Reykjavík Grapevine - 10.02.2006, Side 41

Nannie come out,” he says, tired of the interview. “And let’s get
to feeling good. That ain’t real Black Nannie, but they found
one and put my initials on it.”
In a few minutes, he has plugged in and started his concert,
an hour before the starting time. To half a dozen people.
Playing Soft Hand
While the show is an obvious success, the bar filling in a few
hours with people who adore T-Model, one can’t help but
notice that everyone who comes in is white and middle-aged.
The one time a woman under 30 enters, T-Model sees her
first, turning away from his microphone to say, with a gorgeous
smile, “Why hello there,” and pausing long enough in the song
that the whole crowd had to wonder if he would just stop the
concert to talk with the girl. The song he played immediately
after she took her seat, a low, relaxed version of Muddy Waters’
Rolling Stone was the best of the night.
T-Model gets properly drunk, so that as the night goes
on he repeats the song Sweet Home Chicago one, two, three,
and finally, seven times. Were the show to be judged on song
selection and crowd, it wouldn’t be a positive review. But it
turns out the T-Model was an incredible guitar stylist—great
enough that if, in the past few years, cultural magazines had
written about his guitar work more than his record, there might
be a more compelling body of T-Model literature.
Like other folk blues guitarists from the Delta, T-Model
plays thumb and forefinger. Unlike them, he learned on electric
and has a producer’s ear for tone. His technique, entirely his
own, is attached to the soft hands he is so proud of. By running
his right forefinger lightly over the strings, his chords have a
better high end than most blues guitarists—likely influenced by
the gorgeous chord work of his label-mate Junior Kimbrough,
another man whose lifestyle overshadowed his music; the fact
that T-Model plays the bass lines with his thumb while giving
a full, separate high end with his forefinger might astound
conventionally trained musicians.
For four hours, I watch and listen to him and his assistant,
an adept young bluesman playing drums in order to study T-
Model, Lightnin Malcolm. Neither Malcolm nor T-Model
is thrilled with the show, T-Model saying repeatedly between
songs, “Something just ain’t right.” But my friends and I, having
travelled 2,000 miles in the hope of finding great music, are
more than satisfied. I have never heard the genre played better.
On our way out of Clarksdale, we stop at the crossroads of
Highway 61 and 49 where, legend and a popular Japanese
manga claim Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil so that
he might play guitar better. It’s an easy jump to claim that in
1992, Matthew Johnson of Fat Possum Records sold blues to
the devil in order to help regain its popularity, marketing based
on personality instead of music, but it’s an inaccurate one.
Johnson gave journalists some easy stories, and they took them.
His musicians, however, have delivered consistently amazing
music—if the marketing paid for the music, it was worthwhile.
The crossroads are not in a good neighbourhood. To ease
our photographer’s mind, I walked with him as he tried to find
a shot of the signs for the blues. The whole time, we were being
passed by people on their way to church, looking at us like we
were out of our minds for wandering around a busy intersection.
A blues landmark didn’t seem remotely important to the people
who lived in the neighbourhood, especially on a day when
decent people should have been in church.
Mentioned in this article:
Cat Head Records, www.catheadrecords.biz.
The Delta Blues Museum, www.deltabluesmuseum.org. (Uncensored
History of the Blues Podcast Available at the museum website.)
Fat Possum Records, www.fatpossum.com
Not mentioned but worthwhile:
WROX 1450 AM Clarksdale, www.wrozblues.com
Arthur Magazine, featuring advice columns by T-Model Ford,
www.arthurmag.com.
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