T-Model Ford
T-Model Ford
The Last of the Hellraisers
and the only Taledragger
Somewhere in the haze of the Mississippi Delta—likely between 1921 and 1925—James Lewis Carter Ford, better known as T-Model Ford, was born. The exact date? No one really knows. But time never meant much to T-Model. He didn’t play by the clock. He played by the rhythm of hard living, whiskey nights, and the deep, dirty blues.
Before the world knew his name, T-Model worked the land, drove trucks, got into fights, and did time for a killing he claimed was in self-defense. Illiterate but sharp as a switchblade, he didn’t pick up a guitar until his late 50s—when his fifth wife walked out and left him an old guitar as a parting gift. That’s when the blues took him. Or maybe it had him all along.
His playing was unpolished, dangerous, and hypnotic. He didn’t follow the rules of music theory—he bent them, broke them, and buried them in Delta mud. Fat Possum Records caught wind of this wild, late-blooming bluesman in the 1990s and launched him into cult stardom. Albums like Pee-Wee Get My Gun and You Better Keep Still introduced the world to a sound that was part juke joint, part exorcism. He sang about violence, love, ghosts, and grit—with a smile that suggested he knew something you didn’t.
And beside him, almost from the very beginning, was a kid with sticks in his hands and rhythm in his blood—his grandson, Stud Ford. T-Model started taking Stud on the road when the boy was just six years old, letting him hammer out the heartbeat of the blues on the drums. Stud didn’t just learn music—he lived it, soaking in every stomp, scream, and slide of the T-Model Ford experience. By the time he was a teenager, he was more than a backing player. He was carrying the legacy.
Together, they roared through clubs, bars, and festivals like a two-man storm. T-Model’s voice might growl and wail, but Stud’s drumming held the chaos in a pocket of rhythm only blood could keep.
Even after suffering multiple strokes, T-Model kept performing—with Stud often driving the rhythm behind him. The bond between them was unshakable. They weren’t just family—they were a living lineage of Mississippi blues.
T-Model Ford passed in 2013 in Greenville, Mississippi, but his legend didn’t die. It passed into Stud, who carries that same fire, grit, and ghost-heavy groove into a new generation. Because the blues isn’t just a sound—it’s a bloodline. And in the Ford family, it runs deep.
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