James Lewis Carter Ford, known to the blues world as T-Model Ford, did not start playing guitar until his fifth wife handed him one as a parting gift on her way out the door. He was in his 70s, illiterate, and carrying the scars of a life that included a severely abusive father, childhood labor in the fields and a sawmill, years as a lumber company foreman and truck driver, and a murder conviction that put him on a Mississippi chain gang. In this deep dive we follow how a man with no formal training and battered hands taught himself the instrument entirely by ear, mimicking Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf records and stomping his foot to build hypnotic, driving grooves.

We look at why even his birth year is a mystery, with his passport, his driver’s license, census researchers and his own record label all pointing to different dates, and how that ambiguity reflects the Jim Crow South he was born into in Forest, Mississippi. Then we trace his improbable rise: touring Mississippi juke joints, opening for Buddy Guy, being discovered by Matthew Johnson of Fat Possum Records in 1995, releasing five albums between 1997 and 2008 including “Pee-Wee Get My Gun” and “Bad Man,” appearing in the 1997 documentary “Juke,” and drawing a new generation of indie and punk fans to his raw, unpolished sound.

• Why Fat Possum Records was the perfect incubator for a bluesman the mainstream industry considered too rough
• How his late-career partnership with the Seattle band GravelRoad grew from a single Deep Blues Festival gig in Minnesota into a tour and two albums, “The Ladies Man” (2010) and “Taledragger” (2011)
• The pacemaker in 2008, the 2010 stroke that crippled his right hand, and how he kept playing festivals like Pickathon and All Tomorrow’s Parties anyway
• The larger-than-life details, from reportedly fathering at least 26 children to writing an advice column for Arthur magazine
• His death in Greenville, Mississippi in July 2013 and the headstone placed by the Mount Zion Memorial Fund in 2014