Salvatore Licitra

Salvatore Licitra, the opera singer, who died on Monday aged 43, was a contender for the title of the world’s next great tenor and had already been acclaimed the “new Pavarotti” on account of his ringing high notes, strong lower register, and considerable stamina.

He was catapulted to fame in dramatic fashion, stepping in at the last moment for Pavarotti in a gala performance of Puccini’s Tosca at the Metropolitan Opera in New York on the evening of May 11 2002.

Salvatore Licitra

 

Only 55 hours earlier, on Thursday May 9, Licitra had been relaxing at his family’s apartment in Milan. Then his manager in New York, JF Mastroianni, called. “He asked me if I feel good,” Licitra said later. “I responded that I was rested and asked him why. He said maybe there is some job for me. I asked him what type of work. He said: 'I’ll let you know.’”

Within the hour Mastroianni called back, uttering the decisive words: “Are you ready for a trip? There is some problem with Luciano.”

After Mastroianni’s call, Licitra was unable to sleep, watching television until 3.30am. He then caught a flight to London and Concorde to New York. Arriving at 9am on Friday morning, he reached the Met two hours later and spent another 12 hours going over a videotape of the production and attending piano rehearsals.

Pavarotti only added to the tension. His scheduled appearance was regarded by many as the likely finale to the superstar’s 41-year career in staged opera, and he dithered all day over whether to let his fans down or risk making a strained and under par appearance. Licitra knew only at about 7pm — an hour before curtain — that he would be going on stage. He finally met the conductor, James Levine, when the maestro dropped in to his dressing room 15 minutes later.

Licitra put any nerves behind him. He earned lengthy ovations for his two big arias and, at the end of the opera, received a three-minute standing ovation from the audience of 4,000, each of whom had paid as much as $1,800 for their non-refundable tickets to hear Pavarotti. The critics agreed that a star had been born.
Salvatore Licitra was born on August 10 1968 at Berne, Switzerland, to Sicilian parents, and returned to Italy as a teenager to open a graphics shop with his brother. He started singing at 18, mimicking great Italian tenors such as Caruso and Gigli. He worked as a graphic artist on layouts for Italian Vogue, and studied at Carlo Bergonzi’s vocal academy until 1998, when he ran out of money.
Although scheduled to sing as an understudy at the Verona festival that summer, he so impressed the conductor Daniel Oren that he made his debut on the opening night as Riccardo in Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera.
Licitra was considered a genuine tenore spinto, with a voice finely balanced between the lyrical and the dramatic but with sufficient heft to play the heroes of the Italian core repertoire of Verdi and Puccini.
In Italy the frenzied search for the “Fourth Tenor”, or at least an heir to Pavarotti and his ageing Spanish contemporaries Placido Domingo and José Carreras, is likened to a papal succession. The difference is that the singing contest is carried out in full view of the faithful.
Licitra’s talent, and the drama of his substitution for Pavarotti, meant his name was added to the list of candidates for this vacancy.
After his triumph at the New York Met, he appeared on opera stages and concert platforms around the world. Under the baton of Ricardo Muti he sang at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and regularly appeared at La Scala and other venues in Europe, the United States and the Far East.
Offstage, Licitra was quick-witted, sunny and informal. He dispensed with the usual starry entourage, preferring the company of his parents, his brother and his fiancée.

Salvatore Licitra had spent nine days in a coma after crashing his scooter. His fiancée, who was riding pillion, was unhurt, but he never regained consciousness.

Vann Nath

Vann Nath, who died yesterday probably aged 66, was one of only seven known survivors of S-21, the secret prison in Cambodia where, between 1975 and 1979, the Khmer Rouge tortured and killed more than 14,000 people; guards spared his life when they discovered he was an artist, putting him to work producing portraits of Pol Pot.

Vann Nath with some of his works depicting tortures inflicted by the Khmer Rouge

After the fall of the regime Nath painted the horrors he had witnessed, and became one of Cambodia's foremost artists. But it was his incarceration and remarkable survival for which he was most famous.

