“Singing & Living the Blues, But T-Model Ford Keeps Rolling On”

“Singing & Living the Blues, 

But T-Model Ford Keeps Rolling On”

By Donna St. George, Staff Writer

Philadelphia Inquirer, February 10, 1991

Please click here and consider helping us mark the unmarked grave of Roosevelt Graves

GREENVILLE, Miss. — His girlfriend died four days earlier, just collapsed at their bedside in the middle of the night, and T-Model Ford is hurting bad. Real bad. He talks about his beloved Jessie until his lined face wrinkles with pain.

"The finest woman I ever had in my life," he says sadly, thumbing through scratched Polaroid photographs of her at the car-repair garage where he helps out when he's not playing his guitar.

Ford is an old-time bluesman, little known except in the Mississippi Delta. There, in small towns that dot flat fields of cotton, he plays ram-shackle juke joints on weekends and scrapes together a meager existence in the hard living, hard-luck blues tradition.

His are bedrock blues of poverty and heartbreak, raw and roughshod, performed largely in obscurity. They recall the way the blues started — as the emotionally powerful, sustaining songs of plantation workers in the deep South.

In recent years, the blues have taken on more voices. Artists like Robert Cray and Stevie Ray Vaughan have turned a contemporary style of blues into a popular, multimillion dollar industry. And there is a generation of those who play Delta blues with the urban flourishes of a B.B. King.

Fewer are down-home traditionalists like Ford.

On this recent day, blues beguile this Delta bluesman. Ford is recalling that his "baby" was sweet, that they never argued, that she applauded him at every bar he played in for three years. Grief shines through his dark eyes.

Before long, T-Model Ford is plucking away at his heartache, a sound loud and dark and lusty. Right there in the middle of the greasy garage. "Ohhh, baby, honey, what's wrong?" he bellows, the paced, twangy music from his electric guitar overpowering his verse.

(c) Bill Steber

Ford is playing his concert in the garage as if he were playing Saturday night on Greenville's raucous Nelson Street. This burst of blues started after someone asked about his music. Ford was happy to demonstrate, and his guitar was stowed nearby, in his carpet-walled red van.

Now, in his smudged blue jeans and muddy work shoes — surrounded by dead engines and open hoods — his left foot taps, his head bobs and one song bleeds into an-other. All are about love and women. "I know you been around making honey, darlin', but you're going to sail back home."

It's an expansive sound from a small, resilient man. At 66, Ford is thin, with a thin black mustache, his hair showing only touches of gray; a gold cap on his front tooth is cut in the shape of a star. He drove logging trucks for a long stretch of his life, and a few serious accidents have left him with a bad knee and a stiff gait.

Clarksdale Historian Gives Famous Tours

Robert Birdsong: 

Clarksdale Historian Gives Famous Tours

By:Marshall Drew

 

“Everybody is going to learn something they didn't know," Birdsong says of his tours. "Even I learn new stuff all the time, and that's what keeps it interesting for me."

Listening to Robert Birdsong discuss Clarksdale's history is revelatory to the point of overwhelming. Stories of neighborhoods, businesses and people ranging from Hernando DeSoto to Sam Cooke fly from his lips as he hands you an impressive array of old photographs and documents. His love of history is obvious, and it is a passion he developed as a child growing up in downtown Clarksdale.

"Polly Clark [of Clarksdale's founding Clark family, lived across the street from my mother, and I would go visit Polly," Birdsong remembers. "She had hundreds of arrowheads and pieces of Indian pottery, and she would tell me stories about the Indians and the settlers. I grew up in what was the Tennessee Williams area of Downtown, so there was history everywhere you'd turn."

As a child, Birdsong also became familiar with the sounds of the delta blues, sneaking off to the black side of town in the highly-segregated Clarksdale of the early 1960s.

"By age seven, I was riding a bicycle," he remembers. "And the first instructions my father gave me were, 'Don't go across the railroad tracks!' So that was the first place I went. The blues bands played up and down Issaquena and in the clubs.

