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After three tours with legendary bluesman T-Model Ford, Marty Reinsel and the other members of Gravel Road have plenty of stories to tell. Most of them about the man himself.
Ford, a master of raw, visceral Delta blues, is the kind of character stories are often told about. And there’s one everyone seems to know.
“The Fort Wayne story has become infamous,” says Reinsel, drummer for Gravel Road. “And what’s funny is that it happened at our very first show with T-Model, which was in Fort Wayne at the Brass Rail.”
After playing for two hours – on a hot summer’s night, the bar packed with people and the air conditioner on the fritz – Ford passed out and hit the floor. Less than an hour later, the 89-year-old was asking to take the stage again.
“I told him the same thing he always tells me,” Reinsel says. “ ‘We’re in Chicago tomorrow, I said. And each town shall furnish its own women.’ ”
Reinsel describes traveling around the country with Ford as “completely unusual and unique.”
“Like nothing else one could ever anticipate,” he says. “There’s a dynamism about him that is always unfolding.”
No one is exactly sure when Ford was born – sometime during the summer solstice nearly 90 years ago – but the stories he tells about his life are all true, Reinsel says. The time he murdered a fellow worker in Tennessee. The years he spent on a chain gang. And the time his father beat him so severely that he lost a testicle.
“It floors me,” Reinsel says. “At an early age he learned hardship and suffering. This guy has seen things. Things that you and I will never have to deal with.”
Gravel Road, a Seattle-based band, joined Ford in 2008. Playing alongside a self-taught musician has changed the way the band – Reinsel, guitarist Stefan Zillioux and bassist-guitarist Jon Kirby Newman – play their instruments.
“As a drummer, I’ve gotten away from book learning and more toward my sense of feel,” Reinsel says. “He’s illiterate, so there is no set list, no intricate song patterns. It’s all according to feel.
“You have to be attentive as a listener and trust your own instinct as a person and a musician. His songs are alive; they’re a live entity. And you have to be aware because you’ll never know what he’s going to do next.”
But the life lessons have been priceless, too. The band has learned a lot about aging.
Touring with an 89-year-old man is slower, more relaxed.
“It’s a healthier way of doing things, actually,” Reinsel says. “There’s a rock ’n’ roll element to it, too, but there’s an element of maturity that is there.”
Onstage … that’s another story. There, you won’t find anything resembling relaxed.
At a recent gig in Florida, Ford played an impromptu 45-minute acoustic set for an older crowd and then turned around and pulled out an hours-long electric set for the younger audience.
“Again, the lessons learned,” Reinsel says. “Touring with him, I’ve learned the value of endurance. These are human values, human qualities I wouldn’t get if I was touring with anybody else.”
