Pribek

I found these bits about blues man, T-Model Ford, at Alternative Reel.

‘I play the blues . . . I don’t ever get the blues. After my sister died I prayed to God to please let me live like a tree. Tree don’t care if them other trees is dyin’. Tree don’t care about nothin’ . . . I don’t let nothin’ get me down.’ Most people can’t do this–stay happy because they’ve decided to be happy, no matter what–but it seems to work for T-Model.’
–T-Model Ford, interview, Guardian Unlimited, Nov. 16, 2003

Stay happy because you want to be happy, hard to argue against that.

“T-Model’s life reads like a horror story. At the age of eight, his father beat him so badly between the legs with a piece of firewood that he lost a testicle. His ankles are scarred from the chain gang. His neck is scarred where one of his wives slashed his throat. He has been shot, stabbed, pinned under a fallen tree with a broken ribcage, beaten unconscious with a metal chair. He watched his first wife go off with his own father, watched another die after she drank poison to try and induce a miscarriage. The only woman he ever really loved poisoned him at the breakfast table; he woke up in hospital that afternoon and never saw her again.
–”Delta Force,” The Observer, November 16, 2003

What is not clear, from this, is exactly when, the “live like a tree” policy went into effect.