The Original Source
Honeyboy Edwards

David "Honeyboy" Edwards is, quite literally, the last word in authentic Delta blues. Born in 1915 in the tiny town of Shaw, Mississippi, Edwards is, now that Robert Jr. Lockwood has passed on, the sole living link to the one and only Robert Johnson; as a boy, the now 93-year-old Edwards played and traveled with—and was musically tutored by—Johnson himself. To call Honeyboy Edwards a walking, talking, and forlornly howling museum of the blues doesn’t quite nail it; his connections to practically every significant blues legend could fill a book—and actually have: his riveting 1997 autobiography, The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing (Chicago Review Press), which eloquently and evocatively recalls the rough and vibrant world of a field-working, rail-hopping, freewheeling bluesman hoboing around the pre-civil rights South making music with one giant after another. And on November 14, this final ambassador to the very source of all that begat R&B, rock ‘n’ roll, soul, funk, rap, and the rest returns to the Rosendale Café.

"Having Honeyboy at the café is like having access to a pure, secret spring whose waters contain a healing elixir," says the venue’s famously savvy booking agent/manager Mark Morganstern, who brought this real-deal country bluesman to town last year. Those blues fans lucky enough to be anointed by Edwards’s transcendental 2007 appearance will no doubt attest to the healing properties of his gruff, primal voice and slashing slide guitar.

And as mind-blowing as the singer’s Robert Johnson connection is, however, his ties to the immortals don’t end there. Edwards also actually performed with Johnson’s monolithic peers Charley Patton and Son House. He learned to play guitar from the great Tommy Johnson and was further mentored by Big Joe Williams—before being discovered in 1942 by no less than Alan Lomax, who recorded him for the Library of Congress at fabled Clarksdale blues crucible Stovall’s Plantation. Edwards was childhood pals with Tommy McLennan and Robert Petaway, worked rural juke joints with Yank Rachell and Big Walter Horton and Chicago’s Maxwell Street and Southside clubs with Willie Dixon, Muddy Waters, B.B. King, Sonny Boy Williamson, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Johnny Temple, Magic Sam, and Floyd Jones, to name only a few. In the 1950s he cut sides for both Sun and Chess, something few bluesers outside of the towering Howlin’ Wolf (another Edwards running mate) ever did. If the term "blues lightning rod" has ever applied to a single artist, it most certainly does here.

Few who caught Edwards in performance last year would have been prepared for what they witnessed: a nonagenarian artist with a voice endlessly more powerful, pain-wracked, and life-celebrating than blues pretenders a quarter of his age. And the way Honeyboy’s slide and fingers get around the neck of his guitar is enough to make those same aspiring young players decide to stick with their data-entry jobs while they take notes (literally) from the master. Yet despite his advanced age, Edwards shows surprisingly few signs of slowing down. Perhaps, when the blues run so thickly and richly through your veins, 100 really is the new 90.

David "Honeyboy" Edwards will perform at the Rosendale Café on November 14. www.rosendalecafe.com.