Deep in Chicago’s South Side ghetto, David “Honeyboy” Edwards chuckles as he
recalls a life lived on the margins of American society. “I came up the hard
way, but I made it!” he whoops. Born in 1915, Honeyboy is the last man
standing of the delta-blues originals. His 93rd birthday approaches, but
Honeyboy refuses to retire, insisting that he is looking forward to his
forthcoming British tour: “I gets restless if I stays home too long. I
always likes to be moving since I was a boy. Just hope England have some sun
fo’ me.”
Honeyboy laughs, inky black skin creasing over Indian cheekbones, his gold
teeth gleaming. Is he laughing at memories of Britain? Or is he bemused by
his own survival, the facts of which defy any known odds?
Born to sharecroppers in Shaw, Mississippi, Honeyboy - a childhood nickname -
describes his early years with a relish worthy of Mark Twain. He grew up on
a plantation where panthers and bears roamed, picking cotton, catching
catfish, hunting raccoons and possums. His parents instilled in him both
literacy and racial pride, while his maternal grandmother recalled the days
of slavery. Sharecropping was, in many ways, legitimised slavery, with
plantation-owners ensuring black farmers remained trapped by debt and fear.
Honeyboy saw the plantation consume his parents, so looked to escape. A
guitar was his ticket to freedom.
“My father, he played violin an’ guitar - a pretty good musician. He’d play
Stagger Lee, songs like that. He played in a ragtime style. I first really
heard blues in 1929, when Tommy Johnson [the author of Canned Heat Blues]
came, him an’ his brother, Clarence, in a Model T Ford to pick cotton with
us. We’d be playin’ the blues on cotton sacks an’ drinkin’ white whiskey.
Play the blues all night an’ go pick cotton the next mornin’.”
In 1931, the restless 16-year-old began hoboing around the south. Arrested for
“trespassing” on a freight train, he was put to work on a prison farm.
There, he saw prisoners being flogged to death while “they worked the rest
of us to death. The boss always said, ‘When a nigger dies, hire a nigger. If
a mule dies, buy a nigger’”. Malarial, Honeyboy was released after four
months and returned to sharecropping. Plantation life held little appeal,
and an encounter with Big Joe Williams (the author of Baby, Please Don’t Go)
introduced him to the itinerant bluesman’s life of hitching and hoboing,
playing on streets and at parties. Williams took Honeyboy to New Orleans
(“It was something to see them bright lights”), then the youth set out on
his own. “Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas... I played everywhere, but I was
scared to go to Georgia at that time. It was too rough.”
What, I inquire, made Georgia so difficult? “White folk!
Yeah, they’d stop you on the highway an’ make you work the farm. I didn’t want
to go through with that!”
Honeyboy avoided Georgia, but trouble still found him: jailed for vagrancy
(several times) and assault (once), stabbed, shot at and beaten with rocks
and a hammer. “Sometimes you get in bad crowds,” he says of such scrapes.
“Sometimes you get in the way.”
Honeyboy lived in constant motion, rarely staying anywhere longer than a week,
playing music, hustling with loaded dice and living off accommodating women.
“Preachers an’ musicians are just alike,” he says. “They ain’t no good.” The
American outlaw life put him in contact with other musicians; he is seen as
a kind of Mississippi Zelig, there at key musical moments, having befriended
many individuals now considered blues icons.
“Elmore James, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Memphis Minnie, BB King - I
remember when he just a lil’ boy watchin’ me play guitar.”
Most notable of all his friendships was one with a youth four years his
senior: that legend of the blues Robert Johnson. “I knowed him pretty good.
He used to go with my cousin in Tunica, Mississippi, Willie Mae. Robert was
about the quietest musician I ever did come across. He liked to drink
whiskey an’ play the blues lonesome an’ sad. He was never a hell-raiser,
never cussed an’ fought. But he played blues good. Played ’em hard an’ good.
He’d take his time to put a lot of things together, put the notes together
like drops of water. An’ the people liked what he was doing.”
