POPMATTERS
T-Model Ford and Gravelroad: Taledragger
By Alan Brown 21 April 2011

T-Model Ford is making up for lost time. Twelve months after his excellent Alive Records debut The Ladies Man, the 90-something bluesman from the North Mississippi hill country is back with a vengeance. And this time he’s not alone. Gravelroad have been backing the Taledragger, intermittently, live and on record—including sitting in on the afternoon jam session that produced last year’s completely acoustic LP—,ever since they walked out behind him on stage at Minneapolis’ Deep Blues Festival in 2008.

The Seattle band play what they like to call “dark blues”, and when Ford joins them, the crossroads at midnight is never far from your mind. On superb retellings of blues staples like “Big Legged Woman” and closer “Little Red Rooster”, the fuzzy, thick-as-molasses, reverb-fueled blues-rock-chug of the trio menacingly oozes behind Ford’s blacker-than-blue cracked growl.

Over the course of the eight songs, Gravelroad’s guitarist Stefan Zillioux, bass player Jon “Kirby” Newman, and drummer Marty Reinsel (he also provides backing rhythms and helps out generally on the bluesman’s solo tours) are joined by two of the record’s producers, former Soledad Brother Brian Olive (sax, keys and guitar) and Outrageous Cherry frontman Mathew Smith (guitars, B3 and fuzz bass), alongside slide guitarist Mike Weinel in backing Ford. Olive and Smith bring a subtle ‘60s pop and soul-jazz groove to the music that counterpoints perfectly with Ford and the band’s sinewy juke-joint blues.

“Comin’ Back Home” and its follow-up number “Someone’s Knocking on My Door” are perfect examples. Both slow churning blues songs are punctuated by bleating baritone sax—there’s also one hell of a sax solo on the outro of the former—, and underscored by shimmering Hammond B3 that makes the numbers weep and growl with tension while Ford howls at the killing moon. The latter track beefs up the action with some scything electric guitar—a great way to ease you into the next track, a monolithic reworking of Howlin’ Wolf’s “How Many More Years” where Ford’s muddied Delta blues style transmutes via surges of wah-wah guitar, vocal echo, and nacroleptic drumming into the hypnotic stoner psych-blues territory of bands past and present, such as Cream, the glorious Wooden Ships, and their offshoot Moon Duo.

Elsewhere, Muddy Waters’s “Two Trains Coming” is retold in an epic seven minutes as “Same Old Train”, with Olive providing barrelhouse piano accompaniment to salacious electric blues guitar. Ford’s languorous drawl fittingly inhabits original number “I Worn My Body for So Long” as gentle slide guitar helps carry the bluesman’s fragile voice through to the close of an acoustic number that could very easily be an out-take from the Ladies Man sessions, but fits perfectly into the plugged-in atmospherics here.

With a little help from his friends, T-Model Ford has once again walked into the studio and bettered himself. The only thing missing is these guys cutting loose on another version of his signature tune “Chicken Head Man”.

ALL MUSIC
Review by Thom Jurek

There is a compelling tension on T-Model Ford’s Taledragger, with his rawer-than-gravel blues style that has always staggered between the styles of his native Mississippi Delta and those of Chicago. This doesn’t mean the record is tense, but merely that its cultural lines blur consistently between the above styles as well as those of his sidemen — his backing band of the last few years, GravelRoad, is augmented by guest musicians from Detroit — who all came of age in the post-punk to indie rock eras. Produced by Brian Olive, Matthew Smith, and Arthur Alexander in Glendale, CA, the set was mixed by Jim Diamond in Detroit. Suffice to say, the addition of baritone saxophone, Hammond B-3, and 12-string acoustic guitars to these extremely basic tunes makes for interesting listening. The set opens with “Same Old Train,” a choogling shuffle that is “Mystery Train” with (some) different words. Ford’s delightfully rough, front-charging guitar playing is supported by Stefan Zillioux’s in-the-pocket pulse that bass and drums follow in sync, but Olive’s upright piano is off the beat, following Ford; the entire tune ultimately slurs drunkenly. The lyrics refer to the record’s muse: “a big legged mama” who appears often. On “Someone’s Knocking on My Door” (one of the album’s many death meditations), Ford channels the spirits of his old friend Junior Kimbrough and Howlin’ Wolf in a hypnotic two-chord shuffle. The band psychs it up with Smith playing a sinister, snaky B-3, augmented by jangling single-string guitar lines played between beats; there’s a stinging lead break with enough echo to add a trippy dimension. The tension on this set reveals itself best in the readings of “How Many More Years” and “I Worn My Body for So Long.” The former is swampy and disorienting, full of wah-wah guitars, stuttering drums, and a heavy echo on Ford’s voice. He sings with an amused acceptance of the inevitable, not dread — though the accompaniment does its best to evoke it. This is true in the latter as well, with shimmering acoustic slide and fuzzed-out bass work by Smith. “Big Legged Woman” is an all-out party rave-up with everything becoming an orgy of sound more befitting a Detroit barroom than a Delta juke joint — and does it ever work! What Ford, Olive, Smith, Alexander, and the rest have wrought on Taledragger is a modern blues album with primitive roots. The tension works. It’s a far more interesting recording because of its “impurities” — paradoxically, making it a far more “authentic” blues record because it is linked to multiple historic traditions simultaneously. It’s exponentially more enjoyable and exciting as blues than anything coming out of Chicago in the 21st century.

The PHOENIX
By BARRY THOMPSON | January 7, 2011

An approximately 90-year-old ex-convict has persuaded hipsters everywhere to pretend to give a fuck about Mississippi blues, and that’s not even the most interesting thing about T-Model Ford. He has lost a testicle, totally killed somebody back when, been arrested a shit-fuck-ton of times, isn’t sure exactly when he was born, and didn’t record any music until he was well into his 70s. But nobody dances to a biography. Cynics can disparage T-Model for the same reason they can shit all over South African rap-ravers Die Antwoord: these performers’ extraordinary personas garner more attention than anything they do pertaining to music. Such assholes would be wrong about T-Model (though mostly correct about Die Antwoord). His live performances border on shamanic, and 10 percent of those hipsters will end up actually giving a fuck about the blues. Indeed, T-Model’s terrifying life story is less relevant than his music. So if you enjoy juke-joint jostlin’ and smoky-cool Delta blues, or if you’re captivated by their novelty, you’ll dig Taledragger. Especially “How Many More Years.” Hinging on a distorted, crunchy, low-end riff, it makes a perfect anthem for shooting heroin in a dive-bar bathroom.