by Nick DeRiso
This is an updated excerpt from a multi-artist piece I had published as part of the statewide Louisiana Folklife Festival’s program book in 1995. Born in 1904, Thomas Edison “Brownie” Ford would travel all over the Deep South — working as a ballad singer, bronc buster, storyteller and craftsman — before settling in Hebert, La. He passed away in 1996:
When Brownie Ford sang about Cowboy Jack, personifying all of the expansiveness and scariness and hopefulness and braveness of rural America, it was through force of habit, and of will.
“Stories,” a belated debut released by the Louisiana Division of the Arts in 1991 as Volume 8 in the Louisiana Folklife Series, came out when Brownie was 84. He had been born in the Indian Territory near what is now Gum Springs, Okla., to crushing adversity; Ford hadn’t even been allowed to attend school as a child because he was “half-breed,” part Choctaw and part Anglo. Other youngsters gave him that life-long nickname, which instead became Ford’s badge of honor.
One that would eventually appear across the marquee at New York City’s most prestigious performance space: Three years after “Stories” was issued, Ford’s story of perseverance and song would culminate in an appearance at Carnegie Hall in April 1994.
It was a musical journey similar to that of fellow north Louisiana musical troubadour Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter. Both Brownie Ford and Lead Belly knew Texas bluesman Blind Lemon Jefferson, and both learned to play varied repertoires before taking off on their own to become well-known singers.
There were notable divergences, though, not least of which was the rodeo riding. Too, Lead Belly spent decades locked away on various charges — and that, as much as anything, seemed to inform his penchant for singing songs of another time in an almost forgotten style.
Brownie Ford, meanwhile, always lived among us. His resistance to change, even as he moved forward through the decades, was more personal. And he never stopped performing. That offered a gift of discovery for successive generations — and a chuckwagon full of fantastical stories along the way.
A favorite was one night when a bull got away from him, then viciously stomped Ford: “I got killed in Port Arthur, Texas, in 1948,” he told me, without emotion. “I mean, he just like to not left me enough hair to comb.”
Brownie, like the blues and folk songs he sang, was a survivor.
By 1983, Ford’s legend as a old-time master of folkways and folk songs was recognized as part of an exhibit at the Library of Congress, which led to a cowboy tour produced by the National Council for the Traditional Arts. He appeared at the Festival of American Folklife at the Smithsonian in 1985 and ’86, and received a National Heritage Award from the Folk Arts Program of the National Endowment for the Arts in 1987.
Then, in 1990, the now-86-year-old Brownie was sitting in a chair on his porch, drinking some coffee. Next thing he knew — some three months later, he says — Ford woke up in a nursing home. He didn’t even know where he was or how he got there — didn’t remember a thing since that cup of coffee.
He’d been in critical condition, a victim of complications from a bad gall bladder, unconscious at one point for as long as three weeks straight.
Brownie looked around, there in the nursing home, and his first words were: “Where’s my boots?”
The nurse told Ford that he didn’t need any boots, that he couldn’t walk.
Brownie replied: “Hide and watch.”
And he was up and gone.
In this way, the 1991 recording made sense. A man of another time, Brownie Ford nevertheless couldn’t be fenced in.
“Half my people came over on the Mayflower,” Ford would often joke, “and the other half was here to greet ’em when they got off the boat.”
There is this same timelessly American blending of styles, voicings and themes on “Stories,” which includes both Western (“Streets of Laredo”) and British ballads (“Barbara Allen”), minstrel comedy, frisky ribaldry (“Cuckoo’s Next”), outlaw country (“Black Jack David”) honky tonk and rockabilly (“Burn the Honky-Tonk Down”).
The crack band of musicians included on Ford’s recording add just the right rootsy touch, too: Beausoleil’s David Doucet is lead guitarist and arranger; D.L. Menard, known as the “Cajun Hank Williams,” is on rhythm guitar; Ben Sandmel, the respected New Orleans-based journalist and folklorist, play drums on two cuts.
Ever the gentleman raconteur, Ford was the thread that wove all of these diverse ideas together.
Think it can’t be done?
Hide, as Brownie once said, and watch.
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