Honeyboy witnessed Johnson’s agonising death and speaks of his friend with
quiet reverence. “Now, when he died, August 16, 1938, that was on a Tuesday,
I come over there an’ I was around 23 years old. Robert was 27 then. He got
poisoned out there, a little place called Three Forks. He had been playin’
out there for pretty close to a year. They had a roadhouse out there called
Juke House - white whiskey, gamblin’. Robert started goin’ with the man’s
wife, an’ she a good-lookin’ woman. An’ the man got him.”
After two decades of rambling, Honeyboy settled in Chicago in 1951 with his
wife, Bessie, and daughter, Betty. “Gravel roads come to Chicago then, just
two lanes from St Louis, Route 66. A lot of A-frame buildings on State
Street an’ people makin’ whiskey. It was a big country town.” He chuckles at
the memory, then adds: “I was here when the old man put the towers up an’
I’m still here when the kid knocked ’em down” - a reference to the infamous
South Side housing estates, built in the 1950s by the city’s mayor, Richard
Daley, and recently torn down by the current mayor, Richard Daley Jr.
Initially, Honeyboy made a living playing the South Side bars; but, as black
American tastes changed from blues to soul, he was forced to work in
factories. Johnson had vanished from history soon after his death, and
Honeyboy, too, looked likely to be forgotten. The 1960s blues boom, however,
resurrected Johnson as “king of the delta blues”, and this led scholars and
young musicians to Honeyboy. He admits this was a surprise, especially when
Fleetwood Mac invited him to record with them in 1969.
“It was on a Monday. Willie Dixon [the author of many blues standards] come to
my house an’ tell me Fleetwood Mac asked if he knowed me. He said, ‘Yeah, I
know Honeyboy.’ An’ they said, ‘Well, get him in, we wanna record with him.’
So we go on down to Chess studios, 21st an’ Michigan. An’ we recorded, me
an’ Fleetwood Mac. Had a good time. They paid us some money.”
In the early 1970s, Honeyboy met a young white musician, Michael Frank, who
became his manager. Frank turned him into an international attraction and
helped him to write his hugely entertaining autobiography, The World Don’t
Owe Me Nothing. Having shared this year’s Grammy for Best Traditional Blues
Recording with several other veterans, Honeyboy declares that his new album,
Roamin’ and Ramblin’ (released on the Earwig label), should win next year.
His 2007 UK tour sold out; the promoter Rupert Orton believes British
audiences respond to Honeyboy’s music and iconic status. “He’s a phenomenal
player,” Orton says, “and the last link to the Mississippi blues musicians
who created the template for much modern music.”
“Life is good,” Honeyboy says. “Beyond some pain in my knees, I feels fine.”
He still smokes and drinks, likes to drive and lives in a rough Chicago
neighbourhood.
“I carry a piece when I steps outside,” he tells me when I suggest he could
shift to a safer location. “A boy carjacked me in ’96 an’ I cut him with a
razor. Yo’ don’ mess with me.” Asked the secret to long life and good
health, he shrugs and says: “I shoulda been dead 50, 60 year ago. God jus’
wasn’t ready fo’ me. Because I usta raise hell. I’ve had my fun.”
Honeyboy is good company across a bleak Chicago afternoon. He cooks, jokes,
takes countless phone calls (“All wantin’ some money from Honey”), tells
tall tales from days gone by (“I remember everythin’ since I was five”) and
casts a laconic gaze over contemporary America.
“I go back to Shaw, Mississippi, where I grew up, an’ now it got a black
mayor, black people runnin’ nice hotels an’ businesses. White folk own the
businesses, but it’s better. I gets treated good there now. Things
change.”
They certainly do; just look at Barack Obama. “Yeah, we could get a black
president,” he replies.
Does Honeyboy know if Barack likes the blues? He pretty frisky,” says the last
bluesman, his gold teeth glinting, “so he probably do like the blues.”
Honeyboy Edwards’s UK tour details are at www.punkrockblues.co.uk/dates.html#honeyboy
; Garth Cartwright travelled to Chicago as a guest of the Chicago-Illinois
Tourist Board (www.gochicago.com )
