Slowly, steadily, inexorably, they are leaving the planet. One at a time. We will never see men like this again. American-made in every sense of the phrase, they came up the way so many bluesmen came up (and so many men who didn’t sing, but know the blues, came up). The combination of hardship, hard work, hard times and being born in the wrong place at the wrong time, under a bad sign. Of course, being born in the wrong place made it the right place for the art to emerge. Their pain, our gain. In many cases, anything but a fair exchange, and all we can do is pay homage and be grateful. Now, more than ever, as these ambassadors leave the stage, it will be more difficult to keep their legacies alive, so attention must be paid.
T-Model Ford kicked Death’s ass for almost a full century, but until we figure out a way to kill or cure death, it comes calling for all of us, eventually.
Summary of his life HERE, and excellent feature on him HERE. (Sample quote: T-Model keeps on going. He’s incredible. But he lives in Greenville which is a fucking cess pit and he’s been robbed there. The 88-year old white woman who was teaching him to read and write was raped and murdered two years ago. We’ve tried to get him out but he refuses to leave.)
It’s impossible, if you are a certain type of person, not to fall in love with a man like T-Model Ford, who proposed a promotional poster with these words of wisdom: I DON’T ALLOW NO MOTHERFUCKING PREACHERS AROUND MY GODDAM HOUSE.
This article changed my life, profoundly. Take my word for it and read every single word, HERE.
This is the article that helped turn me on to Fat Possum Records (how can you not love a label whose motto is “We’re trying our best”? Check them out HERE) and contains one of the all-time best magazine story quotes of all time, courtesy of R.L. Burnside:
I ask him about the man he killed and he gives a variation of his standard response: ‘I didn’t mean to kill nobody. I just meant to shoot the sonofabitch in the head and two times in the chest. Him dying was between him and the Lord.’ (More on Burnside HERE, articles that underscore what a national fucking treasure Matthew Johnson, who runs the Fat Possum label, really is.)
A few (and only a few–you need to read this piece) snippets, which could comprise the best novel not yet written:
There is violence and strangeness in his music, but no hint of the sadness or pain traditional in the blues. Matthew Johnson describes him as ‘a happy-go-lucky psychopath’.
T-Model’s life reads like a horror story. At the age of eight, his father beat him so badly between the legs with a piece of firewood that he lost a testicle. His ankles are scarred from the chain gang. His neck is scarred where one of his wives slashed his throat. He has been shot, stabbed, pinned under a fallen tree with a broken ribcage, beaten unconscious with a metal chair. He watched his first wife go off with his own father, watched another die after she drank poison to try and induce a miscarriage. The only woman he ever really loved poisoned him at the breakfast table; he woke up in hospital that afternoon and never saw her again.
Last year T-Model Ford recorded a new album and played 150 shows. Towards the end of the tour he was complaining of blood in his urine and everyone assumed it was prostate cancer. They took him to the doctor who made an inspection and announced that T-Model, at the age of 79, had managed to contract gonorrhea.
Before Fat Possum found him, he had spent his life in Deep South logging camps and on the chain gang for killing a man with a 25-cent pocketknife in a bar-room altercation. He fathered 26 children and started playing the guitar on the night his fifth wife left him, at the age of 58.
I ask T-Model if I can hear him play. ‘Let’s go,’ he says and we get into his big blue 1979 Lincoln Continental and drive across the railroad tracks to a corner house in a part of Water Valley I have never seen before. An old man with one eye and no teeth is in a wheelchair on a rotting front porch, trying to attach a prosthetic leg to his stump. ‘Hey Pete!’ yells T-Model. ‘Y’all got any elec-quickery up in there? We fixin’ to play a little music.’
‘Hey bluesman, you come on. We got electric,’ says Pete and then his leg falls off with a clatter. ‘I ain’t never gonna get used to this damn fool leg.’
‘I play the blues,’ he says during a whiskey break. ‘But I don’t ever get the blues. After my sister died I prayed to God to please let me live like a tree. Tree don’t care if them other trees is dyin’. Tree don’t care about nothin’.
