James "Son Ford" Thomas
(1926–1993)
BornEden, Mississippi, United States
ActiveLeland, Mississippi, United States
DiedGreenville, Mississippi, United States
BiographyJames “Son Ford” Thomas was known as a guitarist who played smooth, acoustic blues accompanied by his sweet, earnest voice. His sculptures, rougher in texture, engaged in the same themes of life and death in the Mississippi Delta. Often using unfired clay, he depicted local animals such as fish and birds, as well as heads and skulls. These small-scale figurative works represented people in his community, imagined visages, and American icons such as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, all detailed with hair, beads, paint, eyeglasses, marbles (for eyes), and other materials. His skulls are especially evocative, their mouths packed with real or artificial teeth and their gaping eye sockets lined with foil; their blocky forms came through Thomas’s process of creating a face first before cutting it into these macabre expressions. References to his experiences as a Black man in the American South during the Jim Crow era are embedded in his sculptures, from depictions of quails in reference to racist laws that banned African Americans from hunting the birds to the cotton used as George Washington’s hair, which recalled the president’s involvement in slavery.Thomas was born in 1926 in Eden, Mississippi, and later moved to Leland, Mississippi. (He also went by James Son Thomas, and he released his first solo album in 1981 under that name.) He got his nickname for his modeling of Ford tractors as a child. He learned both guitar and sculpture from his uncle, Delta blues guitarist Joe Cooper, who showed him how to shape the “gumbo” clay found along the Mississippi River. Thomas used his art and music to support his family alongside doing odd jobs such as painting houses and digging graves. (Small coffins were regulars in his sculpting repertoire.)
His work came to wider attention in the late 1960s through the writing and field recordings of folklorist William R. Ferris as part of his survey of Delta blues. “I’m liable to dream anything,” Thomas told Ferris in an interview. “That gives you in your head what to do. Then you get up and try. If you can’t hold it in your head, you can’t do it in your hand.” He toured extensively across the United States and Europe in the 1970s and 1980s. His sculptures were included in Black Folk Art in America, 1930–1980, which opened in 1982 at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. He died in 1993.
Allison C. Meier, 2025
Text written as part of “Rethinking Biography,” an initiative supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).
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