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T-Model FordTrue, honest-to-goodness bluesmen are a dying breed. Sure, there are plenty of folks who play the blues, but there are few who have grown up living the blues. T-Model Ford (born James Lewis Carter Ford) may well be one of the last - he started plowing a field in Mississippi when he was 6 (sometime around 1930 - although he's not actually sure how old he is), never learned to read or write, has 26 children between the ages of 13 and 54, and somewhere along the way spent 2 years on a chain-gang for murder. His drummer 'Spam' was found one day wandering the streets wearing nothing but his underwear - it seems his girlfriend stole the rest of his clothes and sold them for cash. But that's not as bad as the time she snipped the tips of his fingers off with a box cutter. T-Model's blues are just about as far from the commercially smooth sounds of Johnny Lang as you can get - this is blues from the gut, a rough-hewn thing with a crazed, at times unintelligible wail, and a jagged, raucous guitar. Take note - despite his age, he apparently still chases after women after his shows: 'Baby, I'm old and I can't do much, but I can still feel.' Thank goodness for that. He may be a bad, bad man, but we'll miss him when he's gone. Links of note:
If you'd like, you can email me here: richard@hearingmusic.com. Oh, and all content on these pages is copyright Richard Lewis. |