David “Honeyboy” Edwards
June 28, 1915 – August 29, 2011
Blues Hall of fame blues guitarist and singer
David Edwards was born June 28, 1915 in the delta of Shaw, Mississippi. His parents were sharecroppers. His parents, who worked as sharecroppers, gave him the nickname Honey, which later became Honeyboy. His mother played the guitar; his father, a fiddler and guitarist, performed for the community. At a tender age he would help his mother to pick cotton in the plantation fields. He would sit and listen to his parents and eventually his father encouraged him to do the same and purchased for him his first guitar. David father taught him how to feel and sing folk blues. The folk blues was an interpretation of the suffering of being enslaved and not having a free will or finances. The songs would be filled with running away from plantation with a metaphoric song of love such as I” am leaving you baby and not coming back no more going to run run far and come back no more”.. Every day he would practice to perfect this gift.
He went to school in 1920 but did not complete his academic requirements. He dropped out at around the 5th or 6th grade. At the age of 14, he left home he would hop on trains to begin the life of an itinerant musician which he led throughout the 1930s and 1940s. During that time, he played with many of the leading bluesmen of the Mississippi Delta, including Robert Johnson and Big Joe Williams and many others.
Edwards did not record commercially until after World War II. Field recordings he made for the Library of Congress under the supervision of the folklorist Alan Lomax in 1942 are the only documents of Mr. Edwards’s music from his years in the Delta. He did not record again until 1951 when he recorded “Who May Be Your Regular Be.” Other albums by Edwards include “Drop Down Mama” (1953), “I’ve Been Around” (1995), and “Roamin’ and Ramblin’” (2008).
On August 29, 2011 Edwards died at his home, of congestive heart failure, at approx. 3 a.m at the age of 96.
He was the complete embodiment of the delta its joy and pain. He lived the life and the industry had the chance to take full advantage of his life gift. He was an inspiration to many artist for over eight decades who today hold him in high regards as an iconic leading figure of the blues genre as a singer and composer.
Edwards won the 2008 Grammy Award for Best Traditional Blues Album for “Last of the Great Mississippi Delta Bluesmen: Live in Dallas.”
He was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1996.
In 1997 Edwards published his autobiography, “The World Don’t Owe Me Nothin’,” .
2002: National Endowment for the Arts, National Heritage Fellowship Award
2005: Acoustic Blues-Artist of the Year (26th W.C. Handy Blues Awards)
2007: Acoustic Artist of the Year (The Blues Music Awards)
2008: Grammy Award; Best Traditional Blues Album for Last of the Great Mississippi Delta Bluesmen: Live In Dallas
2010: Lifetime Achievement Award, Grammy; Mississippi Governor’s Awards For Excellence in the Arts
2010: Lifetime Achievement Award, National Guitar Museum