A hard-living, late-blooming bluesman

JAMES "T-MODEL" FORD

BLUES MUSICIAN

26-6-c.1920 - 16-7-2013

T-Model Ford, a raw-sounding, mesmerising guitarist and singer who was among the last of the old-time Delta bluesmen - and whose career was all the more noteworthy for his not having picked up a guitar until he was almost 60 - has died at his home in Greenville, Mississippi.

His exact age was shrouded in the smoky legend that often attends the blues, but he was almost certainly in his early 90s.

His death was announced on the website of Fat Possum Records, an independent label in Oxford, Mississippi, that produced several of his albums.

Once described by the head of that label as "the friendliest fun-loving psychopath you'll ever meet" (Ford spoke openly, and amiably, of having killed at least one man), he began his musical life in the 1980s in Mississippi juke joints.

Ford did not release his first record, Pee-Wee Get My Gun, until 1997, when he was well into his 70s.

Afterwards, he performed to great acclaim across the country - appearing at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, and at various New York City clubs - and around the world. He was featured in You See Me Laughin', a 2002 documentary about the blues.

Ford toured energetically until last year, when he suffered a stroke. He owed his crackling longevity and lust for life, he said (he had six wives and at least 26 children), to a simple three-part regimen.

"Jack Daniel's, the women and the Lord been keeping me here," he told The Chicago Sun-Times in 2003. In old age, however, on doctor's orders, he reduced his involvement with the first of these to some extent.

Ford was a completely self-taught musician, and the blues that sprang from him was stark, harsh and haunting even by the standards of the genre.

Because he did not know the proper way to tune a guitar, the eccentric tunings he devised lent his music a strange, soulful tonality - he played, as fellow musicians sometimes described it, "in the key of T".

If Ford exuded the aura of a backwoods bluesman from Central Casting, he came by it more or less honestly, for his personal narrative seemed to rival that of any blues song:

There was the childhood spent working the fields under the brutal Mississippi sun. There was his first wife, whom he married when he was a teenager, and who left, Ford said, to run off with his father. There was another wife, who he said drank poison to try to end a pregnancy but died instead. "I heard her thump down on the floor, stone dead," Ford told an interviewer in 1999. "I was sad, I loved that woman, but I didn't let it get me down."

There was still another wife - either the third or the fifth; the number varied with Ford's recollection - who gave him his first guitar before decamping.

There were the times, more recently, that he tried to stab members of his band, because they irked him.

Of the stories that swirled around Ford, some were tall tales in the oral tradition of old bluesmen. Others seemed born of the gleeful, spur-of-the-moment hyperbole with which Ford, who could neither read nor write but was no less canny for that, embellished his many interviews.

And still others, given the realities of black life in the Depression-era south, were apparently true - including the two years he spent on a chain gang for killing a man in self-defence.

That man may not have been the only one Ford killed in his long life. As he wondered aloud in an interview with The New York Times in 2001: "Do I count the one I run over in my Pontiac?"

James Lewis Carter Ford was born June 24 - of that much he was certain - about 1920, in Forest, Mississippi.

His father, whom he described as violent, was a sharecropper, and young James did not attend school, instead working each day in the fields. The elder Ford considered the blues the Devil's work, and what little music James heard he caught by slipping furtively into juke joints.

Early on, James Ford worked for a sawmill, becoming a logging-truck driver; his nickname, T-Model, is said to derive from that time.

As a young man, he said, he was stabbed in a bar fight. Reaching for a knife of his own, he stabbed his assailant to death.

Sentenced to 10 years on a chain gang, he was released after two. Decades later, journalists wrote of seeing the scars from the shackles on Ford's ankles.

When Ford was in his late 50s, his professional course was changed forever.

"Before then," he told The Bergen Record in 2000, "I didn't have the blues in me."

Then, one day, his wife brought home a Gibson electric guitar. "I said: 'What are you spending my money on that for, baby? I can't play no guitar,"' Ford told The Chicago Tribune in 2002.

"She said, 'You can learn.' She was all the time running off, leaving and coming back. And I said, 'If I play it, will you stay?' And she said yes. She left the next Friday night."

Ford's survivors include his sixth wife, Estella, and myriad children and grandchildren.

His other albums include Bad Man (2002), Jack Daniel Time (2008) and The Ladies Man (2010).

Although he might well have begun his musical life sooner, starting late, Ford said, proved to be his saving grace.

"One night, I was playin' the blues in Mississippi, singin', 'How many more years, baby, you gonna dog me around,"' he said in The Bergen Record interview.

"This fella comes up to me; he thought I was after his wife. He put a .45 up to my nose and he said, 'If you play that again, I'll blow your brains out.'

"So it's a good thing I didn't start to playin' the blues when I was younger. If I did, I might not be around today."