He had been arrested by the Khmer Rouge, the fanatical Kampuchean communists whose policies led to an estimated 1.5 to 2 million deaths, while working in rice fields near his home in Battambang, in the north-west of the country. Chained and put in a truck, he was transferred to S-21, where he arrived on January 7 1978. Like many of the Khmer Rouge's "enemies", he never knew why he had been arrested; 17 years later he described the Kafkaesque nature of his first interrogation:

"'What was the problem that caused them to arrest you?' the interrogator asked.

I said I didn't know.

'The Organization isn't stupid,' he said. 'It never catches people who aren't guilty. Now think again – what did you do wrong?'

'I don't know,' I said again."
At S-21, an interrogation facility in the grounds of a former high school in Phnom Penh, prisoners were tortured until they revealed "accomplices", and were made to write confessions admitting to "crimes against the regime". Those who weren't killed outright or through torture died of starvation and disease. "We were so hungry, we would eat insects that dropped from the ceiling," Nath told the court during the recent, belated trial (on charges of crimes against humanity) of the prison's chief, Kaing Guek Eav, alias Duch. "We would quickly grab and eat them so we could avoid being seen by the guards. The conditions were so inhumane and the food was so little, I even thought eating human flesh would be a good meal."
Prisoners were shackled together, and when one died it could be hours before the guards came to take the corpse away: survivors ate their spoonfuls of thin rice porridge next to the dead bodies but, said Nath, "we didn't care because we were like animals".
After a month at S-21, already so weak he could hardly stand, Nath was unchained from the other prisoners and taken to see Duch, who had read his file and seen that he had trained as an artist. After questioning, Nath was moved to a workroom where he was made to paint propaganda portraits of Pol Pot. From then on, he was given more to eat, and kept in better conditions, and was able to survive until the Vietnamese invasion which overthrew the Khmer Rouge in January 1979.
Vann Nath was born into a farming family in Battambang. As a teenager he spent several years as a monk, then took up an apprenticeship with an artist. In 1969 he jointly set up a small business painting cinema placards, billboards, and private portraits. When the Khmer Rouge seized power in 1975 he was evacuated to the countryside to work in the rice fields, where he was eventually arrested.
When the regime fell and the Vietnamese opened S-21 as Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, Nath returned to paint scenes from prison life: a prisoner being whipped on the floor; a baby being taken from its mother; a guard pulling out a victim's fingernail. The unsparing nature of these images stemmed from a pledge he had made with fellow inmates when first imprisoned: everyone in the cell agreed that whoever survived would tell the families of the others what had happened.
Accordingly Nath felt it was his duty to tell the stories of those who had died. His graphic paintings now hang on the walls of the museum, bearing witness to the brutality that thousands suffered but only a handful survived to describe.
After being freed, Nath enlisted in the Cambodian Army, fighting the lingering Khmer Rouge insurgency in the Thai border region. After landmark elections in 1993, which followed peace accords in 1991 that ended decades of foreign meddling and conflict, Nath started painting again and began to receive wide recognition for his work. Since then, his pictures have hung in exhibitions around the world.
He also became, through writing and interviews as well as through his paintings, a leading advocate of justice for the victims of Khmer Rouge atrocities. In 1998 he published A Cambodian Prison Portrait: One Year in the Khmer Rouge's S-21 to tell his story in his own words, and he featured prominently in the documentary S21: The Khmer Rouge Death Machine (2003), in which he interrogated his former persecutors.
The trial of Duch was the first to be held at the UN-backed war crimes tribunal in Cambodia. It ended last July with his conviction and a 35-year sentence. So far, it is the only case to be completed. Case 002, in which the four most senior former members of the Khmer Rouge regime still alive are due to stand trial, will be the court's last. The tribunal's spokesman, Neth Pheaktra, could not confirm whether Nath would again have been called to testify.
In 2007 Nath was awarded the Hellman/Hammett Award, given by Human Rights Watch to writers who have shown bravery in the face of political persecution.
He owned a restaurant in Phnom Penh named after his wife, Kith Eng, which houses a gallery of his work.
When Nath became ill with kidney disease in 2005, donations from patrons and friends from around the world helped pay for his treatment.
Vann Nath and his wife had two children who died during the Khmer Rouge genocide. After 1979 Nath was reunited with his wife and they had three more children. She and they survive him.

