Answer my question, "Will you be mine?" If you don't love me, love whom you please, Throw your arms round me, give my heart ease. Give my heart ease, dear .
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- Give My Poor Heart Ease: Voices of the Mississippi Blues by William Ferris
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The South in Color: A Visual Journal H. Eugene and Lillian Youngs Lehman Series. The Most Southern Place on Earth: Sponsored products related to this item What's this? The dramatic true story of a forgotten moment in American History. Readers call it gripping, like they were sitting on the train themselves. The Amazing Dogs adult coloring book allows you to be creative!
Add color, add more color and enjoy the process of your artistic creativity! Ace your daily challenges from health, work, and relationships. Find more happiness and meaning. Follows the ancient wisdom of the 8 Limbs of Yoga. Review The stories, collected during Ferris' travels in his native lands of the Mississippi Delta, are real, raw, passionate, at times ribald and rough and at others sweeter than tupelo honey. Related Video Shorts 0 Upload your video.
Share your thoughts with other customers. Write a customer review. There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later. William Ferris's book is a summary of 40 years of his field research, offering elegantly written portraits of the people and places he spent so much time amongst in the 's and beyond. His patch was, essentially, Mississippi and his self-defined brief was to capture the fast-dissapearing history of traditional blues and gospel by any means at his disposal. This included interviews, photos, taped performances and sound films. Unusual for the time, and now, four decades later, the five films are of especially great value.
Moreover, they are all included here in DVD format, accompanied by a selection of field recordings on a CD, both packaged into the back of the book. So essentialy you have a multi-media product to absorb; words, photographic images, sound recordings and films, including the one which, in my view, is the best single documentary about what the blues actually means.
At 21 minutes, his color film "Give My Poor Heart Ease" is the ideal introduction to the real purpose and underlying meaning of the Blues as catharsis for its original community, rather than mass entertainment. Ther are no California Rayban-wearing harp players here, just honest folk playing honest music because they have to. Whatever your level of interest in the blues is, Ferris's new volume is one to get and absorb. This is a great book, and better yet when I met the author in Natchez it turns out he likes trains even has a railroad pocket watch and signed the book to our volunteers.
One person found this helpful. Kudos to William Ferris for this book. It is clearly a labor of love for him. He documents the unknown blues singers he met along the way. And he tells about his long-standing friendship with the legendary BB King fantastic stories! This book belongs on the shelf of every serious student of Folklore and ethnomusicology or anyone who likes music, especially the Blues.
So well written and easy to read, the words slide off the pages and take you back to a time when great Blues singers were as common as Cottonmouths in the Mississippi Delta. Ferris shares his life and the lives of the seminal Blues musicians with his readers. This book is oral history the way it should be written. Ferris spent many years of his life recording the interviews in this book with the all-time great Blues musicians, like B. From cover to cover it reads like fiction, but every inch of it is true. We all know that a storyteller like a good Blues singer never lies or "spins a yarn"!
I hear that if you get the IPAD version the print magically turns into video at critical junctures in the stories. The long list of Bill Ferris's accomplishments reads like a who's who of Delta scholarship. If you want to understand the Blues from Mississippi to Chicago to the present day, this is the book to read.
Early in the first chapter the author fades into the shadows and allows the musicians to tell their own unique stories. The key word in the title is "Voices". The author's skill as oral historian is to allow the voices of so many truly exceptional musicians to shout and holler, weep and moan, blending into one powerful tradition that has entertained this nation as long a people have eeked out a living as slaves, tenant farmers and laborers in the great delta of the Mississippi River that Bill Ferris is proud to call his home.
Voices of the Mississippi Blues. This book is not an exciting read but it is interesting and very very informative about the early days and origins of Blues music culture. I haven't yet watched the included DVD but I expect it will be fascinating. I've known of William Ferris for at least a couple of decades, and his work in preserving the delta blues and honoring the bluesmen. This book lives up to expectations. It is well researched and a satisfying read.
