a short film about tall tales
Mule trader, auctioneer, fast-talker: the only thing Ray Lum didn’t do was sit still. Nearly 50 years after his death, he still can’t be pinned down.
“You’re never broke long as you keep trading!”
SYNOPSIS
No one could spin a yarn to make a sale like Ray Lum. Twenty years after their initial meeting, Bill Ferris returned home to Mississippi in the early ‘70s with a camera. The result reveals a look back at the colorful rhythms of Ray’s life—at home, at the auction, joking with strangers outside country stores— and provides a glimpse at Southern manhood, friendship and loss. Now nearly Ray’s age when they first filmed, Ferris has become a Grammy Award winning documentarian and renowned folklorist. Using never before seen 16mm footage and new animations, OKAY, MR. RAY is a short documentary film about how even the tallest tales help us keep the memory alive of the ones we love
The Film Team
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Ashley Melzer
Director/Producer
Ashley Melzer is a producer, writer and media-maker living in Durham, NC. Born in North Florida, she received her Bachelors in Cinematic Arts from the University of Southern California and then a Masters in Folklore from UNC-Chapel Hill. Her writing and photography has been featured in Indy Week, Paste Magazine, eMusic, and the Southern Foodways Alliance to name a few. She's worked with Hopscotch, Moogfest, Southern Cultures and more. She currently works as a catalyst for publicly engaged scholarship at UNC Chapel Hill. Ashley is the founder of Mettlesome, a creative, project based collective, for which she performs, directs, writes and teaches comedy.
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Bill Ferris
Producer
William Ferris was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi in 1942. As he grew up on a working farm, Ferris began to document the artwork, music, and lives of the people on the farm and in his local community. The archive of recordings that he created and the documentary films that he had a hand in producing have served as powerful tools in institutions of higher learning for decades. Recently, his box set Voices of Mississippi won Grammy awards for best historical album and best album notes.
A former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Ferris is coeditor of the award-winning Encyclopedia of Southern Culture and author of several other books, including the informal trilogy The South in Color: A Visual Journal, The Storied South: Voices of Writers and Artists, and Give My Poor Heart Ease: Voices of the Mississippi Blues.
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Bridgette Cyr
Editor
Bridgette Cyr is a video journalist, documentary filmmaker, and audio producer. Film collaborations have taken her to a Q-Anon rally in Tampa, Florida; the bedroom of a revenge porn victim; the recording studio of feminist hip hop artists in Havana, Cuba; and to the hideout of a North Carolina woman as she sought refuge in sanctuary, fearful of deportation. As of late, her work has a focus on access to education, healthcare, and LGBTQIA+ rights in the rapidly evolving American South. She graduated with a Master’s in Visual Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where she was a Roy H. Park Fellow. Before returning to school she was the Artist Services Coordinator at Full Frame Documentary Film Festival.
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Rodgers Dameron
Animator
Rodgers Dameron is a freelance Artist, Animator, and Musician. He has ten years experience as a lead animator creating motion design, logos, animation, and visual effects for Emmy award winning series and award winning ad campaigns. Before first trying his hand at animation in 2005, Rodgers studied painting and drawing at the Pratt Institute of Art in Brooklyn. When not animating, he makes custom artwork, mainly portraits, using traditional drawing and watercolor techniques.
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Jake Xerxes Fussell
Music
Singer, guitarist, and folksong interpreter Jake Xerxes Fussell (yes, that’s his real middle name, after Georgia potter D.X. Gordy) has distinguished himself as one of his generation’s preeminent interpreters of traditional (and not so traditional) “folk” songs, a practice which he approaches with a refreshingly unfussy lack of nostalgia and preciousness. By recontextualizing ancient vernacular songs and sources of the American South, he allows them to breathe and speak for themselves and for himself; he alternately inhabits them and allows them to inhabit him. In all his work, Fussell humanizes his material with his own profound curatorial and interpretive gifts, unmooring stories and melodies from their specific eras and origins and setting them adrift in our own waterways.
WHO WAS RAY LUM?
Ray Lum (1891—1977) was a mule trader, auctioneer, fast-talker, friend to many, and all around American original. Growing up in poverty in rural Mississippi, Ray soon found that he could make more money trading than working in a store. He became a savvy bargainer and business man, whose tall tales wooed even the folks he beat out of money. He had a home and auction house in Vicksburg Mississippi and traveled from South Dakota to Mexico trading mainly mules and horses—sometimes literally out of the back of his Cadillac. "He is known all over cow country for his honest fair dealing and gentlemanly attitude” reported one Texas newspaper, “A letter addressed to him anywhere in Texas probably would be delivered."
William Ferris, who himself grew up on a farm just outside of Vicksburg, met Ray Lum as a child. Ferris never forgot Ray’s way with words and returned as an adult to try and capture the special quality of Ray’s storytelling and wisdom. Ray is the subject of Ferris and Judy Peiser’s 1972 film, Ray Lum: Mule Trader. He is also the focus of Ferris’s 1992 book, Mule Trader: Ray Lum's Tales of Horses, Mules, and Men published by University of Mississippi Press and which features a forward by Eudora Welty.
