The Bitter Southerner magazine, which I’ve just come across thanks to the Twitter feed of the estimable Rocky Mountain Land Library, has a fine tribute to Bill Ferris, who has spent his lifetime collecting the stories and songs of the American South. This Friday, the Georgia-based record label Dust to Digital will release Voices of Mississippi, a four-disc set that includes Ferris’s field recordings and films of blues singers, gospel singers and storytellers. If that whets your appetite for Southern stories, you will also enjoy Pamela Petro’s Sitting Up with the Dead, which was reissued in the United States earlier this year.