James Henry “Son” Thomas, born in the Yazoo County community of Eden on October 14, 1926, became an internationally famed blues musician and folk sculptor after moving to Leland in 1961, where he first worked as a porter at the Montgomery Hotel, then as a gravedigger with his stepfather, and later at a furniture store while supporting a wife and six children. He learned guitar as a youngster after hearing his grandfather, Eddie Collins, and uncle, Joe Cooper, at house parties in Yazoo County, later saw Elmore James, Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup, and Bentonia bluesman Jack Owens, from whom he learned “Nothin’ But the Devil,” and after playing jukes with Cooper, Percy Lee, and others, became known for his rendition of “Cairo Blues,” which earned him the nickname “Cairo.” Also called “Sonny Ford” for his childhood habit of making clay models of Ford tractors, Thomas performed widely across Mississippi in the 1970s and ’80s at nightclubs, festivals, private parties, government social affairs, colleges, and juke joints. His performances had been limited to juke joints and house parties until folklorist Bill Ferris began recording and filming him and other local bluesmen in 1968; Thomas’s first recordings were released by the Xtra label in England, and he later made albums for Southern Culture, Rustron, Rooster Blues, and companies in France, Holland, and Germany, appeared in several documentary films, and traveled throughout the United States and Europe to perform at blues concerts and exhibit his artwork, which was featured at galleries in New York, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. Despite his international renown and increased income, he continued to live in bare, dilapidated shotgun houses, saying that this suited him because blues fans, art buyers, and photographers would come looking for him, and he often earned his living at home when visitors arrived with money to hear him play or buy a skull or coffin he had sculpted. His gaunt appearance and the deathly themes of much of his artwork led to neighborhood rumors that he was a “hoodoo man,” but his songs and stories carried a droll sense of humor rather than darkness. Thomas died in Greenville on June 26, 1993, and his son Raymond “Pat” Thomas earned his own place as an authentic bluesman and folk artisan, especially noted for his drawings of cats’ heads.