"In the daytime, I'd come to the Stag, which was a domino parlor, and I'd rack balls. Normally the black kids did the job, but I played with them, I knew them, so I was a rack boy too."

At the time, the young white boy was often chastised for socializing with local black people.

"I wasn't supposed to be over there," Birdsong says. "The police would run you off all the time: 'You know you're not supposed to be here!'"

Birdsong's love of culture, history, and blues music continued into his adult years. He joined the Sunflower River Blues and Gospel Festival Association during the festival's early years, and he soon took notice of Clarksdale's growing status as a tourist destination.

"I'd see tourists at the Delta Blues Museum and walking around downtown," he says. "I'd ask them what they were looking for, what interested them, and I'd offer to show them around. Knowing the places downtown, I knew where to take them."

Over time, Birdsong's simple acts of southern hospitality developed into full-fledge tours. In the past decade, his tours have informed and entertained tourists, students, journalists and even Clarksdale's locals looking to learn more about their town.

So where might you go on a Birdsong Tour? Well, you'd probably start downtown, where Birdsong would tell you about WC Handy and his discovery of Clarksdale, responsible for exposing the blues to the world. You'd visit the Greyhound bus station, where millions of African Americans, including iconic figures like Muddy Waters, made their historic migration to the North in search of a better life.

From there you would head to the corner of Tallahatchie and Martin Luther King, the original "Crossroads" of Highway 61 and 49, overlooking the New World District, home to what was once known as the toughest crowd in all of the blues.

"If you could make it in the New World District," Birdsong explains, "you could make it as a bluesman."

From there you might head to the Riverside Hotel, where legendary blues and jazz singer Bessie Smith died in 1973. Then you might head to the birthplace and childhood home of rock n' roll pioneer Ike Turner. And after all these sites, you would have only covered a few blocks worth of Clarksdale's rich history.

Whether you're interested in the blues, Native Americans, or Tennessee Williams, Birdsong has a route picked out for you.

"People get a real sense of history and culture," Birdsong says of his tours. "You get to understand how important Clarksdale was and still is."

While his tours have been successful, even garnering a mention in The New York Times, they are, in Birdsong's words, "nothing that pays the bills." He still keeps his day job as a 26-year veteran of the Clarksdale Fire Department. Nevertheless, Birdsong remains passionate about his tours and exposing Clarksdale's history as well as its people.

"People are amazed by us," he says. "We’re used to the fact that people who don't know you will wave at you, but for visitors, that's incredible. It’s the people here that will always bring them back. The history is just the icing on the cake."

The One-time Collaboration between Mt. Zion Fund and Delta Blues Museum to Save Cemeteries

Cultural Resource Management, Eradication, and Desecration in the Magnolia State

Mississippi's Delta blues music impelled the rise of the Mt. Zion Memorial Fund in 1989, but the need to preserve abandoned cemeteries and burial sites of musicians keeps us going.  Like many folks still today visiting the Delta, we enjoy visiting the graves of blues artists,  But unlike most folks now, we discovered that most of them were not marked and some border on the level of atrocity. When Cootchie Howard showed our founder the grave of Charley Patton, one of the most popular early blues guitarists and composers in the Delta, I am not ashamed to admit that he cried.  Here was a man who served as a mentor to many other legends and his grave was twenty yards from a garbage dump. He deserved more respect than that. 

That may be in the dictionary: disrespect - storing garbage on the grave of someone's ancestor

Yet, if the grave is unmarked.  It's legal in Mississippi.  And the law has not changed as of 2017.

At the dedication of Patton's headstone, Rev. Ernest Ware of New Jerusalem Baptist Church in Holly Ridge mentioned Mt. Olive Cemetery where his two brothers and great-grandmother were buried. He told Henderson that farmers had plowed over the cemetery and planted cotton on the property. 