Rosel Zech

Rosel Zech in Fassbinder's Veronika Voss. 

'I never felt so comfortable with any other director,' she said.

According to the German actor and writer Peter Berling, the most important thing for the director Rainer Werner Fassbinder was "to surround himself with people who needed him for their own survival … from the beginning he wanted to create a 'family', something he himself never had". One devoted member of this family was Rosel Zech, who has died of bone cancer aged 69.
Sadly, Veronika Voss (1982), in which Zech became a Fassbinder star, was the director's penultimate film, released less than four months before his death, aged 37, of a drug overdose. "I never felt so comfortable with any other director," Zech declared. "We were just at the beginning and had many plans together." One of these was a biopic of the writer and activist Rosa Luxemburg, the uncompleted script of which was found beside Fassbinder's dead body.
As Veronika Voss, Zech splendidly followed Hanna Schygulla (The Marriage of Maria Braun, 1979) and Barbara Sukowa (Lola, 1981) in the third of Fassbinder's BRD (Bundesrepublik Deutschland) trilogy, a flamboyant, metaphorical and ironic onslaught on Germany's "economic miracle" of the 1950s. Zech portrays a drug-addicted screen idol of the previous decade, now at the end of her career, who subsists on memories of past grandeur, which includes Nazi Germany.
It took almost 10 years from the time of Zech's first meeting with Fassbinder before he gave her a leading role. They met on the set of Ulli Lommel's Tenderness of the Wolves (1973), in which Zech had a bit part, and on which Fassbinder was producer and co-editor. Much later he cast her as the respectable suburban wife of a corrupt unfaithful building contractor (Mario Adorf) in Lola. There was nothing in the role, however well played, to suggest the range of emotions Zech brought to her nuanced portrayal of Veronika Voss, and her Marlene Dietrich-like rendering in that film of Memories Are Made of This.
Zech recalled that Fassbinder made her feel "loved, cherished and protected" throughout the shoot of Veronika Voss. Harry Baer, who was in the film, claimed that "Zech performed with such selflessness that in the suicide scene, she actually took 30 pills. They were made of sugar to be sure, but the excessive dose was sickening all the same."
Rosalie Helga Lina Zech was born out of wedlock in Berlin. Her father was an inland waterway boatman and her mother was a dressmaker. She started acting in provincial theatre, gradually moving to the Schauspielhaus Bochum, in North Rhine-Westphalia, which was then run by the celebrated stage director Peter Zadek. It was Zadek who gave Zech her first leading roles on stage and television. They worked together throughout her career. "I found a great coach in Peter Zadek," said the football-mad Zech. Among her best roles in the 1970s were Hedda Gabler, Portia (The Merchant of Venice), Nina (The Seagull) and Cordelia (King Lear).
Zech had a long and busy career on German television, where she became known for her parts in several popular mini-series, such as the mother in The Oppermann Family (1983), based on the novel by Lion Feuchtwanger about a German-Jewish family at the start of Hitler's rise to power; The Officer Factory (1989), set in a military academy; and as the severe mother superior in For Heaven's Sake (2002-11), set in a convent.
As television and the stage ("Theatre is the pinnacle for me," she once said) took up most of Zech's time, her films were few and far between. Outstanding among them, however, was Percy Adlon's Salmonberries (1991), an atmospheric Alaska-set drama in which Zech played a reserved librarian from East Germany lured into a love affair with an androgynous half-Inuit orphan played by kd lang. Zech shone as a sexy but repressed woman, who slowly blossoms when loved.

• Rosalie Helga Lina Zech, actor, born 7 July 1942; died 31 August 2011

Tom Hibbert

Tom Hibbert with Margaret Thatcher at No 10 in 1987; she revealed to him how much she admired Cliff Richard.

