Pee Wee Get My Gun
T-Model Ford didn't learn to play guitar until he was 58, and even then the Mississippi lumber-truck driver didn't play the way most people do. In his thick, throbbing amplifier buzz, he lengthens and shortens measures at will and allows the beat to fall wherever he feels it at the moment. Over these extremely elastic rhythms, he growls and mumbles bits of other songs and his own violent warnings against unfaithful women and musical rivals. This unusual approach is no doubt the reason Ford didn't release this debut album,Pee-Wee Get My Gun, until 1997, when he was 76.Ford grew up, and still lives, in the Mississippi Delta where he and his longtime drummer Spam still play all-night sets at the shack-like juke joints. The Delta is as isolated geographically and economically as it ever was, and idiosyncratic talents like Ford's are allowed to assume their own strange shape without much contact with the music industry. Two tunes on the album feature Delta blues veterans Frank Frost and Sam Carr and one features Ford alone at home, but the other eight capture Ford and Spam playing as a duo as they do in the joints. There's a good-natured humor to the proceedings, for even the violent threats are delivered with a teasing chuckle and the Howlin' Wolf beats are played with a relaxed party atmosphere. Ford lacks the dark urgency and dense brilliance of his Fat Possum label-mates Junior Kimbrough and R.L. Burnside, but in a blues field dominated by sound-alikes he's one of a kind.--Geoffrey Himes