James "Son Ford" Thomas

1926–1993, lived and worked in the Mississippi Delta

Both a world-famous bluesman and a respected sculptor, James Thomas qualifies as an extraordinary artist by any conceivable measure. Born in Eden, Mississippi, in 1926, Thomas was raised by his grandparents, who bestowed the nickname “Son,” which stuck. He earned another of his sobriquets, “Ford,” because of his childhood proclivity for sculpting trucks (he favored animals too) out of the local Mississippi Delta clay, which he scooped from the banks of the Yazoo River and elsewhere. After an uncle helped him develop his considerable musical talents as a youngster, Thomas worked the Delta juke joints, apprenticing with Elmore James and maturing into a fearsome and singular bottle-neck guitarist, singer, songwriter, and interpreter, known for his signature tune Cairo Blues. As an adult, Thomas worked as a sharecropper and a cotton picker around the impoverished Delta, but lifelong ill health and regional economic blight conspired to render a steadier career impossible.

     All the while he continued to sculpt in clay, specializing in skulls, corpses in coffins, and disembodied heads, macabre and meditative reminders of a long stint as a gravedigger. In his humble and homely heads, sometimes outfitted with corn-kernel teeth and rock or foil details, the essential mortality of the blues becomes material; musical laments are made tangible as both funereal and funny. Thomas’s animistic work, inspired principally by dreams, conjures a variety of associations––West African masks and fetishes, Mexican Day of the Dead sugar skulls, the face jug pottery tradition of the upland American South––but remains entirely his own idiom. Folklorist and blues scholar William Ferris met Thomas in 1967, and subsequent collaborations yielded a series of books, articles, interviews, films, and albums, launching the artist into national and international fame among music enthusiasts and art collectors alike. Following a place in the landmark 1981 Corcoran Gallery exhibition “Black Folk Art in America,” Thomas toured and recorded widely, even playing for President Reagan in 1983. In the final years of his life, this remarkable artist survived an accidental shooting and brain surgery, only to succumb to a stroke in 1993, at the age of sixty-six.

 

—Brendan Greaves

A Southern Folk Art Collection. Winston-Salem, NC: Sawtooth Center for Visual Arts, 1991.

Black History and Artistry: Work by Self-Taught Painters and Sculptors from The Blanchard-Hill Collection. New York: Baruch College/Sidney Mishkin Gallery, 1993.

Chase, Hank. “The House of Blues Folk Art Collection.” American Visions 13, no. 3 (June 1998): 18-20.

Contemporary American Folk Art: The Balsley Collection. Milwaukee, WI: Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University, 1992.

Delta Blues Singer: James “Sonny Ford” Thomas. Prod. Bill Ferris and Josette Rossi. Memphis, TN: Center for Southern Folklore, 1970.

Enisled Visions: The Southern Non-Traditional Folk Artists. Mobile, AL: Fine Arts Museum of the South, 1987. 

Ferris, William, Jr. Local Color: A Sense of Place in Folk Art. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982. 

Ferris, William, Jr. “Black Folk Art and Crafts: A Mississippi Sample.” Southern Folklore Quarterly 42 (1978): 209-241. 

Ferris, William, Jr. “If You Ain’t Got IT in Your Head, You Can’t Do It with Your Hands: James Thomas, Mississippi Delta Folk Sculptor.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 3 (1970): 89-101.

Ferris, William, Jr. “Visions in Afro-American Folk Art: The Sculpture of James Thomas.” Journal of American Folklore 88 (1975): 115-132.

Give My Poor Heart Ease . Prod. Yale University Films. Dir. Bill Ferris. New Haven, CT: Yale University Media Design Studio, 1975. 

Haardt, Anton. “James (‘Son Ford’) Thomas (1926-1993).” Folk Art Finder 14, no. 4 (October-December 1993). 

It’ll Come True: Eleven Artists First and Last. Lafayette, LA: Artists Alliance, 1992.

James “Son” Thomas. Prod. University of Georgia. Dir. Judith McWillie. Athens, GA: University of Georgia, n.d.

Kogan, Lee. “James Henry (“Son Ford”) Thomas” 1926-1993.” Folk Art 18, no. 3 (Fall 1993): 60.

Lowe, Warren. “James ‘Son’ Thomas 1926-1993.” Folk Art Messenger 7, no. 1, (fall 1993): 1. 

Livingston, Jane, and John Beardsley. Black Folk Art in America: 1930-1980. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi/Center for the Study of Southern culture for the Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1982.

Made by Hand: Mississippi Folk Art. Jackson, MS: Mississippi Department of Archives and History, 1980.

The Migration of Meaning: A Source Book. New York: Intar Gallery, 1992. 

Orphans in the Storm. Birmingham, AL: 10 2 4 Gallery, 1991.

 

Out of the Boot: Self-Taught Louisiana Afro-American Artists. Los Angeles: California: Afro-American Museum, 1989. 

Passionate Visions of the American South: Self-Taught Artists from 1940 to the Present. New Orleans: New Orleans Museum of Art, 1993. 

Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art of the South. Volume One: The Tree Gave the Dove a Leaf. Atlanta: Tinwood Books, 2000. 

Talbot, Mary. “A Mingling of Spirits.” Newsweek [International edition] (9 March 1992): 49. 

Unsigned, Unsung … Whereabouts Unknown. Tallahassee: Florida State University, 1993.

Wahlman, Maude Southwell. “Religious Symbols in Afro-American Folk Art.” New York Folklore 12, no. 1-2 (1986): 1+. 

Walker, Phillip. “James “Son” Thomas.” Bomb Magazine, no. 6 (n.d.).

Wrestling with History: A Celebration of African American Self-Taught Artists from the Collection of Ronald and June Shelp. New York: Baruch College/Sidney Mishkin Gallery, 1996. 

Young, Stephen. “A Conversation with James ‘Son’ Thomas.” Art Papers (November 1989): 24-25.

Young, Stephen Flinn. “Visionary Artists in the Mainstream.” Number 2, no. 3 (Winter 1989): 12-13.