David ‘Honeyboy’ Edwards, 1915–2011

The last of the original Delta bluesmen

David “Honeyboy” Edwards rode the rails and played at Mississippi fish fries with iconic bluesman Robert Johnson in the 1930s. “We would walk through the country with our guitars on our shoulders, stop at people’s houses, play a little music, walk on,” he once said. Edwards was on hand when Johnson drank the poisoned whisky that killed him, in 1938, and six decades later, he was still keeping the original Delta blues sound alive.

Edwards was born in Shaw, Miss., as the son of a sharecropper and grandson of a slave, said the Chicago Sun-Times. His father, a guitarist and violinist in “country jukes throughout Mississippi,” bought him a Sears guitar for $4 and taught him how to play. At the age of 14, Edwards left home to hobo with guitarist Big Joe Williams, who helped cultivate the musician’s “distinctive style of uneven phrasing and skewed timing.”

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