T-Model Ford
The Ladies Man
[Alive Natural Sound]
Some people in this world sing about the blues, and other people actually sing the blues. T-Model Ford is neither…he is the blues. And on his latest album, The Ladies Man, the 90 year old Ford (who didn’t learn guitar until he was 58, and didn’t release his debut album until 77), tells the stories that brought him to sing the blues.
What’s there to say about a blues album this good? It’s authentic…it’s stylized…it’s beautiful. But it doesn’t break any new ground, as well it shouldn’t. And this is less a batch of whole new material, and more a stripped down collection of old standards. But when you have an artist as genuine as T-Model Ford – growth can’t be tracked in musical measure as much as in his own self-realization. And on The Ladies Man, he seems to be reaching ephemeral plateau of swamp that made him the blues singer that he is.
He obviously knows that he’s not just a cliché, but rather he is the man they based the cliché on.
The album is mostly acoustic, mostly just Ford pickin’ away and telling stories of a life spent plowing fields, working sawmills, and driving trucks. Recorded in one three hour session, with no overdubbing and minimal mixing – Ford bounces between music, spoken word tales, and banter with people in the studio lucky enough to witness the sessions. Hearing him tell tales of another time, how he doesn’t know his actual birth date on account of his wallet and his passport being stolen by two different women, is fascinating to those of us who come from a very well documented age.
His stripped down take on old classics like “44 Blues”, “Sallie Mae”, and “Hip Shaking Woman” exist to remind us that the blues aren’t dead; its body is just being ravaged by fakers.
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