Last May I wrote a column on what would have been the 100th birthday of Delta blues legend Robert Johnson, who according to folklore, traded his soul for his superior guitar skills. Black blues musicians playing Mississippi Delta roadhouses in the 1930s seemed almost as distant to our day as serfs tilling the soil of Medieval England.
Almost as distant.
I felt this sweet, good feeling, knowing one of Johnson’s contemporaries was still around, still with his faculties, still – at 96-years of age – in possession of his blues guitar and showmanship talents. David “Honeyboy” Edwards was 17 when he left home to hop freight trains and play fish fries and roadhouses with Johnson. Edwards was with Johnson at a Greensburg, Miss. Juke joint on the fateful night in 1938 when he drank from a bottle of whiskey that turned out to be laced with poison.
Edwards carried on. He was part of the Great Migration that brought African-Americans and the blues to the urban North where the old black folk music was amplified. Long after Robert Johnson, had receded into history and mythology, Edwards remained on stage – a fleshly, living connection to a time gone. He lived to see a world that Johnson could never have believed, real.
In the Jim Crow South, a black man caught after dark was at risk of being lynched. When Johnson supposedly sold his soul at the Crossroads, the real devil on his trail was the racist white man. A black man caught in daylight, not working, was also in danger of the rope. That’s why Edwards waited until sunset to go out playing for the folks.
However in January of 2009, he was welcomed and cheered on at Washington D.C.’s Black Cat nightclub. It was the eve of Barrack Obama’s inauguration as 44th President of the United States.
“I never thought I’d live to see the day a black man got elected president,” Edwards said.
This past spring Edwards was back in the Mississippi delta, celebrating his old friend’s centennial birthday bash in the land where blues was born. Honeyboy didn’t know that the show he gave at a Clarksdale, Miss. juke joint on April 17 would be his final performance, but it turned out to be so.
In July when Edwards’s manager Michael Frank announced he was retiring from touring due to health problems, I knew what would probably come next. The performance he would have given in Chicago on Aug. 29 was cancelled and Honeyboy Edwards died peacefully in his sleep.
The last man to have known or played blues with Charley Patton, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Sonny Boy Williamson, Tommy Johnson, Sunnyland Smith, Peetie Wheatstraw, Son House and Big Joe Williams returned naked and to the dust from which he was born.
“That piece of history from that generation, people have to read about it from now on,” Frank said.
