David Edwards

David "Honeyboy" Edwards (June 28, 1915 – August 29, 2011) was an American delta blues guitarist and singer from Mississippi. He learned to play music from his father, a guitarist and violinist. At the age of 14, he left home to travel with the bluesman Big Joe Williams, beginning life as an itinerant musician, which he maintained through the 1930s and 1940s. He performed with the famed blues musician Robert Johnson, with whom he developed a close friendship. Edwards was present on the night Johnson drank the poisoned whiskey that killed him, and his story has become the definitive version of Johnson's demise. Edwards also knew and played with other leading bluesmen in the Mississippi Delta, including Charley Patton, Tommy Johnson, and Johnny Shines. He described the itinerant bluesman's life:

The folklorist Alan Lomax recorded Edwards in Clarksdale, Mississippi, in 1942 for the Library of Congress. He did not record commercially until 1951, when he recorded "Who May Be Your Regular Be" for Arc under the name Mr. Honey. and produced by the ethnomusicologist Peter B. Lowry. Kansas City Red played for Edwards for a brief period, and Earwig recorded them in 1981, along with Sunnyland Slim and Floyd Jones, for the album Old Friends Together for the First Time.

His autobiography, The World Don't Owe Me Nothing: The Life and Times of Delta Bluesman Honeyboy Edwards, published in 1997 by the Chicago Review Press, recounts his life from childhood, his travels through the American South, and his arrival in Chicago in the early 1950s. A companion CD with the same title was released by Earwig Music. His long association with the Earwig label and with his manager, Michael Frank, led to several late-career albums on various independent labels from the 1980s on. He also recorded at a church turned recording studio in Salina, Kansas, and released albums on the APO label. Edwards continued the rambling life he described in his autobiography, touring well into his 90s.

Between 1996 and 2000, he was nominated for eight W. C. Handy/Blues Music Awards, including for his albums White Windows, The World Don't Owe Me Nothin''', Mississippi Delta Blues Man, and a 2007 album on which he appears with Robert Lockwood Jr., Henry Townsend and Pinetop Perkins titled Last of the Great Mississippi Delta Bluesmen: Live In Dallas.

Edwards died of congestive heart failure at his home on August 29, 2011, at about 3 a.m. According to events listings on the Metromix Chicago website, he had been scheduled to perform at noon that day, at the Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago's Millennium Park.

Discography

"Build a Cave"/"Who May Be Your Regular Be" (ARC, 1951) "Drop Down Mama" (Chess, 1953) I've Been Around (Trix Records, 1978, 1995)Mississippi Delta Bluesman (Folkways Records, 1979) Old Friends (Earwig, 1979) White Windows (Blue Suit, 1988) Delta Bluesman (Earwig/Indigo, 1992) Crawling Kingsnake (Testament, 1997) World Don't Owe Me Nothing, recorded live (Earwig, 1997) Don't Mistreat a Fool (Genes, 1999) Shake 'Em On Down (APO, 2000) Mississippi Delta Bluesman (reissue of 1979 album: Smithsonian Folkways Records, 2001) Back to the Roots (Wolf, 2001) Roamin' and Ramblin (Earwig, 2008)

Film In the 1991 documentary The Search for Robert Johnson, Edwards recounts stories about Johnson, including his murder.

Edwards is the subject of the 2010 award-winning film Honeyboy and the History of the Blues, from Free Range Studios, directed by Scott Taradash. The film features stories of his life from picking cotton as a sharecropper to traveling the world performing his music. Artists who appear in the film include Keith Richards, Robert Cray, Joe Perry, Lucinda Williams, B. B. King, Big Joe Williams, and Ace Atkins.

Edwards appeared in the 2007 film Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.

Awards and honors

1996: Induction into the Blues Hall of Fame 1999: Blues Hall of Fame inductee, Classics of Blues Literature, for The World Don't Owe Me Nothing'' 2005: Acoustic Blues Artist of the Year, 26th W. C. Handy Blues Awards 2010: Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award 2010: Mississippi Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts 2010: Lifetime Achievement Award, National Guitar Museum