>>PREVIEW
DAVID "HONEYBOY" EDWARDS
Friday, May 18
Red Onion
Legendary Delta bluesman David "Honeyboy" Edwards’s recording career started in 1942, the year the legendary Alan Lomax travelled to Mississippi to record the several giants of the blues. Imagine, Lomax, working for the Library of Congress project, recorded Son House in Memphis the week before he found and recorded Honeyboy. The week after, Lomax recorded Muddy Waters. Names in blues history just don’t get any bigger than that.
Honeyboy’s story, however, has a twist to it. It’s not enough that this 92-year-old has known and played with just about every blues legend you can name, including the near mythical Robert Johnson, and his career reads like something out of a novel. First, there’s the funny story that Edwards tells about how Lomax picked him up for the recording date. He laughs as he recalls that day.
"He went out to my aunt’s house Monday morning where I was and I was about laying out to sleep," says Edwards. "He was driving a brand new Hudson, a new car, a Hudson Super Six. It was a beautiful car then, dark green and he drove up in the yard and my aunt thought it was the police or detectives and she was scared to talk to him. He said, ‘Does Honeyboy live here?’ and she looks at him and she says, ‘I don’t know, he comes here sometimes.’ So he saw that she was scared and he said, ‘I’m from the library, I want him to record some records with me.’ He saw she was scared, so she went back (inside the house) and she said, ‘A man out there he come for you.’ I said, ‘You tell him I’m getting ready,’ and I got my harp and guitar."
Edwards went with Lomax and recorded 14 tracks in a big school house near where Muddy Waters used to stay before he went to Chicago. Edwards remembers two things about that schoolhouse – the storm and the money.
"The trustees had them a big room out there," he recalls. "We recorded in that room, a big room and there come up a storm that day in the middle of the session and we had to stop. It was about 11:00 a.m., the storm come up about 11:30 and we had to quit about an hour. At 1:00 p.m. we started back up. It had blowed over and about 2:30 we was through. He (Lomax) gave me $20 and that’s more money than I’d ever had in all my life.
Edwards laughs again as he remembers that $20. "I kept that $20 about two weeks," he says.
By 1951, Edwards had laid down the first of his commercial recordings with Arc Records. Since the late-’80s he’s released another eight albums and an autobiography titled The World Don’t Owe Me Anything. His career’s been made, his reputation secure, but Honeyboy just keeps going. It’s not for the money though.
"I’ve been doing pretty good in the last years or so and made good money and everything," he confesses. "I made enough that I really don’t have to work regularly or nothing, but I just like to do what I’m doing."
Lucky for us. |
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