Tom Hibbert, a former Observer columnist and mainstay of both Smash Hits and Q magazines, has died aged 59, from complications brought about by diabetes. His cavalier humour and softly ruthless interview technique earned him a wide following in the pop-culture publications of the 1980s and 90s, as well as the affection and respect of his colleagues.
The son of the historian Christopher Hibbert, Tom was born in Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, and went to Leighton Park Quaker school in Reading and then the local grammar, but dropped out of Leeds University after a term to play in various uncelebrated rock bands and chance his arm as a journalist.
Tom was unsuited to the home-improvement periodicals for which he wrote in the late 70s, but in 1980 his droll and quizzical reviews began to appear in New Music News, an underground rock weekly launched by Felix Dennis to fill the vacuum left by the strike-bound NME and Melody Maker. Tom admired very few musicians beyond Iggy Pop, Ray Davies and Jerry Garcia but filed fond, waspish and lightly mocking deconstructions of many others. Asked by another staff member why he made up all the entries in the short-lived publication's letters column, his response was flatly logical: "Because we don't have any readers."
At Smash Hits in the mid-80s, he helped invent a cartoon fantasy world in which everyone interviewed seemed to exhibit the same slapstick characteristics. All his subjects – Paul McCartney, David Bowie, Bucks Fizz, John Lydon – were delightfully over-exaggerated, as mischievous and eccentric as their interrogator. The magazine was so successful that even the prime minister, seeking re-election in 1987, believed she could speak to the entire nation's teenage youth by allowing Hibbert and his ancient tape-recorder through the door at Downing Street.
Margaret Thatcher's undoing was to attempt to prove that she, too, was a pop-music enthusiast. Tom took great delight in revealing that her favourite singer was Cliff Richard, whom she admired for being professional, and that her favourite record – on-message for the cost-conscious curator of an economic boom – was the fearful 1953 novelty hit (How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window?
Tom was unafraid of silence. He would give his subjects the impression that, despite their obvious successes, they were still somehow shameful underachievers, and then sit back quietly with a cigarette to enjoy the panicked response. Both in work and life, he refused to take anything seriously. When given the job of writing the "trail" to flag up the contents of the next Smash Hits, he would advertise groups that existed only in his fertile imagination – such as the failed pop idol Reg "Reg" Snipton or an intriguing electronic duo, The Human Saucepans of the Orinoco.
Hibbert was transferred in 1986 to the new rock monthly Q, where a long-running feature known as Who the Hell … was devised especially for his withering humour and his extraordinary ability to get pompous public figures to make buffoons of themselves.
Month after month, the gullible and self-important celebrities of the day – Jeremy Beadle, Jeffrey Archer, Robert Maxwell, Samantha Fox, Keith Floyd, Bernard Manning, David Mellor, Sir Jimmy Savile – would find their pearls of wisdom gently lampooned and their carefully constructed profiles vigorously barbecued. Tom flew to Brazil and tracked down the train robber Ronnie Biggs (whom, inevitably, he both liked and rather admired). He puffed his way across the Alps pointing his microphone at the charity-walking Ian Botham and his elephant. The health minister Edwina Currie once advised him that his fondness for nicotine might lower his sperm count.
The Observer hired Tom to write its Pendennis column in the mid-90s – witty and bone-dry conceits from the perspective of a smoke-fugged bar-stool – but in 1997 he developed pneumonia and acute pancreatitis, and spent three months in the intensive care unit of his local hospital in Hammersmith, west London. In his characteristic resigned and shrugging manner, he spent the last 14 years of his life unable to work and living with the after-effects of an illness from which he never fully recovered.
Tom is survived by his wife, Allyce.

• Tom Hibbert, journalist, born 28 May 1952; died 28 August 2011

Lieutenant-Commander Peter Twiss

At the controls of the Fairey Delta 2 (FD 2), a supersonic research aircraft, Twiss did not just creep past the post – he smashed the previous world air speed record, setting a new benchmark of 1,132mph.

Peter Twiss

 

The FD 2 had been produced in response to a call from the Ministry of Supply for investigation into flight behaviour and control at transonic and supersonic speeds. The elegant craft, a modified version of which would later help in research for the Concorde project, featured a long "droop snoot" nose and razor-thin delta wings, and seemed to mark a moment of unrivalled British aeronautic superiority.

