T-Model Ford: A 'bad man with a guitar'

T-Model Ford went from playing house parties for friends in Greenville, Miss., to touring the world with his droning brand of Hill Country electric blues.

Mississippi bluesman T-Model Ford is in the mood for making pronouncements.

Calling from somewhere in the middle of Virginia, where he's in the midst of a tour that will bring him to the Hi-Tone Café tonight, the nearly 90-year-old guitarist and singer is touting his bona fides. "You see, I'm a man now," says Ford, with a rumbling laugh. "I done been all over the world. Sure enough, I'm a maaaaan now."

T-Model Ford went from playing house parties for friends in Greenville, Miss., to touring the world with his droning brand of Hill Country electric blues.

Few would deny Ford his propers. Promoting his seventh album and first acoustic disc, titled The Ladies Man, Ford has long been a vocal proponent of the power of whiskey, women and song. And like most things in his life, Ford's hard-won success has been a long time coming.

Born James Lewis Carter Ford in the early 1920s (various sources put his birth date somewhere between 1920 and 1925) in Forest, Miss., his first half-century was blur of manual labor — including a career as a log truck driver, where he picked up his nickname — and scrapes with the law, including time on a chain gang for a murder conviction.

Ford was nearly 60 years old when he picked up the guitar for the first time. "My third wife, she went shopping and come upon a guitar and an amplifier for $50 and she bought it," says Ford. "I come in that evening, and she said, 'You see your present?' I said, 'I can't play no guitar. I ain't never even put my hand on a guitar.'"

The instrument would come in handy a short time later when Ford's wife left him. "She said I'm leaving. I told her, 'I ain't gonna mess around with you no more.' So I went up to the

house and I looked at the guitar and I looked at the amplifier sitting there.

"I picked that guitar up, hooked it up," he says. "The first switch didn't work, second switch didn't work. I hit that third switch and the sound come out and I said, 'Ah-ha, I got you now.' So I sat there and started messing with it. I'd heard Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf, and their sound was in my head. And I tried to make that sound."

Before long he was playing for friends and family in and around his Greenville shack, at all-night house parties fueled by copious amounts of moonshine and Ford's funky, hypnotic blues drones. "I've been playing the guitar ever since then. Now, I'm a bad man with a guitar. I ain't scared of nobody with a guitar."

In the mid-'90s, Ford came to national prominence, part of a wave of Hill Country bluesman recorded and promoted by Mississippi's Fat Possum label. He went on to tour with Chicago blues great Buddy Guy, and became a staple on the festival circuit at home and abroad.

A series of albums on Fat Possum — beginning with 1997's Pee Wee Get My Gun — cemented Ford's status as a gifted purveyor of a raw, mesmerizing electric blues that radiated intensity and authenticity. Ford has continued to carry the flag for the genre, even as his fellow Hill Country contemporaries — including R.L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough — have nearly all passed away.

Ford recently signed with Alive! Records. Earlier this year, the label released the acoustic effort, The Ladies Man. "Yeah, I played the acoustic on this one. But I still love my electric," says Ford. "I just go around, and if I hear a sound and I want to play it, I'll play it."

Ford is currently touring in support of the album, backed by drummer Marty Reinsel from Seattle-based blues band Gravel Road.

Despite his nonagenarian status, Ford is already making plans to record a live album, and tour Europe in the summer and fall (as well as appear at the Beale Street Music Festival in May).

Clearly not one to take early retirement, Ford almost sounds pained that he's still not working his log truck. "I'm not able to work anymore. Nine years ago, a big ol' limb feel out of that tree and fell on me and broke my legs. Messed my back up and my stomach," he says. "But I thank the Lord for keeping me here. 'Cause I'm still going, still playing that guitar."

T-Model Ford, Tyler Keith & The Apostles, Hobo Newphews

Tonight, 9 p.m. at the Hi-Tone Café, 1913 Poplar Ave. Tickets are $10 and available at hitonememphis.com or at the door. For more information, call 278-8663.

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