RIP T-Model Ford

For thirty years, Bluesman T-Model Ford rocked the blues world from his home in Greenville, Mississippi. A short career for someone who died last week in his 90s, but he didn't pick up a guitar until he was nearly 60 years old. The New York Times has the full story: T-Model Ford, Late-Blooming Bluesman, Is Dead and notes:

“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.”

B.B. King Drawing Fans South

Word has spread about the new B.B. King museum in Indianola. And the word is good. It's been open for less than three months and blues fans from all over are feeling a pull to the delta to pay homage to the man and the delta blues art form.

Tom Uhlenbrock of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch is a recent visitor. But he wanted to see more than artifacts and photographs in a museum honoring the past.

Here's an excerpt:

Rave reviews about the B.B. King Museum, which opened in Indianola in September, inspired me to head out on a road trip through Mississippi, which is busy setting up highway markers for a Blues Trail. But I didn't want to make a dead-man's tour of markers, museums and grave sites. I wanted live legends, "real-deal" Delta bluesmen.

Uhlenbrock also mentions the new documentary "M for Mississippi" and interviews one of the bluesmen featured, T-Model Ford:

"I was born in Forest, Miss., picked cotton, plowed mules, worked in a sawmill," he said. "Can't read, can't write, never been to school a day in my life. Taught myself how to play the guitar. When I was 18, guy tried to kill me. I killed him and went on the chain gang in Tennessee. It didn't make a bad man out of me, made me a good man. I been quiet ever since."

Although his doctor told him to cut back on the Jack, Ford still tours and just got back "from this place with a great big blue lake." He couldn't remember the name, but Stella, who is 50ish, yelled from the porch, "Barbados."

Read the full article here.

Click here to hear B.B. King's 3 O'Clock Blues