Edwards, Honeyboy, 1915-2011

David "Honeyboy" Edwards (June 28, 1915 – August 29, 2011) was an American delta blues guitarist and singer from Mississippi ...

David Honeyboy Edwards; born 1915, Shaw, Bolivar County, Mississippi, died 2011, Chicago; Grammy Award Winning Musician. With a career spanning 80 years, he was probably the last of the original generation of Delta Bluesmen. Raised in rural Mississippi by a sharecropper family of amateur musicians who gave him the nickname "Honey", he was taught to play the guitar by his father. After meeting and hearing Tommy Johnson in 1929, Edwards embarked on a 20 year career as an itinerant singer and guitar player that saw him perform with Pinetop Perkins, Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, Charley Patton, and others, and represented the final link to the legendary Robert Johnson who was known as "The King of Delta Blues"; he traveled and played numerous gigs with Johnson and was with him on the 1938 evening when he drank the poison liquor that killed him. His first recordings were made by Allan Lomax at Clarksdale, Mississippi in 1942 for a Library of Congress project and consist of 15 sides including "Wind Howlin' Blues" and "Army Blues". In 1951 he settled in Chicago, at first supporting himself as a factory worker and construction laborer, and made his initial studio records; one of the earliest bluesmen to employ a saxophone player and a drummer, he was to continue performing as both a lead and a sideman for the remainder of his life and was to gradually gain an international following. Edwards was to write a number of songs including "Long Tall Woman Blues", "Just Like Jesse James", and "Gamblin' Man", and was to take part in Fleetwood Mac's late 1960s album "Blues Jam in Chicago". His autobiography "The World Don't Owe Me Nothin'" was published in 1997; he was inducted into the Blues Hall-of-Fame in 1996, was named a National Heritage Fellow by the National Endowment for the Arts in 2002, earned a 2008 Grammy for "Last of the Great Mississippi Delta Bluesmen: Live in Dallas", and was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Grammy in 2010. Edwards gave his final public performances at Clarksdale in April 2011 and died of congestive heart failure; at his death most of his recorded legacy remained in print. Of his art he said: "You could play the blues like it was a lonesome thing-it was a feeling. The blues is nothing but a story...the verses which are sung in the blues is a true story, what people are doing, what they all went through. It's not just a song, see?".