T-MODEL FORD + ROBERT RANDOLPH & THE FAMILY BAND

DEEP BLUES

T-Model Ford's passing, and the rise of Robert Randolph & the Family Band

by Matt Ashare |  
Published July 24, 2013

Most of us think we know what the blues is, whether it's manifest as a discrete style of music, or, more broadly, a state of mind and venerable cultural tradition with deep roots in the African-American experience. Even if you're not sure what a 1-4-5 chord progression looks like, or how slurring and bending certain notes in a scale creates a blueing effect that resonates tonally and emotionally as "the blues," chances are you've got some notion of what blues music looks, feels, and sounds like. It's simply bred in the bones of rock and roll, which, more often than not, is the portal through which curious young listeners pass on their way to discovering the blues.
    But, just when you think you've got a steady lens through which to view the blues, someone or something comes along and reshuffles the proverbial deck, recasting the genre as far more varied, complex, and expansive than one might have initially expected. T-Model Ford, who passed away last week at an age estimated to be somewhere north of 90 (his record company guessed 94, others have suggested he was born round about 1920), was one of those guys. Indeed, Ford was last surviving representative of a trio of raw, gutsy, and oddly influential Mississippi bluesmen who emerged in the ’90s, and were instrumental in reshaping conventional notions of the blues at a point when it seemed like most mainstream artists on the blues circuit were either legacy ambassadors a la B.B. King or reverent students of what had become an increasingly codified tradition.
    Born James Lewis Carter Ford in the central Mississippi town of Forest — i.e., not in the famed blues-belt of the Delta region — T-Model came late to the guitar, and even later to the attention of Fat Possum Records, the Oxford-based label that discovered the late, great hill-country bluesmen R.L. Burnside (Nov. 23, 1926-Sept. 1, 2005) and Junior Kimbrough (July 28, 1930-Jan. 17, 1998) in the early ’90s. Of course, both Burnside and Kimbrough had been there all along, toiling for years in obscurity, playing an elemental style of country blues built around single-chord drones, sinewy guitar riffs, and jaggedly hypnotic rhythms — the same basic bag of tricks John Lee Hooker brought with him from Mississippi to Detroit to launch his career in 1948.
    Almost 50 years later, a new wave of interest in formative blues styles began to crest, inspired in part by a flood of back-catalogue CD reissues of recordings by some of the seminal greats (Robert Johnson, Son House, and Mississippi Fred McDowell are the first three that come to mind). And Mississippi was once again a key nexus. Filmmaker Robert Mugge and music critic Robert Palmer had gone looking for the blues in previously overlooked locales for the documentary "Deep Blues," a 1992 documentary that featured both Burnside and Kimbrough.  And right around the same time, blues enthusiasts Peter Redvers-Lee and Matthew Johnson had a similar mission in mind when they formed Fat Possum and brought Burnside and Kimbrough in as two of their first signings. The timing was fortuitous: it wasn't long before the underground rock scene was taking notice, Kimbrough was on tour with Iggy Pop, and Burnside was recording with NYC hipster Jon Spencer and his combustible band the Blues Explosion.
    The blues tends to come to us in reverse chronology, from the Stones and Zeppelin back through Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, and Robert Johnson; from Hendrix back through Buddy Guy, Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, and Robert Johnson;  from Clapton back through B.B. King, Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, and Robert Johnson. As you get closer to the genre's origins, which usually entails going deeper into the past, a patina of exotic purity begins to attach itself to the canonized artists and their music. Up until their deaths, Burnside and Kimbrough presented rare examples of performers who were outsider enough to exist as living approximations of the past, as representations of a kind of juke-joint authenticity that stirred up nostalgic warmth for a mythical past.
    If Burnside and Kimbrough were, as rural bluesmen in an urbanized world, relative outsiders, then T-Model Ford, the junior member of Fat Possum's Mississippi 3, was an outright outlier whose story didn't quite conform to the favored dues-paid-in-full trope of the blues world. As his too-bad-to-be-true tale goes — and he was quite fond of running with it — Ford was sentenced to two years on a chain gang in his younger years for killing a man in self defense, after which he made a life for himself in the Delta town of Greenville, where he worked his way through five wives, one of whom (perhaps the 5th), left him with a guitar that he didn't teach himself to play until he was well into his sixties. By the time the Fat Possum posse caught up with him in ’95, he'd developed a hybrid style of electric blues that was neither pure hill country nor unadulterated Delta. Backed only by a drummer who went by the name of Spam (née, Tommy Lee Miles), Ford churned out unadorned gut-bucket riffs  with unhinged, humorous stream-of-consciousness lyrics that often bordered on the absurd on four albums, from 1997 through 2002, before taking a six-year hiatus from recording.
