It started when directors of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters wanted to recognize Vicksburg-native Dr. Bill Ferris for his most recent book, “Give My Poor Heart Ease: Voices of the Mississippi Blues,” which is accompanied by Ferris’ audio and video field recordings from the 1960s and ’70s.

“We were trying to find a category for it, but we were stuck because it overlaps so many,” explained Margaret Robbins, institute executive secretary. “Somebody pointed out that it’s really the culmination of a lifetime of work, and it just went from there.”

Today, Ferris will be honored by MIAL with a Lifetime Achievement award in Jackson at the Mississippi Museum of Art. The institute is marking its 31st year of awarding Mississippi writers, artists and musicians for their work.

Awards and high praise are not exactly rare for Ferris, a folklorist, professor, author of 10 books, former chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities and current professor and senior associate director of the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. President Bill Clinton has bestowed him with the Charles Frankel Prize in the Humanities, France has recognized him as Chevalier and Officer in the Order of Arts and Letters and the American Library Association has awarded him a Dartmouth Medal.

Still, Ferris said the Lifetime Achievement Award he will receive today is perhaps the most special, as it comes from those who are most special to him.

“To me, what it means is your people at home appreciate what you’ve done, and that’s really the highest achievement I think a person can reach,” said Ferris, who has always traced the inspiration for his life’s work back to the family farm where his mother still lives and where he grew up, located about 15 miles south of Vicksburg off Fisher Ferry Road.

Since 1988, the MIAL has handed out a Lifetime Achievement Award just 15 times. It’s the rarest MIAL award, and one of very few that is not necessarily given out each year, but only when the board decides someone is deserving of the distinction. Since Eudora Welty was given the first, other recipients have included Walter Anderson, Shelby Foote, Morgan Freeman, Leontyne Price and Ellen Douglas.

“Once we started talking about a Lifetime Achievement Award for Bill everybody was really enthusiastic about it, because he certainly has had an outstanding career that has highlighted Mississippi arts and culture,” said Robbins. “Our only hesitation was, well, he’s a little young and we don’t think he’s done yet.”

At a spry 68, Ferris said he doesn’t think he’s done either.

“I don’t feel like the journey is finished,” he said. “I have plans to publish another book that I’m working on. It’s a collection of interviews I’ve done over the years with Southern writers and artists. It will be very similar in format to the blues book.”

Published last fall, Ferris’ latest book is his most comprehensive project to date. Combining his love of Mississippi folklore, history and music, the raw interviews with his subjects — ranging from blues legends BB King and Vicksburg-native Willie Dixon to preachers, prisoners, farmhands and lesser-known Mississippi musicians — are presented in a multi-media format providing tangible insight into the history and culture of the blues in Mississippi.

Later this month, “Give My Poor Heart Ease” will be included in Amazon’s first generation of multimedia electronic books, which will allow readers to click on certain portions of the text to hear excerpts from field recordings Ferris captured decades ago on a Sony Super 8 camera and battery-powered reel-to-reel recorder.

“Being able to go back and finish the work that I started in the ’60s — and being able to present it now in this multimedia format — that has really been a fun and gratifying experience,” Ferris said. “My desire is to see it all complete.”

Another of Ferris’ lifelong passions has been teaching, and in that area, again, Ferris said he’s got no intention of slowing down anytime soon.

“For me that is my retirement,” he said. “I learn from my students as much as I teach them. As long as I’m healthy and have my wits about me I want to stay in the classroom and continue to write.”

At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Ferris each fall teaches one class on Southern music, and in the spring he teaches a course on Southern literature and oral tradition.

“So in a very real way, I never leave home,” he said.

The road from the Ferris family farm in Warren County to North Carolina has been a long and winding one. After attending public schools in Vicksburg, Ferris went east to attend prep school in Massachusetts at Brooks School and in 1964 received his bachelor of arts in English Literature from Davidson College. A year later, he earned a master’s degree from Northwestern University. From there, he went to Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, for a year, returning to complete his studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where he left in 1969 with a master’s and doctorate in Folklore.

Ferris spent the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s writing and teaching, first at Jackson State University, then Yale University — where he co-founded the Center for Southern Folklore in Mississippi — and later Ole Miss. He spent 18 years in Oxford before being tapped in 1997 by Clinton to chair the NEH, a post he held through 2001.

“I thought they’d made a mistake,” is how the perpetually modest Ferris recalled the call from the White House, “but I said I’d be honored.”

Along with his wife, Marcie Cohen Ferris, and 24-year-old daughter, Virginia, Ferris will spend the majority of this summer traveling to blues festivals and events across the United States and Europe to promote his book. In France, a three-day event will focus solely on Ferris’ book, field recordings and photographs.

When ruminating over the totality of his life’s work thus far, Ferris quite naturally deflects personal accomplishments and shines the light instead on his old home. He talks of a recent visit to Vicksburg’s newest Mississippi Blues Trail marker in Marcus Bottom with his daughter, and said nothing gives him more pleasure than to see the often-overlooked heroes of history getting the recognition they deserve.

“For me to go through Marcus Bottom and the rest of the city now and see these beautiful plaques honoring the people who shaped my own experience — people like Milt Hinton, Willie Dixon and The Red Tops — I feel like I’ve finally arrived,” Ferris said. “Ultimately, I’m the proudest of being able to help preserve some of that history, and that we are recognizing and embracing the roots of who we are as Vicksburgers.”