farms, prisons and bars collecting the memories and songs of the Mississippi Delta. It’s also the thing that gives this book its heart.
 
The book is loosely divided into sections: “Blues Roots” which looks at the country people and the music they sing in the fields and churches. (It’s a famous saying, notes the author, that blues and sacred music are so close that if a singer wants to switch over from one to the other he simply replaces “my God” with “my baby” and keeps singing the same song). “Blues Towns and Cities” which explores the people in Leland and Clarkesdale (home of Muddy Waters and the place where Bessie Smith died),  and the WOKJ radio station in Jackson, and “Looking Back” which is an extended section of reminisces of Willie Dixon and B.B. King. The book also comes with a CD of Ferris’s original recordings on the Sony reel-to-reel from those long ago-days of living in his Chevy Nova, and a DVD with the original footage made on that old Super 8 movie camera. 

But Ferris doesn’t let theory get in the way of story—Give My Poor Heart Ease is no dissertation on the origins of blues music. It’s a witnessing. The author could probably make all sorts of pronouncements about the similarity or differences in blues as sung in the cities and blues as sung in the country. In blues that is born out of church hymns and blues that is borne out of field songs. But he doesn’t. He lets the singers sing and the storytellers talk and the readers come to their own conclusions.

And the one conclusion that is inescapable is that the blues is a kind of spontaneous musical combustion. It just bursts out of a person like a cry or a laugh. Fannie Bell Chapman said it when she claimed “my mouth just opened up and sang.” John “Son Ford” Thomas said it when he said “Your mind is on your woman. She’s giving you the blues. You get worried over something, what you call a “deep study.” That’s the blues.” B.B. King says it when he says “There’s always been blues.” If life has a sound track, then these are the people who hear it and can sing it. And William Ferris has caught it on tape and in print for the rest of us.

Note: This is an excellent website where you can hear some of the music and watch some of the DVDs. 

Books mentioned in this column:
Give My Poor Heart Ease by William Ferris (University of North Carolina Press, 2009)

Nicki Leone showed her proclivities early when as a young child she asked her parents if she could exchange the jewelry a well-meaning relative had given her for Christmas for a dictionary instead. She supported her college career with a part-time job in a bookstore, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that her college career and attending scholarships and financial aid loans supported her predilection for working as a bookseller. She has been in the book business for over twenty years. Currently she works for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, developing marketing and outreach programs for independent bookstores. Nicki has been a book reviewer for several magazines, her local public radio station and local television stations. She was one of the founders of The Cape Fear Crime Festival, currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network, and as Managing Editor of BiblioBuffet. Plus, she blogs at Will Read for Food. She manages all this by the grace of a very patient partner and the loving support of varying numbers of dogs and cats. Contact Nicki.