T-Model Ford and Gravel Road, Ferocious Few, Ramshackle Romeos - Thee Parkside, 03/29/09

Posted by glen609 on March 31, 2009

My girlfriend dumped me today so it was a good time to listen to the Blues.

Real, authentic, deep South, Delta Blues coming to you from the luminary label Fat Possum. This was T-Model Ford. Eighty Eight years old and a reported 23 little Ford’s to his name. That’s got to be a classic.

Francisco Fernandez, from the opener Ferocious Few called out his name and pointed to the diminutive man sitting on the side with his cane waiting patiently to go on.

“I’m a legend!” he announced. Classic.

Getting dumped is a bummer. But it’s a bummer tinged with realism and that’s what the blues are about. It’s a bunch of sad chords, set with a bunch of sad and lonely and resigned lyrics, but there’s an optimism and energy to the structure and to the rhythm. We’re all fucked, it says, but we’re all in it together so we may as well dance, drink, fuck and have a good time.

So I was listening, loosening up, drinking Thee Parkside’s famous Blue Collar Special (shot of Jameson and a PBR) two fisted of course and the feeling was coming back. From an incredible sadness I went into a kind of reverie and then I hit on this girl that turned out to be my friend’s new girlfriend. Oops! Worse things have happened and now we were all good friends.

I even started flirting, by text, with my ex. Maybe we weren’t done after all. As long as there’s the blues, there’s a glimmer of hope.

T-Model has a creaky broken guitar sound that he fingerpicks and drones and he plays exclusively in the key of E. That’s apparently all he knows. He only picked up a guitar at the age of 58. And now he sounds like the back side of Heaven. “I’m a chicken head man,” or “She asked me, so I told her.” Classic.

Between every song he announced, “It’s Jack Daniels time!” and he took a slug.

Nothing sad about this man. He was having the time of his life and you could tell he had that same time of his life every night. This was not the embittered, embattled picture of the stereotyped black bluesman from the South.

He watched my friend’s girl twirling her hips to the beat right in front of the stage and licked his chops. He wasn’t afraid.

Twenty four was right around the corner.