Singin' the blues a long, long time

Singin' the blues a long, long ti
February 19, 2010
BY JORDAN LEVIN
Miami Herald

You don't often get to hear history singing, but that's what you hear from David ``Honeyboy'' Edwards, one of the last original Delta blues musicians. At 94, Edwards has lived the kind of life in music that doesn't exist in this country anymore.
Performing on street corners and bars for change. Riding freight trains from town to town through the South. Playing with just about every other blues musician you've ever heard of, from the legendary Robert Johnson on through Big Joe Williams, Rice ``Sonny Boy'' Williamson, Howlin Wolf, Sunnyland Slim, Lightnin' Hopkins, Muddy Waters, Big Walter and Little Walter.
For Edwards, who will perform at the Colony Theater Saturday night courtesy of Tigertail Productions, the blues is a lifetime endeavor.
``Music, you don't learn it overnight,'' he said recently from his Chicago home. ``You got to take time to learn music. You got to take time and wants to do it.''
Edwards received a lifetime achievement award at the Grammys last month, and in 2002 got a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
``Ain't too many people know what I know,'' he says. ``I been here a long time. That's why people want to know stuff. Unlike friends of mine, I can think of everything I done. I can think of when I was 5 years old.''
Born June 28, 1915, in the small town of Shaw in the Mississippi Delta, Edwards helped his mother pick cotton, and dropped out of school around the fifth grade. He began learning guitar from his sharecropper father, who also played violin.
``Every time he'd put his instrument down I'd pick it up and I kept going til I got into it,'' Edwards says. At 13, he played his first gig, at a house party where he also got his first taste of whiskey.
At 17, Edwards heard Big Joe Williams, who had just recorded his classic Baby Please Don't Go, at a local dance.
``I kept lookin at him and he said, `What you lookin at? Can you play?' And I said, `Yes, I can play a little bit.' He tossed the guitar to me, and I rode the neck a little bit. And he said, `I can learn you to play.' ''
Williams took Edwards with him to New Orleans. Scared by the older man's drinking and fighting, Edwards struck out on his own after about six months, but he didn't go home.
``I thought I was too good to stay in the country,'' he says. Instead, he traveled around the South, hopping freight trains, playing music for nickels and dimes, gambling on the side. He lived for a while in Memphis, but was restless.
``I didn't want no wife. I wasn't lookin for a wife,'' Edwards says. ``I made enough money to take care of myself gamblin' and playin music.''
Of all the musicians Edwards mixed with, the most famous was Johnson. A legend about him selling his soul to the devil in exchange for his talent is as much a part of the fabric of the blues as Johnson songs such as Come On Into My Kitchen.
The two played together a number of times in 1937-38, including a Saturday night in August 1938 at a Mississippi roadhouse where the owner, the jealous husband of a woman who was seeing Johnson, gave the bluesman a bottle of whiskey laced with strychnine.
``We got there 'bout 11 p.m. and he was sick from that pint of whiskey,'' Edwards says. ``People was begging him to play everything, and he said, `I'm sick. I don't feel good.' Sunday morning I didn't go to his house. And he died on a Wednesday.''
Edwards' mobility meant he didn't record much, and his output as a songwriter was limited. In 1942, Alan Lomax recorded him playing 15 songs for the Archive of Folk Song at the Library of Congress, the influential repository of traditional American music.
In 1945, Edwards cut several tracks for Chess Records, the famous Chicago label that launched blues greats Howlin Wolf and Muddy Waters, but those recordings weren't issued for years, and even then only in an anthology.
A turning point came in 1972, when he met blues fan and harmonica player Michael Frank in Chicago, where Edwards settled in 1951. Frank became his manager, producer and musical partner, and has released four albums of Edwards' music on his label, Earwig Records, including Roamin and Ramblin, which won a Grammy in 2008.
At this year's Grammys, Edwards got to chat with Roberta Flack and Quincy Jones, and appeared briefly on the telecast.
``I saw so many rock stars and so many people were coming up to me I had my head hurting,'' he says. ``It was just something I never seen before.''
Edwards says he doesn't mind that recognition is coming late in life. After all, he's still performing and touring.
``I feel pretty good,'' he says. ``I have arthritis in my knees, but my hands are just as fast as when I was 20. Don't nothing come til the time come. . . . and God let me live til that time come.''