T-Model Ford

You'd still have to go a lot further than the Mississippi hill country to find an 82 year-old more ornery than T-Model Ford, a man mean enough to eat a box of iron filings and spit 'em out as nails. T-Model's blues are still as hardscrabble as they come, but She Ain't None of Your'n, despite the suggested menace of the title, just doesn't have the punch of his last couple of albums, which came off like blues-rock firecrackers exploding inside a frog's butt: loud, messy and equally cruel and fun. One hesitates, in fact, to call anything on the Fat Possum label "blues-rock" because of the way it conjures images of long-haired Brits or middle-aged, bearded Americans wearing cowboy hats playing Muddy Waters songs with rock beats and flashy, interminable solos. T-Model Ford would have none of that - and you might wonder whether he's so much as heard any of that. His is a rawer, more unrefined rock from a time when it hadn't yet been divorced from the blues in the first place. That much hasn't changed, and parts of She Ain't None of Your'n are still plenty raucous, but the wildness and intensity aren't at the same pitch. You can forgive him for that, and wonder at how he manages to get his mojo working even half as much as he still does, but you'd still be better off with You'd Better Keep Still, which he made as a stripling 80 year-old.