T-Model Ford
She Ain’t None of Your’n (Fat Possum)
by Jon Sarre
Whilst most seventy-somethings are kickin’ back in their proverbial rockin’ chairs, contemplatin’ senility (or worse, feedin’ the worms), T-Model Ford, perhaps the hardest-workin’ septuagenarian in show biz, has released his third record in as many years. She Ain’t None of Your’n follows the same path Ford beat into the ground with his first two Fat Possum discs, Pee Wee Get My Gun and You Better Sit Still: his gravely million-year old growl backed up by his trebly home-tuned twelve-bar chord manglin’ and slap dash snare beats courtesy of his usual grudging cohort or despised enemy or barely tolerated “bandmate” (depending on his mood), the uni-monikered Spam (or in the case of a few tracks here, by the jangle-heavy percussion of Bryan Berry or the late [if I recall correctly, sorry if I didn’t] blues legend Sam Carr).
The result almost always sounds malevolent, evil in a certain ageless Old Testament way a la Jerry Lee Lewis. Ford’s music is blues primitivism gone electric so untamed that a goofy riff on eatin’ chicken heads (“Chickenhead Man”) sounds fuckin’ frightenin’, even if it’s not a metaphor for sumptin’ else (which it probably is), but cuz some guy braggin’ ’bout such a thing, well, it ain’t what Robert Cray or Jon Spencer — if that’s yer definition of “blues” — babbles on about, now is it? Check out how the relatively standard’n’sunny chords of “When Are You Coming Back Home” gradually begin to resemble the hypno voodoo muck of ’60s caveman anthropologists The Groupies on their hit (???), “Primitive” (later covered with like a quarter of the menace by The Cramps on Psychedelic Jungle). Ya know T-Model’s never heard either version of the song, it’s just his sound. His “Sail On,” likewise, is Muddy Waters’ “Honey Bee,” just as his “Sugar Farm” on Pee Wee was a Lightnin’ Hopkins number I can’t seem to remember right now, yet far as Ford’s publishin’ is concerned, he wrote both the damn things, cuz they’re his sound, too. Does any of this matter? Nah, not really (‘specially since the authorship of a blues song is pretty fuckin’ impossible to confirm, no matter whose name is attached to it), whatever the guy feels like singin’, that’s his sound, too. Know of anyone else who can sing the telephone book and play the same two chords and make it sound b-a-a-a-a-d? T-Model Ford and only T-Model Ford.
(www.fatpossum.com)
