Due to privilege regarding race and color, "mulattoes" on the plantation were given more respectable jobs, whereas the Edmonsons mainly worked in the corn fields and handled livestock.

[1] During this time, the Edmondson family officially resided in Nashville as his mother, Jane, was the last to leave the Compton Plantation.

By age 39, his wages at Women's Hospital allowed him to buy a modest home and spacious lot in Edgehill, a segregated neighborhood in Nashville's Vanderbilt-Belmont area.

[5] When the hospital closed in 1931, Edmondson picked up work at various part-time jobs and in his leisure, he sculpted in his backyward and sold vegetables.

On February 7, 1951, at age seventy-six, he died quietly in his home in Nashville, Tennessee, where illness had confined him to bed for several months.

Today there is no sign of Edmondson's grave marker because at the time cheap wooden caskets were used to bury African Americans.

"[7] He carved tombstones primarily from chunks of discarded limestone from demolished buildings, which were delivered to him by wrecking companies' trucks.

He carved figures of biblical characters, angels, doves, turtles, eagles, rabbits, horses and other real and fanciful creatures.

[14] The facial technique, overbuilt-ness, and range in texturing can be observed in Edmonson's most well-known masterpiece Bess and Joe and further with Mary and Martha.

She attempted to publish his work but newspaper chain mogul William Randolph Hearst had a prejudice against showing Negro art as he saw them as nothing other than servants.

[17][9] She then brought Edmondson's work to the attention of fellow Tennessean Thomas Mabry and his boss Alfred Barr, the director of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

[19][20] In 1938, through MoMA's influence, William Edmondson's sculpture was included in the "Three Centuries of Art in the United States" in Paris.

Interest in his work on the national and international stage was short-lived, and he was viewed primarily as a novelty, or exemplar of the "primitive" race-memory of an untutored, naive old Negro stone carver.

Through the 1980s and 1990s Edmondson's sculptures were exhibited extensively, though often in the limiting context of the labels "outsider", "folk art", "self-taught", and "naive".

[22] In 1999, Nashville's Cheekwood Museum of Art mounted a major traveling retrospective exhibition and catalog that included in-depth biographical and critical essays on his life and work.

[9] On August 20, 2014, Mayor Karl Dean opened Nashville's first arts park, named in Edmondson's honor.

The park, managed by the Nashville Metropolitan Development and Housing Agency, includes sculptures by Thornton Dial and Lonnie Holley inspired by the work of William Edmondson.

[25] Even though the site of Edmondson's house at 1434 Fourteenth Avenue South is now a public school, it has been officially recognized with a Tennessee historical marker.