Thanks Amazon for making it available. Shipment was prompt and I received my copy well within the predicted time. This is an essential book for blues lovers. It traces the birth of Mississippi Delta blues, arguably the birthplace of American blues. There is an extended section on the influence of prisoners who were in Parchman Farm prison, made immortal by a song by Mose Allison years later. I highly recommend it. See all 13 reviews. See all customer images. Most recent customer reviews. Published 1 year ago. Published on June 9, William Ferris is devoted to the notion that Published on July 11, Published on May 3, Published on November 21, Amazon Giveaway allows you to run promotional giveaways in order to create buzz, reward your audience, and attract new followers and customers.
Learn more about Amazon Giveaway. Set up a giveaway. Customers who bought this item also bought. Even though I am familiar with the musical forms and sounds of the blues and its inheritors, this book helped me realize that this deep ancestry remains very distant from me. Dec 25, Richard rated it really liked it. Listening to the blues is like Listening to life Coming at you full-on Straight at your chest As you're stuck on the tracks Unable and unwilling to move Knowing it's going to hurt But you'll be better off Facing it and taking it And letting it take you To wherever the train runs Reading this book is like listening to the blues.
It's people from Mississippi telling about themselves and their everyday lives. This is the true roots of the blues and Mr. Ferris captures it very well. The blues is something t Listening to the blues is like Listening to life Coming at you full-on Straight at your chest As you're stuck on the tracks Unable and unwilling to move Knowing it's going to hurt But you'll be better off Facing it and taking it And letting it take you To wherever the train runs The blues is something that isn't always pretty, but is always honest.
God, the devil, racism, poverty, loneliness, heartache, joy, love, hope The mid's interview with BB King was riveting. The two things I know about BB are that he can wail the blues and he can tell a mean story.
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And this interview did nothing to detract from either of those two things. Ferris, for sharing with us your passion. Sep 07, Jeff Crompton rated it it was amazing.
Give My Poor Heart Ease: Voices of the Mississippi Blues by William Ferris
I read this book in small pieces over the course of several months. It's drawn from Ferris's recordings of Mississippi blues and gospel musicians, made in the 's and 's. The narratives are fascinating, chilling, inspiring, and annoying. One of the interviewees has a sense of humor so different from mine that his chapter exasperated me.
An example of what I found chilling was the short segment by Ben Gooch, an inmate at the state penitentiary at Parchman. His statement, which was record I read this book in small pieces over the course of several months. His statement, which was recorded in , begins with the words, "I first came here in , November the fifth.
Parchman was pretty rough then. The anger and defiance in the face of racism and oppression expressed by Gussie Tobe was moving, and I enjoyed reading Wade Walton's comments.
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Walton was a barber first and a bluesman second; I met him in Clarksdale back in the 's, and he was kind enough to sign my copy of his only album. The book itself is good, but I would be tempted to rate it no higher than four stars if it hadn't been for the CD and DVD that are included. They are both stunning. The DVD has seven short films made by Ferris between and They're cheaply made and crudely edited, but they present an amazing picture of black culture in Mississippi at the time.
The CD includes blues, gospel, and Parchman work songs, and the best tracks are incredible. He sings unusual, asymmetrical blues with a beautiful tenor voice; the result is not quite like any other blues I've ever heard. The author did field work in Mississippi, primarily in the late sixties. He was looking not so much for blues musicians themselves as he was the culture they emerged from. Hence apart from interviews with B. King and Willie Dixon, there aren't any well known names found here. Instead we get a treasure trove of accounts from residents of that state who had grown up under the fiercest segregation and racism found in America.
And yet they had power within, and it was that spark that gave birth to The author did field work in Mississippi, primarily in the late sixties. And yet they had power within, and it was that spark that gave birth to the music we know as the blues. But where Lomax went south with a political agenda and a preconceived story that biased his reporting, Ferris appears to have kept himself as removed from the interviews as he could have.
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Apart from brief introductions to each section, he has deleted himself entirely and let the subjects of his interviews provide the full narrative. This book belongs to the people it profiles, not the author. Ferris deserves commendation for this. Many of those he spoke with were quite old at the time and clearly remembered grandparents who were former slaves.
There was a living memory in their stories to an age that is gone now, and Ferris caught it in the nick of time.
In addition to the book, there's a CD of field recordings, and a DVD of films Ferris shot in the sixties and seventies. It's a full package that readers will not only spend hours enjoying, but will also return to many times. Essential for all blues fans. Jul 02, Tom Schulte rated it liked it. Jun 14, Deborah rated it really liked it.
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