Gothic Theatre
Fat Possum Juke Joint Caravan
Instrumentation
T-Model Ford-Guitar/Vocals with Spam-Drums
Kenny Brown-Guitar/Vocals with Cedric Burnside-Drums
Paul Jones-Guitar/Vocals w/ Drummer
Biography
T-Model Ford w/ Spam
T-Model’s credentials are impeccable; if anything he’s over qualified. He was born James Lewis Carter Ford in Forrest, a small community in Scott County, Mississippi. T-Model thinks he’s seventy-five but isn’t sure. He was plowing a field behind a mule on his family’s farm by age eleven, and in his early teens he secured a job at a local sawmill. He excelled and was later recruited by a foreman from a bigger lumber company in the Delta, near Greenville, and eventually got promoted to truck driver. Between that and working in a log camp T-Model was sentenced to ten years on a chain-gang for murder. He lucked out and was released after serving two. He says, grinning, “I could really stomp some ass back then, stomp it good. I was a-sure-enough- dangerous man.”
Well, old times here are not forgotten. T-model is constantly arguing playfully with Stella, his girlfriend, about their more violent disagreements. When asked how many times he’d been to jail, T-Model responded, “I don’t know. How many?” He seemed to think it might be a trick question. Upon realizing it wasn’t, he answered to the best of his ability. “Every Saturday night there for awhile.”
As disheartening as this is, it’s also a refreshing reminder of how ridiculous the present image of a bluesman is. Nothing could be more twisted that the romanticized and picturesque standard; and old black man devoid of anger and rage happily strumming an acoustic guitar on the back porch of his shack “in that evening sun”. Three quarters of a century old, and with a dislocated hip, T-Model Ford is the only musician making his debut who could just as easily be starring in the most competitive branch of the National Wrestling Federation: The Cage Match.
Although Fat Possum makes it it’s business to trod some wild paths, the wildest yet has to be the one that T-Models drummer, Spam, lives on. We stopped en route to New York City just as Spam’s girlfriend walked out of the door dragging an oxygen tank and holding a cigarette in her other hand-a situation that could have been easily blown out her rib cage if not the entire block. Spam didn’t care about that, though. He was worried she might snip off the tips of his fingers with a box cutter again.
Tommy Lee Miles to the authorities, Spam to his friends, he has been T-Model’s A-number-one drummer for the past eight years. Sam Carr and Frank Frost, T-Model’s old friends, were brought in for one session. But the guest musician’s smiles gave way to scowls as T-Model’s constant refrain (“T-Model Ford is going to remember you sorry fuckers how it’s done”) became more and more emphatic. Seconds before “Been a Long Time” was recorded, Frank Frost felt compelled to sate, “I want everyone to know that I’m now playing against my will.”
T-Model and Spam are the only men still playing on Greenville’s Nelson Street. Most of the audience has scattered due to violence from the crack trade, and with the exception of T-Model, the street that once boasted Booba Barnes and others is dead. On a typical night Spam and T-Model will arrive at the club and unpack T-Model’s guitar and amp, and the bass drum and snare he allows Spam to use. When T-Model feels there are enough people, they start banging away in their own post-war Peavey-powered hill stomp. It’s nothing unusual for T-Model to play eight hours a night. They keep going until no one’s left standing. After his equipment’s packed up T-Model will coat himself with Outdoorsman Off and climb into his van to crash.
Kenny Brown
After 3 long years Kenny’s much awaited genuine Fat Possum debut Stingray will be released on Feb 11th. Although R.L. Burnside is fond of calling Kenny Brown his adopted son, it is really the sadly under-recorded north Mississippi bluesman Joe Callicott who was the first musician to take Kenny under his wing.
At ten, Brown was playing with Callicott after school everyday, simultaneously absorbing the hypnotic old African sound of OtharTurner’s fife and drum band, a fixture at picnics across the road from Brown’s Nesbit, Mississippi, home.
By eighteen, Brown had also apprenticed with local harmonica ace Johnny Woods and Mississippi Fred McDowell, soon becoming Burnside’s right hand, which he remained for twenty-five years. With his own band Brown has applied the powerful cry-and-moan singing style of the hills and those relentless, droning guitars to his own distinctive Sound, earning him Musician magazine’s praise as “simply the best white slide player you might ever hear.” Brown lives in Potts Camp, in the middle of the giant Holly Springs National Forest, with his nephew Jocko and a number of horses.
Paul Jones
Paul Jones of Belzoni, Mississippi, a small town with a rich blues heritage in the heart of the delta, is a professional welder. He lives with his wife Bessie Mae in a house he purchased with the sweat of his brow. Before becoming a welder, Jones worked in a Delta cotton gin; before that, like many of his Delta neighbors, he worked on a farm. And throughout his adult life, Paul Jones has been a bluesman, known and admired by a number of his fellow Delta musicians but seldom venturing far from home. His style is deeply rooted in the rural blues of the delta, but so distinctly original and idiosyncratic that his sound will not easily be mistaken for that of any other artist. Rock-solid bass-string drones, expansively sonic guitar textures, a seasoning of wah-wah riffs, and a voice that can sound vinegary, molasses-like, or simply, urgently passionate, as the song demands—these are some of the qualities that make Paul Jones a unique and formidable talent.
“I’m from Flora, Mississippi,” says Paul, “a little town about eighteen miles from Jackson. My daddy was a guitar player years ago, when I was a little boy. When he used to come home from working on the farm, we’d have frolics, and after he played awhile he’d rest his guitar on the floor and I’d get on it. It came natural to me; nobody taught me, I was just born to it. I started in playing, and by the time I was about thirteen, people would come by and want to take me with ‘em to play somewhere out in the country. Before my dad died, four of the children had taken up the guitar, including my sister Jo Ann. She stopped, but I didn’t ever stop.” Among Paul’s other siblings was Casey Jones, who now lives in Chicago where he is one of the most in-demand drummers for blues gigs and recording sessions.
At 48, Paul is old enough to have heard some of the Delta’s most celebrated blues stylists as a youth, young enough to be a post—B. B. King “modernist” if he’d chosen to go that way. Instead he developed a style that is unabashedly “country” and “in the tradition” but with modern shadings—that wah-wah pedal—and a dexterous manner of subsuming rhythm and lead functions in to a guitar style with the momentum and unpredictability of a runaway steamroller.