"As I looked into his eyes, I saw bitterness, defeat and helplessness," Henderson recalled, "I hope I never see anything like that in human eyes again." 

Says Ware: "As a minister, I know it's nothing but flesh in the graves. The soul is gone to another place. It's just the principle of the thing. These families want to go back and visit the graves of their loved ones. How would you feel just going back to a cotton field?" Henderson established the Mt. Zion Memorial Fund, a non-profit corporation that raises "money to support church communities in memorializing musical figures associated with their church or buried at their church." 

"Our whole premise in doing this is that the church cornmunity controls its property.  If they control the property, they don't have to worry about others coming in to destroy cemeteries."

Sid Graves, director of the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale, thought the MZMF had been an inspiration to many Delta residents. The Mt. Zion Memorial Fund "spent a lot of time and money helping the people here [and] some churches have been able to retire their debts."  Graves even joined together with Henderson in his efforts at "empowering the people of the Delta, while he and the churches are honoring the blues greats."  Graves explained his support,. "I respect him and his efforts."

Mississippi's chief archaeologist says the state has laws protecting gravesites, but it's up to local, county and state officials to enforce them. "There is always the misconception that the Department of Archives and History can do something about all grave desecrations," informed archaeologist Sam McGahey. "The fact is, we only have the authority to protect ancient graves — the graves of Native Americans, Hawaiians and Eskimos. Law enforcement officers must handle the other problems. Archives and History just doesn't have the time or manpower to go around and chase violators or check out every place a possible desecration occurs. "I think we would put an end to this problem if officials would only enforce the law."

Assistant Attorney General Trey Bobbinger says state law makes obliterating a cemetery that is recognizable by grave markers, a plot, or fence line a misdemeanor carrying a fine of not more than $500 or a sentence of not more than one year in the county jail, or both. 

On the other hand, state law makes injuring, disfiguring, removing, excavating, damaging, digging into or destroying any "prehistoric or historic American Indian or aboriginal burial" a misdemeanor carrying a fine of not less than $500 and not more than $5,000 or a sentence of not more than 30 days or both. "The county may order restitution to pay the cost of damage to the grave," admits Bobbinger. "However, before a person can be prosecuted for desecration of a cemetery, he must have knowingly or willingly committed the offense." 

Rev. Earnest Ware of Leland, a plaintiff in a Washington County grave desecration lawsuit, exclaimed, "The law says destroying graves is a crime and those who do it should be penalized. Something has to be done. All I want is better laws, better protection for the dead. A little respect is not much to ask for."  But look around.  A little respect is the one thing that has never been.

Since 1989, the Mt. Zion Memorial Fund has assisted Delta residents in the preservation of area cemeteries. Skip Henderson took an interest in the preservation after discovering that many of the graves of legendary bluesmen were in danger of being lost. "Farmers are taking over much of the land in the Delta," he maintained, and "We don't want to continue to lose the rich heritage that is found in the Mississippi Delta. The thing I find ironic is black farm workers who are required to go around Indian mounds, but yet they plow through the graves of their own relatives. How can people let this happen'?"  There is only so much the that can legally be done through  the Mt. Zion  Memorial Fund.

John Hurt: Last Chord Diminished

What the writer of this smart alek article seems to be unaware of is that those other electric bands rode to fame on the likes of John Hurt's back. He trivializes the social networks that collected the 78s, searched for the singers, brought them to light--and to some money--in the cloistered little bubble of an 'inner' folk world, and made them an enduring symbol of passive resistance against oppression, without ever having to mention the word. He's right about the stoicism. Some of his statements are factually incorrect."

--- Andrew Cohen

John Hurt: Last Chord Diminished 

By John Lombardi - Louisville Courier-Post - June 4, 1967

Mississippi John Hurt is dead. And this is a delayed-reaction post modem. Which is okay because a lot of things that happened to the 72-year-old blues singer were "delayed."

Like his success.

