WEST POINT – Preserving the blues has always seemed natural for Black Prairie Blues Museum advisory board member Bill Ferris. After all, he started doing it when he was just a teenager on his family’s farm in Warren County.

“I went to a Black church on the farm,” Ferris said. “The lady who would take care of me every first Sunday. And I learned to sing the hymns. And as I grew older, I realized there were no hymnals in the church. So when those families were no longer there, I figured that music would disappear.”

After he started recording and photographing the blues in the 1960s, Ferris said he couldn’t stop. First, his love for the blues carried him up and down Highway 61, recording and documenting blues artists.

Then, the blues took him into classrooms across the country, at Jackson State, Yale, the University of Mississippi and, most recently the University of North Carolina.

“I’ve taught it both as an oral tradition and as an inspiration for the writers of the South,” Ferris said. “I’ve looked at the music as the key to modern culture and art.”

Now, a lifetime of blues preservation has brought him all the way into the Blues Hall of Fame, as The Blues Foundation, a nonprofit preserving and celebrating blues based out of Memphis, Tennessee, announced Ferris as a 2024 inductee.

“To be recognized in this way is something I could never have dreamed of,” Ferris said. “It’s a pinnacle of my life to have this wonderful recognition.”

Ferris was nominated to the Hall of Fame for his work as an “author, folklorist, professor, lecturer and administrator,” The Blues Foundation’s website said.

Despite being based out of North Carolina today, Ferris has served as an advisory board member for the Black Prairie Blues Museum for about 10 years, he said, hoping to draw attention to its “pioneering work.”

“The Mississippi Delta, and more recently, the hill country of Mississippi, has been well documented and is known all over the world for the musicians who grew up there,” Ferris said. “But the prairie has sort of fallen through the cracks. And it’s a problem because many great musicians, including Howling Wolf, as one, are from the prairie. And that needs to be looked at and cared for in a documenting way, and that’s exactly what this museum does.”

According to fellow board member Bob Brzusezek, who originally brought Ferris onto the board, Ferris’ work has also included acting as a “connector” for the blues.

“He is a treasure,” Brzusezek said. “He is a verified treasure. It’s just amazing the amount of different things he has been responsible for and put together.”

Brzusezek said Ferris’ network of blues musicians, along with his historical knowledge of the blues, have been “invaluable” to the museum ever since Ferris joined the board. Ferris has also encouraged conversations around social equity and representation in the museum, he said.

Ferris has worked to connect the museum with notable blues preservationists and musicians, including those who originally rooted the genre to West Point, like the extended family of blues musician Chester Arthur Burnett, who was better known as “Howling Wolf.”

For more information about the Blues Hall of Fame, and Ferris’ induction, visit blues.org/. Or, for more information about the Black Prairie Blues Museum, visit blackprairiebluesmuseum.com/.

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