David 'Honeyboy' Edwards:DAVID "HONEYBOY" Edwards, who has died aged 96, was the last member of the first generation of Mississippi Delta blues singers. According to his website, he died while resting peacefully at home.
“He lived a long, full life, and he felt at peace,” said the website, “He loved to say, ‘The world don’t owe me nothing’,” a sentiment he used as the title of his autobiography, published in 1997 by Chicago Review Press.
Honeyboy’s career spanned nearly the entire recorded history of the blues, from its early years in the delta to its migration to the nightclubs of Chicago and its emergence as an international phenomenon.
Over eight decades Edwards knew or played with virtually every major figure who played the blues, including the best known, such as Charley Patton, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf.
He himself was probably best known, though, as the last living link to Robert Johnson, widely hailed as the King of the Delta Blues.
The two travelled together, performing on street corners and at picnics, dances and fish fries during the 1930s.
He described his early years in music to the blues historian Robert Palmer. “We would walk through the country with our guitars on our shoulders, stop at people’s houses, play a little music, walk on.
“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.
“Man, we played for a lot of peoples.”
He did not record commercially until after the second World War. Field recordings he made for the US Library of Congress under the supervision of the folklorist Alan Lomax in 1942 are the only documents of his music from his years in the delta.
Citing the interplay between his coarse, keening vocals and his syncopated "talking" guitar on recordings like Wind Howling Blues, many historians regard these performances as classic examples of the deep, down-home blues that shaped rhythm and blues and rock'n'roll.
He was renowned for his intricate fingerpicking and his slashing bottleneck-slide guitar work. Though he played in much the same traditional style throughout his career, he also enjoyed the distinction of being one of the first delta blues musicians to perform with a saxophonist and drummer.
David Edwards was born in Shaw, Mississippi, to parents who worked as sharecroppers. They nicknamed him Honey, which later became Honeyboy.
His mother played guitar; his father, a fiddler and guitarist, performed at local social events.
His first real exposure to the blues came in 1929, when the celebrated country bluesman Tommy Johnson came to pick cotton at Wildwood Plantation, the farm near Greenwood where the Edwards family lived at the time.
"They'd pick cotton all through the day, and at night they'd sit around and play the guitars," he recalled in The World Don't Owe Me Nothing. "Drinking that white whisky, that moonshine, I'd just sit and look at them. I'd say, 'I wish I could play'."
He eventually made Chicago his permanent home in the 1950s and performed frequently in its clubs and at an open-air market on Maxwell Street.
He achieved new popularity during the 1960s blues revival, appearing near the end of that decade with Willie Dixon and Buddy Guy on sessions that produced both volumes of the album Blues Jam in Chicagoby Fleetwood Mac. He produced 14 albums of material in total.
Honeyboy Edwards was elected to the Blues Hall of Fame in 1996 and was named a National Heritage Fellow by the National Endowment for the Arts in 2002.
In 2007 he appeared as himself in the movie Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. Participants included Keith Richards, Robert Cray, Joe Perry, Lucinda Williams, BB King, Big Joe Williams and Ace Atkins.
Edwards won a Grammy Award in 2008 for the album Last of the Great Mississippi Delta Bluesmen: Live in Dallas, and a lifetime achievement Grammy in 2010.
He played his last gigs at the Juke Joint Festival and Cathead Mini-Festival in Clarksdale, Mississippi last April, and was still playing as many as 100 shows a year when he stopped touring in 2008.
He is survived by a daughter, a stepdaughter and several grandchildren.
David “Honeyboy” Edwards: born June 28th, 1915; died August 29th, 2011