Gravedigger and blues musician James ”Son Ford” Thomas moulded clay skulls and coffins that reflect his thoughts on death and the afterlife
The joys of life and the grim shadow of death were never far apart for James “Son Ford” Thomas. One of the many nicknames the Mississippi Delta blues musician picked up was “Cairo” for his evocative take on Cairo Blues, recorded by Melvin “Lil Son” Jackson in 1949. The song reflects on the catastrophic Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, in which a levee failed near Cairo, Illinois, but the way Thomas sang it made it sound like the inevitability of your world being obliterated: “You know I would go to Cairo / But the water too high for me. …. The girl I love, she got washed-away / You know that woman got drowned / Swimming along after me.”
Although better known for those plaintive blues, Thomas instilled the same awareness of the frailty of life in a hard world in his small-scale sculptures. From rough unfired clay, he formed faces, skulls and animals native to the Mississippi Delta, like deer, rabbits and fish. The local clay he used – known as “gumbo” for the way it soaks up moisture into a sticky mass – wasn’t just an accessible material; it was a reminder of the mortal fate everyone shares. In the 1969 documentary Sonny Ford, Delta Artist, recorded on 16mm by folklorist William R Ferris, he said: “If everybody was friendly to one another, it would be a whole lot different. Because I don’t care who it is, white or Black, they got to go where I’m going. That’s down in that clay, and that ain’t going to be too long.”
Untitled, 1987, unfired clay, artificial hair, cigarette, glass marbles and metal coin, 7 x 9 x 7.5 in. / 18 x 23 x 19 cm
Untitled, 1987, unfired clay, artificial hair, wire and paint, 5.5 x 8.5 x 6 in. / 14 x 21.5 x 15.5 cm
If you look closely at Thomas’s clay skulls, their hollow sockets gleaming with a lining of aluminum foil, you may notice they grin back at you with real human teeth. “Mr Thomas was an artist whose stories, music, and sculpture intersected in important ways,” Ferris said. “During the day he worked as a gravedigger, and his thoughts about death and the afterlife shaped all his artistic work. He moulded clay skulls with teeth that a local dentist gave him and gave them to friends as a reminder of what one day they would become.” Both his music and art drew on the precariousness of being a Black man in an impoverished corner of the rural American South, where the Jim Crow-era laws of segregation upheld a system of racial apartheid long after the end of slavery. The cotton fields where once enslaved people had toiled were still worked by Black people in the exploitative system of sharecropping – something Thomas experienced firsthand as a boy working alongside his grandparents, who raised him in Eden, Mississippi.
Untitled, 1987, unfired clay, artificial hair, sunglasses and glass marbles, 7 x 9 x 7 in. / 18 x 23 x 18 cm
By ALLISON C MEIER
This is an article extract; read the full article in Raw Vision #127.
