David "Honeyboy" Edwards - Biography
By Chris Morris
“The blues is something that leads you, that lays on your mind,” David Honeyboy Edwards says at the end of his beautiful 1997 memoir The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing, written with Janice Martinson and Michael Frank. “You got to go where it leads you. When I was young I’d sit around and play the blues, and sometimes it would put me in mind of someplace else. I’d always follow it. I’d get up and go wherever it took me. And everywhere it took me was home.”
By following his restless muse, Edwards became a living monument to the pre-World War II Delta blues. Active well into the new millennium, when he was in his ‘90s, the singer-guitarist was the lone remaining link to the titans of the music. He learned from and played with the Delta greats – Tommy Johnson, Son House, Big Joe Williams, Charlie Patton, and (most famously of all) Robert Johnson. On the road, he was partnered with the harmonica great Little Walter Jacobs; in Chicago during the 1950s, he worked the same clubs and taverns as Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and the other Windy City giants. It was only in the 1970s, when he began to record regularly as an acoustic performer, that Edwards acquired a reputation of his own.
He was born June 28, 1915, in Shaw, Mississippi, in Sunflower County, and was known as “Honey” to family and friends from childhood. His father, a sharecropping farmer, and his mother were musical – both played guitar, and his father entertained at country dances until a shooting incident spurred him to end his musical career. His mother died in the wake of the Mississippi flood of 1927. He began learning to play guitar from a local sharecropper in 1929. He admired Tommy Johnson, who lived in nearby Crystal Springs, and met the bluesmen Sonny Boy Williamson II (Rice Miller), Tommy McClennan, and Robert Petway in the late ‘20s and early ‘30s.
A vagabond from an early age, Edwards began hoboing with the peripatetic singer-guitarist Big Joe Williams in 1932, supporting himself with playing and gambling. By the mid-‘30s he was based in Memphis, where he performed with many of the city’s venerable blues and jug band musicians in Handy Park on Beale Street – Frank Stokes, Will Shade, Sleepy John Estes. He also worked with such younger bluesmen as Johnny Shines, Floyd Jones, and his frequent collaborator Big Walter Horton, who would all later migrate to Chicago. Later, in Greenwood, Mississippi, he encountered such elders as Son House, Willie Brown, and Charley Patton, and met the young Howlin’ Wolf.
In 1937, Edwards encountered Robert Johnson in Greenwood. He sometimes traveled with the legendary performer, and was with Johnson after he was fatally poisoned by a jealous man at a Greenwood dance in 1938. Edwards and Johnny Shines, who also worked with Johnson, were frequently interviewed about the elusive Johnson in later years.
Edwards’ footloose ways continued in the late ‘30s and early ‘40s. With Big Walter Horton and Sonny Boy Williamson, he unsuccessfully auditioned for blues talent scout H.C. Spier in Jackson, Mississippi. He was jailed for a beating in Vicksburg, Mississippi. Finally, in July 1942, he was recorded for the first time: On a Library of Congress field trip that also found him recording Son House, folklorist Alan Lomax cut a dozen numbers with him. Edwards received $20 for the session.
In the early ‘40s, Edwards met the teenage harmonica virtuoso Little Walter Jacobs in Helena, Arkansas. The pair played together throughout the South, and in 1945 they made their way to Chicago. However, Edwards returned south. After stops in Memphis, Florida, and Louisiana, he moved to Houston, where he made his first commercial recordings, “Build a Cave” and “Who May Your Regular Be,” under the name “Mr. Honey,” for Lola Anne Collum’s ARC label. Soon thereafter, he cut some sides for Sam Phillips in Memphis; one, “Sweet Home Chicago,” was issued on Sun Records, incorrectly credited to Albert (Joiner) Williams.
In 1953, Edwards and his wife arrived in Chicago. He recorded four sides for Chess Records, then the most prominent blues label in the city, but they went unissued; in his autobiography, Edwards maintains that Muddy Waters jealously asked Leonard Chess to not release the numbers, which sounded much like Waters’ slide guitar-dominated work. Edwards returned south again, but settled in Chicago for good in 1956.
For the next two decades, Edwards would largely perform in Chicago’s clubs and taverns; following the ‘60s blues boom, independent labels like Milestone and Adelphi began to record him. In 1969, he appeared with Otis Spann, Willie Dixon, Big Walter Horton, and others at a session recorded at Chess Records’ studios by the British blues band Fleeetwood Mac; the subsequent album was known variously as Blues Jam in Chicago, Blues Jam at Chess, and Fleetwood Mac in Chicago. In 1970, one of his Chess recordings became the title cut of the rarities compilation Drop Down Mama.
Beginning in the late ‘60s, Edwards began to plumb the classic Delta repertoire as an acoustic performer on sessions for Testament (Crawlin’ Kingsnake [1967]), Trix (I’ve Been Around [1978]) and Folkways (Mississippi Delta Bluesman [1979]). His manager and frequent harmonica accompanist Michael Frank initiated the independent label Earwig, which recorded Edwards in the company of his Mississippi colleagues Walter Horton, Sunnyland Slim, Floyd Jones, and Kansas City Red on Old Friends (1981).
Edwards’ latter-day work includes White Windows (1989), the live The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing (1997), Shake ‘Em On Down (2000), and Roamin’ and Ramblin’ (2008). He appeared in the documentaries The Search For Robert Johnson (2000), Honeyboy (2004), and Lightning in a Bottle (2004). The album Last of the Great Mississippi Delta Bluesmen – Live in Dallas (2007), a collaboration with Pinetop Perkins, Robert Jr. Lockwood, and Henry Townshend, won the 2007 Grammy Award as best traditional blues album.
Edwards was inducted into the Blues Foundation’s Hall of Fame in 1996. He performed tirelessly at clubs, concert halls, and festivals in the US and abroad into his 90s, and only retired from international touring in 2008, at the age of 93.