David "Honeyboy"Edwards
Traveling Up and Down the Road

by Gianluca Tramontana

When David "Honeyboy" Edwards boarded a plane in his adopted hometown of Chicago to open for 90-year-old string-band fiddle player Howard Armstrong in New York, it marked the 67th year that he had traveled, guitar in hand, to bring blues music to eager ears. Things are a little different for him now from the conditions of the 30s and 40s, however. Back then, being a traveling musician meant jumping on and off freight trains, hitchhiking, avoiding jealous husbands and corrupt law enforcement officers, relying on the kindness of strangers, and supplementing one's income with a bit of gambling.

Instead of being invited by Symphony Space and The World Music Institute to entertain at The Miller Theater, performances back then would have been in minstrel shows, levees, and saw-mill camps, juke joints, brothels, gambling dens, or bootleg whiskey houses. A dangerous and precarious life, to say the least.

Edwards, from Shaw, Mississippi, is the last link to those times. Times when Blind Lemon Jefferson was a star – the James Brown of his day – rather than a fixture in the domain of the discriminatory connoisseur to be studied in a historical and sociological context, as is being done today. They were times when people didn't get into the blues; if you lived in the parallel world that was black reality, that was what you came from, the soundtrack of your experiences. Before the radio and gramophone became household items, the only way for most people to hear music in the home was to play music in the home. "My father played violin and guitar, too," remembered Edwards. "My mother played harp – kind of a musical family. They played parties, country dances, in the streets sometimes."

Always fascinated by the music, it wasn't long before a young Edwards started learning the guitar from his father. "I wanted to play guitar, so my daddy bought me one," he said. "The first dance I played for, I was 14. Some people were staying in the country and they were giving a dance that night and they had one of them wind-up gramophones – where you put the record on and wind it up – and they broke the spring in it." So, with guitar in hand and permission from his father, the young Edwards marched over to supply the music at the host's request and, that night, became an entertainer. "I sang a hundred songs, but played the same piece all night," he laughed. "That was the first time I ever got drunk on whiskey. I come home Sunday morning, had the gui tar on my shoulder. I started drinking whis key from then on, and from then on I started to playing the guitar."

When he talked, Edwards proudly and vividly recounted stories in a thick, smokey pre-war Mississippi drawl. When he hit on certain moments of his life, his eyes conveyed a slight child-like enthusiasm and, though he is a street-wise traveler, one could catch a glimpse of the young and eager son of a sharecropper. He also possesses the ability to bring alive the days when performed music was an integral part of the social fabric and, in most cases, the only form of entertainment. On weekends, when people would come into town with time and money on their hands, musicians would perform in the street. Traveling blues musicians would go from town to town following the weather and the harvests – when there would be more spending money in circulation. Edwards would come to know just about all of them, including the small percentage of those who were fortunate enough to get recorded.

This is an excerpt. Read the full article in Dirty Linen #87 (Apr/May '00).