Its maiden flight, with Twiss in the cockpit, came on October 6 1954. During the next two years he made more than 110 flights, with 50 faster than the speed of sound (which is about 761mph at sea level). Fairey was certain that the aircraft could reach a four-figure speed, however, and the idea of making an official attempt on the world speed record crystallised in November 1955 when cockpit instruments suggested the FD 2 had reached Mach 1.56 (almost 1200mph).

A month previously a new air speed record of 822mph had been set by a US Air Force pilot in a F-100 Supersabre. Certain that the FD 2 could demolish this, Twiss and Fairey decided to make their official British attempt in March 1956.

The course was laid out along the coast south of Chichester, close to the aircraft's base at Boscombe Down, near Salisbury. The height for the runs was fixed at 38,000ft, not only because this was the optimum level for performance, but also because it was likely to ensure a good condensation trail – essential for ground tracking by telescopic cameras.

All was ready by March 8, and Twiss flew eight runs over the next few days. On the final sortie, on March 10, he achieved speeds of 1,117mph and 1,147mph on the two required runs, giving a mean of 1,132mph. The USAF record had been beaten by over 300mph, and Twiss had become the first pilot to exceed 1,000mph in level flight.
Not everyone rejoiced at this British triumph, however. Greenhouse owners across the south were agitated as the sonic boom broke glass windows. One market gardener even threatened to sue Twiss for £16,000.
Lionel Peter Twiss was born on July 23 1921 at Lindfield Sussex and educated at Sherborne School. After a brief period as a tea taster with Brooke Bond, he turned his hand to farming before joining the Fleet Air Arm in 1939.
After a few months learning seamanship as a naval airman, second class, he trained as a pilot. Initially he flew Hurricanes with the Merchant Ship Fighter Unit, an early attempt to provide convoy support. Catapulted from a merchant ship, the pilot either bailed out or ditched alongside a ship at the end of his mission.
By early 1942 he was flying Fairey Fulmar fighters with 807 Squadron from the aircraft carrier Argus. In June he flew patrols in support of the Malta convoys during Operation Harpoon and escorted RAF fighters which were launched from the carrier to fly to Malta to reinforce the depleted air defences of the beleaguered island. During this period he shot down an Italian fighter and damaged an enemy bomber and was awarded the DSC.
Later in the year, after his squadron had converted to the Seafire (the naval derivative of the Spitfire), he was in action in support of the Operation Torch landings in Morocco and Algeria, flying from the carrier Furious. These operations brought the award of a Bar to his DSC. In March 1943 he returned to Britain and transferred to night fighters before joining the RAF's Fighter Interception Unit at Ford on the south coast. From here he flew Mosquitoes on intruder sorties over France and in the period after D-Day shot down two Junker 88 bombers.
Late in 1944 he left for the United States to join the British Air Commission, where he had the opportunity to test naval fighters. He returned in 1945 to join No 3 Course at the Empire Test Pilots' School before a loan period with Fairey Aviation as a test pilot.
Leaving the Royal Navy as a lieutenant-commander, he remained with Fairey and advanced with the company to become, in 1954, chief test pilot. There he tested all the company's aircraft, which included the Firefly, Gannet and the Rotodyne compound-helicopter.
By its nature this was hazardous work. During the FD 2's fourteenth flight the aircraft suffered an engine failure due to fuel starvation at 30,000ft. Twiss could have ejected to safety but decided to glide back to Boscombe Down. He broke cloud at 2,500ft but had insufficient hydraulic pressure to lower the undercarriage fully. Still with the option to eject, he continued and made a successful forced landing on the nose-wheel at 170mph. He was awarded a Queen's Commendation for Valuable Service in the Air.
After the successful record flight, Twiss continued to fly the FD 2 exploring high supersonic speeds and in 1956, for his services to test flying and for breaking the world speed record, he was appointed OBE. The aircraft is now on display at the Fleet Air Arm Museum at Yeovilton.
In 1959 Fairey Aviation was sold to Westland Aircraft, the helicopter manufacturer, and Twiss decided to retire from test flying. He had flown over 4,500 hours in 148 different types of aircraft. In retirement he spent many hours at a more leisurely speed with the Lasham Gliding Club.
A year after leaving Fairey Aviation he joined Fairey Marine and was responsible for development and sales of the company's day-cruisers. He was a director from 1968 to 1978, then director and general manager of Hamble Point Marine until 1988.
Twiss appeared in the Bond film From Russia with Love (1963) at the helm of a Fairey Marine Speedboat and also in the film Sink the Bismark (1960), when he flew a Fairey Swordfish torpedo aircraft. His autobiography, Faster than the Sun, was published in 1963.
Peter Twiss was married five times. He is survived by two daughters and a number of step children. A daughter predeceased him.