A folklore enthusiast and writer, Tom Hoskins, found him cleaning out a livery stable near his home town of Avalon, Miss., back in 1960. He persuaded John to journey up to the Newport Folk Festival that year and perform for the then-burgeoning crowd of "authentic" blues and country music purists who were beginning to create the market that has boomed and died since.

"Electrified Critics"

John went up, with a borrowed guitar, and didn't exactly electrify the audience. He "electrified" a small nucleus of critics, writers who were influential later in folk music publications like "Sing Out" and "The Little Sandy Review," and who "interpreted" John's worth for the new record buyers.

He caught on slowly but surely, until it was suddenly very "in" to dig his intricate finger-picking and gentle blues vocals. That was in 1963-65.

Then he began to subside, like unamplified folk music generally, and to give way to post-hip electric-rock and acid-rock blues groups like the Paul Butterfield Band, the Blues Project, and later the Mothers of Invention and the Lovin' Spoonful.

"Albums Sold Well"

By 1966 when most of the "new" folk clubs around the country were regularly booking rock, John was still appearing but not really "drawing."

But his four albums had sold well, and his appearances guaranteed him an income for the rest of his life.

John had cut records earlier, back in the 20s and early 30s for old labels like Caedmon and Bluebird, and he'd been praised then as a "natural virtuoso," but with the Depression, money to buy such luxuries as records dried up. Especially among rural and urban Negro audiences.

"Success Fades"

(Real collectors, with the money to spend, were able to go on buying blues records and tapes, but they didn't constitute a large enough public to sustain too many careers.)

So after a brief period of comparative success, John faded back into rural Avalon.

One groovy thing about him was an ability to ride-with-it. He had a kind of easy-going stoicism, an ability to bend without breaking—and bend pretty far. He smiled at you—you couldn't miss it.

"Just Make 'Em Up"

And John didn't consider himself any guitar virtuoso. He made up a lot of the chords he played, and his chord progressions could get rather obviously repetitious, even to an inexperienced blues listener.

"I just make 'em up (chords) and fit 'em in where they sound right," he told an interviewer last year.

He always liked to tell it like it was.

One night at the 2nd Fret in Philadelphia, during the height of his popularity, he looked down from the tiny wooden stage at a ringside couple and smiled; "I seen trouble all my days." Then he sang "I Love My Baby By the Lovin' Spoonful," and you knew he wasn't jiving.

"Like the Janitor"

He'd come in a short time before, a little early, to catch the end of Jesse Colin Young's act. Jesse, at the time, was a rising young folk star and, for my money, the best of the white blues singers.

John had on a wrinkled old see-through white shirt, baggy, street-colored pants and his ever-present, turned-down, flop-felt hat. He looked like the janitor.

He came sidling in, slowly, along the wall, then worked himself as unobtrusively as possible past some ringside customers and settled in a corner.

"Encounter Angers Patron"

Courier Post, Jan 14, 1967.

Before getting to his seat though. John stepped on a man's foot. The guy was with his wife, and they were both in their late 20s with lank, pale hair and blue eyes and just in from Narberth or Bryn Mawr or St. David's to see the great John Hurt.

The man winced and kind of drew back, then exchanged a look with his wife that might have meant nothing more than "my foot hurts," but looked more like "who is that damned black janitor anyway?"

John didn't say "excuse me" or anything and the man went on looking outraged and kept casting furious glances at him for the rest of the act, until some people sitting behind him noticed who it was and began whispering: "That's Mississippi John Hurt, John Hurt, Hurt, Hurt, Hurt . . ." just like Tom Wolfe says they always do.


Got a Light?

The outraged guy was shocked.

John stood up, still smiling from Jesse's fine blues, and fished a cigarette out of his shirt pocket. Then he began fumbling for a match.

He wasn't fast enough.

The guy from Narberth or Bryn Mawr stuck a lighter in his face and offered, with bounteous good-fellowship and the-proper-amount-of-respect-for-such-a-really-great-artist: "Here John, I've got your light."

Hurt was grinning as he accepted.