    Ford returned to the studio, backed by the Seattle-based group GravelRoad, in 2010, completing two more albums before his death. But by then he'd begun to show the strains of trying to pack a lifetime of touring into a decade and a half. And, frankly, his act had become a bit schticky over those years. So, it was a little amusing to see him referred to as "the last of the old-time Delta bluesmen" in obits last week. At least, I think Ford would have found it funny, given his penchant for irascible irreverence. Hyperbole aside, he was the right guy in the right place at the right time to enjoy an unlikely late-in-life run as something akin to the real deal. And, while Ford's body of work may not elevate him to the level of "greatness" that both Burnside and Kimbrough arguably attained, but he played more than just a bit part in a narrative that reframed the blues for the alt-rock generation and reinvigorated a part of the blues tradition that had largely been forgotten.
    When word of Ford's passing reached me, I was working my way through "Lickety Split," the new album by jamming r&b funksters Robert Randolph & the Family Band. And, it struck me that Randolph, too, has played a unique role in shinning a light on what had previously been a largely overlooked African-American musical tradition that's a close cousin of the blues. In many ways, Randolph's story couldn't be more different from Ford's: a young musical prodigy, he was raised in the Newark branch of the House of God Church, where he emerged as an energetic band leader, mastering the intricacies of pedal steel, an instrument usually associated with country music. Actually, pedal steel is very likely one of the most difficult and complex non-digital instruments to truly master: a permutation of the guitar, it typically has two necks with between 10-14 strings each that are played in the manner of a lap steel with a slide. In addition, there are pedals and often knee levers that slacken and stretch various combinations of strings. Oh, and a pedal steel can be tuned in a variety of ways. so, it's a bit like trying to play slide guitar on a piano with pitch shifting strings.
    Randolph & the Family Band (which features three of Robert's relatives), created a sensation when they took their amped up act secular in 2000 at the now defunct NYC jam-band haven The Wetlands for a number of reasons. For starters, there was the shock of the new: few people had ever heard a pedal steel played quite the way Randolphdoes. Instead of the plaintive embellishments, stately atmospherics, and twangy riffs that are generally with the instrument's use in countrified settings, Randolph employs all the techniques of the electric bluesman. Using a deft yet muscular touch, his signature sound involves coaxing distorted wails and rapid-fire riffs out of an instrument that has a much larger tonal range than the guitar. Indeed, he's cited Stevie Rae Vaughan, Buddy Guy, and Muddy Waters as formative influences. So, it's no surprise that blues scholar Eric Clapton was an early convert, inviting the Family Band to tour with him in the wake of their first two albums, 2002's "Live at the Wetlands" and 2003's "Unclassified," and guesting on their third, 2006's "Colorblind."
    But, Randolph comes out of a long, if somewhat obscure tradition the developed parallel to the blues in the 20th century — "sacred steel," a style that's been incorporating the lap and pedal steel in church music since the 1920s. The emergence of Randolph & the Family Band stirred a new interest in the history and practice of sacred steel: a number of compilations and reissues have been released over the past decade, and earlier this year Randolph put his weight behind "Robert Randolph Presents: The Slide Brothers," an album that spotlights four of his fellow House of God Church pedal steel masters — Calvin Cooke, Chuck Campbell, Darick Campbell, and Aubry Ghent.
    Randolph's own new album — his fourth studio effort with the Family Band — comes after a three-year lay off in which he released a second live disc and clearly contemplated how to best harness the energetic chemistry of the group in the studio. Although still rather polished, it's definitely the band's best approximation of the loose, free-flowing tension and release the Family Band can generate in front of a crowd. Randolph sounds like he's addressing an audience as he slashed at the pedals steel on the disc's exultant party-anthem opener, "Amped Up." He splits the difference between the sacred and the secular on the gospel-steeped "Born Again" (a tune outfitted with a rising chorus that echoes Stevin Stills' classic "Love the One You're With"). And, he hands the microphone over to his sister Lanesha on the smooth grooving Crescent City homage "New Orleans," which leads into the trombone-fueled Bourbon Street stomp on "Take the Party."
    This disc's guest star is another modern bluesman, Carlos Santana. On "Brand New Wayo," Randolph exhorts him to peal off a few B.b. King Licks, and the two trade solos on the ruminative blues rocker "Blacky Joe." Elsewhere, the Family Band do their best to put their own mark on the Ohio Players' ’70s funk classic "Love Rollercoaster" and "Good Lovin'" by the Rascals. But the star of the show remains Randolph's uncanny ability to take the pedal steel in whatever direction he chooses, to take the unwieldy instrument into places it was perhaps never meant to go. In many respects, that's what the blues has always been about.