David “Honeyboy” Edwards, the once-itinerant Delta blues singer and guitarist who late in life won two Grammy Awards, toured almost until his death Aug. 29 at age 96.
Such was his longevity that, as a young man in Mississippi, he performed with Robert Johnson, one of the most influential and enigmatic bluesmen of all time. Late in life, Edwards improvised in a Connecticut nightclub with Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards.
Edwards’ death, from congestive heart failure at his home in Chicago, was confirmed by his manager and harmonica player, Michael Frank.
Edwards won a 2007 Grammy for traditional blues album with the recording “Last of the Great Mississippi Delta Bluesmen — Live in Dallas,” a collaboration by Edwards and three other elder statesmen of Mississippi blues: Pinetop Perkins, Robert Lockwood Jr. and Henry James Townsend.
Last year, Edwards was awarded a lifetime achievement Grammy.
After the deaths of revered blues performers such as Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and Johnny Shines, Edwards was regarded as an eminence of the Delta blues. From the 1980s onward, Edwards became a mainstay at festivals, clubs and concerts and even performed for grade-school students.
His spirited performances resounded with his life experiences. He had been a sharecropper, hobo and juke joint entertainer – a living witness to an impoverished and racially segregated Jim Crow world far removed from that of his much younger, comfortably middle-class audiences.
Recalling his sharecropping youth, Edwards once said, “The doctor we had was the same one that went to the mule. Working for them white folks, you have a doctor come to you about twice. If the doctor talk to your boss and say, ‘Well, he ain’t goin’ to get well,’ then the boss quit spending money on you.”
His 1997 autobiography, “The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing,” from transcribed interviews, recounted a youth spent hitchhiking and hopping freight trains throughout Mississippi and Arkansas, and his arrival in Chicago in the early 1950s.
In the book, Edwards claimed to have been with Robert Johnson in August 1938 at the Three Forks juke joint in Greenwood, Miss., when a man reputedly poisoned his whiskey because of a rivalry over a woman. Three nights later, Johnson died at 27.
In 1942, Edwards made his first-known recordings when folklorist Alan Lomax of the Library of Congress tracked him down and paid him $20 — a fee that seemed like a windfall.
Edwards also recorded in the 1950s for both Sun Records in Memphis and Chicago-based Chess Records, although those vintage recordings were released only in later decades.
When Fleetwood Mac went to Chicago in 1969 to record its all-star album “Blues Jam in Chicago,” the English band sought out Edwards to perform on the record alongside fellow Chicago bluesmen Buddy Guy and Willie Dixon.
David Edwards was born June 28, 1915, on a plantation in Shaw, Miss. He was given his first guitar by his father, a guitarist and fiddler who played rural dances. His early influences included Mississippi blues guitarists Tommy Johnson and Big Joe Williams. Edwards’ father allowed him to travel with Williams in the winter months when there was no cotton to pick.
“Joe changed my life and I was glad of it,” Edwards said in his autobiography. “I didn’t want to be in that field from sun to sun, can to can’t see. I was going to make it with the guitar. I could make more money playing than picking cotton.”
With Williams, he furthered his guitar technique and learned how to hop freight trains and ride the rods.
After nearly two decades of hoboing that took him as far north as Milwaukee and as far west as Oregon, Edwards settled in Chicago in the early 1950s and married.
His wife, Bessie, died in 1972. A son, David Edwards, also died. Survivors include a daughter, Betty Washington, and stepdaughter, Dolly McGinister, both of Chicago.
In Chicago, he performed in South Side blues bars and at the open-air market on Maxwell Street while moonlighting as a construction laborer and factory worker.
While his accompanists sometimes had difficulty with his quirky timing, Edwards proved formidable as a soloist or in a trio that included his manager Frank.
“That was part of the fun of it, his unpredictability,” said Frank, referring to Edwards’ musical timing. “He loved to throw curveballs on the bandstand. He would laugh knowing that he was messing with us, but that made it fun.”
In 2004, Edwards had a surprise guest on stage when the Rolling Stones’ Richards went to a performance at a small club in Southport, Conn., and sat in the front row.
“We felt it was appropriate to call him up at the end,” Frank told the Toledo Blade. “So, of course, it made more press than anything else Honeyboy has done.”