The Reverend Eugene Nida

Linguist who translated the Bible into hundreds of tongues, taking its message from the ice cap to the desert

The Rev Eugene Nida 

THE REVEREND EUGENE NIDA, who has died aged 96, helped translate the Bible into more than 200 languages, enabling the world's most popular book to be understood by remote populations from the icy wastes of the Arctic Circle to the deserts of Africa.

Key to his work was the concept of "functional equivalence". Instead of using literal translations, his idea was to incorporate native culture and idiom into the Bible story. Using this system, translators could rearrange sentences in the Bible to convey more clearly its meaning and intention in any given language.

Nida travelled far and wide, visiting more than 85 countries to recruit native speakers to help with translations. His longest project, begun in 1978, was to translate the Bible into Inuktitut, the tongue spoken by the Inuit people who live in the Arctic; it took 24 years to complete.

This was because the Bible story is set among palm trees, olive groves and sandy deserts and features donkeys, cattle and goats, none of which makes sense to the Inuit, who live amid vast expanses of snow and are more familiar with seals and walruses. As Nida explained: "You can't translate without cultural context."

He also helped write the Good News Bible, applying his system to break down large words into smaller, clearer ideas. So, for example, the word "multitude" became "crowd," "covetous" became "greedy", and "take heed" became "watch out".

Though such changes rankled with believers who revel in the beauty and rolling cadences of the King James Version, Nida was unfazed. To him, the key to the Bible was not poetry, but comprehension. The sole aim, he insisted, should be "to read it, to understand it and be transformed by its message. Meaning is found not in dictionaries, grammars and encyclopedias, nor in texts nor even in contexts, but in our heads."
Eugene Albert Nida was born on November 11 1914 in Oklahoma City, where his father was a chiropractor. When he was five, the family moved to California, and while studying Latin in high school Eugene was already anticipating being able to translate Scripture as a missionary.
He duly graduated in Greek and Latin at the University of California at Los Angeles, and in 1939 received a Master's degree in New Testament Greek from the University of Southern California.
In 1943 he was ordained as a Baptist minister and in the same year earned a doctorate in Linguistics from the University of Michigan. He also joined the American Bible Society, becoming head of its translation programme three years later.
Though Nida was a prolific linguist, fluent in at least eight languages, he needed a system to understand the languages of many peoples around the world. His technique was to point to something on the ground and ask locals what they called it. This way, he explained, the word was not a literal translation but a reflection of their culture.
He would then compile a vocabulary and incorporate his understanding of the language and culture into his translations. But he was not vain about his efforts. "There is no such thing as a definitive translation, since there are constant advances in Biblical scholarship as well as changes in all living languages," Nida once said. "No major translation should last more than 50 years."
He retired from the American Bible Society in the early 1990s, but remained busy, conferring with translators around the world. He wrote more than 40 books on languages, translations and Bible scholarship.
Although the Bible's origins date back more than 2,000 years, Nida believed that the book had an enduring relevance. "People are discovering that the Bible has a significant message for the present day," he said. "While this is an age of technology, urbanisation and change, the world hasn't invented a new sin in 2,000 years."
Eugene Nida, who died on August 25, was predeceased in 1993 by his wife of 49 years, Althea Sprague. He is survived by his second wife, Elena Fernandez-Miranda of Brussels, a translator and interpreter, whom he married in 1997.

David 'Honeyboy’ Edwards

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.

David 'Honeyboy' Edwards 

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.