David 'Honeyboy’ Edwards, who died on August 29 aged 96, is thought to have been the last of the Delta bluesmen, and during an eight-decade career performed with artists from Robert Johnson to Muddy Waters.
Like the music itself, Edwards migrated from the Mississippi Delta to the clubs of Chicago in the north . Late in life, he aroused particular interest for his connection with the great Delta musician Robert Johnson. They met when Edwards was 20 and Johnson 24, and together led an itinerant existence in the South, offering a mixture of blues, ragtime and boogie-woogie at dances and on street corners.
“We would walk through the country with our guitars on our shoulders, stop at people’s houses, play a little music, walk on,” Edwards told the blues historian Robert Palmer. “We could hitchhike, transfer from truck to truck, or, if we couldn’t catch one of them, we’d go to the train yard, ’cause the railroad was all through that part of the country then.”
It is always said that Johnson “sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads” in return for his mesmeric gifts as a musician. Edwards’s take on this legend certainly seemed to confirm that an extraordinary transformation had taken place.
Johnson, he said, had left his home town of Robinsonville, Mississippi, in 1936 without having made much of an impact: “Then he came back next year, famous and playing more tricks and more guitar than anybody in the Mississippi Delta.”
Edwards was present in August 1938 when Johnson fell ill after performing in Mississippi. He died a few days later, aged just 27 — his whisky, it was said, had been poisoned by the jealous husband of one of his lovers.
David Edwards was born on June 28 1915 at Shaw, Mississippi, the son of sharecroppers. His father played guitar and violin in bars, and bought his son a guitar for $4 from a plantation worker. From the age of nine David — or “Honey”, as his parents called him — worked on the plantations. “They’d pick cotton all through the day, and at night they’d sit around and play the guitars,” he later recalled. “Drinking that white whisky, that moonshine, I’d just sit and look at them. I’d say, 'I wish I could play.’”
Aged 14, he decided to leave home to go on the road with the bluesman Big Joe Williams . They wandered the southern states for several years — Edwards being arrested on a number of occasions for vagrancy — before Honeyboy decided to return home. He then teamed up with the harmonica player Big Walter Horton, and later Robert Johnson.
Having spent some 25 years as an itinerant musician, in 1953 Edwards moved to Chicago, where he recorded Drop Down Mama for Chess Records. He earned his living as a factory machine operator and building labourer, and at night played the blues in Chicago’s clubs and in the open-air market on Maxwell Street.
Edwards was thus a fixture in the new home of the blues when the music began to enjoy novel international popularity through the recordings of a young generation of (mainly white, mainly British) artists, such as Eric Clapton and The Rolling Stones. By the late Sixties he was appearing with Willie Dixon and Buddy Guy on sessions that produced the two-volume album Blues Jam in Chicago, by the British rock band Fleetwood Mac.
His own view about white performers playing the blues were ambivalent: “They’ve got good fingers,” he said, “but most of them don’t have the voice. Let me tell you something, the blues was meant to be played slow. And they play it too fast.”
Known for his intricate finger-work and bottleneck-slide guitar, Edwards never achieved the celebrity enjoyed by Waters, Dixon or Buddy Guy. He made no commercial recordings until after the Second World War, and the only examples of his music from his years in the Delta are the recordings he made for the Library of Congress in 1942, under a scheme run by the folklorist Alan Lomax.
In 1972 Michael Frank became Edwards’s manager and harmonica player, a partnership which endured for the remainder of Honeyboy’s life. Apparently undimmed by age, he continued to perform — and even to tour — into his nineties. In 2007, for example, Edwards undertook a European tour that included gigs in five countries — including England — over three weeks. Although his final tour was in 2008, he continued to perform occasionally — most recently at the Juke Joint Festival in Clarksdale, Mississippi, on April 17 this year.
He remarked recently: “I ain’t learn everything yet at 95. But I got good fingers, that’s one thing, I got good fingers. If it weren’t for them fingers I wouldn’t be going now.”
In 1997 Edwards published an autobiography, The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing: The Life and Times of Delta Bluesman Honeyboy Edwards, in which he chronicled the brutality of life for blacks in pre-war Mississippi. He also featured in Martin Scorsese’s documentary series The Blues (2003).
In 1996 he was elected to the Blues Hall of Fame, and in 2008 he won a Grammy for best traditional blues album for his contribution (with Henry Townsend, Pinetop Perkins and Robert Lockwood Jr) to Last of the Great Mississippi Bluesmen: Live in Dallas. Last year he received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.
He is survived by a daughter and a stepdaughter.
Aged 14, he decided to leave home to go on the road with the bluesman Big Joe Williams . They wandered the southern states for several years — Edwards being arrested on a number of occasions for vagrancy — before Honeyboy decided to return home. He then teamed up with the harmonica player Big Walter Horton, and later Robert Johnson.
Having spent some 25 years as an itinerant musician, in 1953 Edwards moved to Chicago, where he recorded Drop Down Mama for Chess Records. He earned his living as a factory machine operator and building labourer, and at night played the blues in Chicago’s clubs and in the open-air market on Maxwell Street.
Edwards was thus a fixture in the new home of the blues when the music began to enjoy novel international popularity through the recordings of a young generation of (mainly white, mainly British) artists, such as Eric Clapton and The Rolling Stones. By the late Sixties he was appearing with Willie Dixon and Buddy Guy on sessions that produced the two-volume album Blues Jam in Chicago, by the British rock band Fleetwood Mac.
His own view about white performers playing the blues were ambivalent: “They’ve got good fingers,” he said, “but most of them don’t have the voice. Let me tell you something, the blues was meant to be played slow. And they play it too fast.”
Known for his intricate finger-work and bottleneck-slide guitar, Edwards never achieved the celebrity enjoyed by Waters, Dixon or Buddy Guy. He made no commercial recordings until after the Second World War, and the only examples of his music from his years in the Delta are the recordings he made for the Library of Congress in 1942, under a scheme run by the folklorist Alan Lomax.
In 1972 Michael Frank became Edwards’s manager and harmonica player, a partnership which endured for the remainder of Honeyboy’s life. Apparently undimmed by age, he continued to perform — and even to tour — into his nineties. In 2007, for example, Edwards undertook a European tour that included gigs in five countries — including England — over three weeks. Although his final tour was in 2008, he continued to perform occasionally — most recently at the Juke Joint Festival in Clarksdale, Mississippi, on April 17 this year.
He remarked recently: “I ain’t learn everything yet at 95. But I got good fingers, that’s one thing, I got good fingers. If it weren’t for them fingers I wouldn’t be going now.”
In 1997 Edwards published an autobiography, The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing: The Life and Times of Delta Bluesman Honeyboy Edwards, in which he chronicled the brutality of life for blacks in pre-war Mississippi. He also featured in Martin Scorsese’s documentary series The Blues (2003).
In 1996 he was elected to the Blues Hall of Fame, and in 2008 he won a Grammy for best traditional blues album for his contribution (with Henry Townsend, Pinetop Perkins and Robert Lockwood Jr) to Last of the Great Mississippi Bluesmen: Live in Dallas. Last year he received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.
He is survived by a daughter and a stepdaughter.
No comments:
Post a Comment