David "Honeyboy" Edwards defied the odds by only increasing his stature as a performer as he aged into his nineties with his skills and charms still intact. Both as a singer-guitarist and an oral history source, Edwards, was treasured as a living link to the Mississippi country blues of his old friends Robert Johnson, Tommy McClennan, and Big Joe Williams. Born June 28, 1915 (or 1914 according to some Social Security and census records), Edwards rambled and gambled his way through the Delta and beyond in his early years. He first recorded for the Library of Congress in Clarksdale in 1942 but only sporadically during the next two decades. Moving to Chicago in the 1950s, he continued playing in a style that resembled that of his mentor Big Joe Williams, the king of the rambling blues bards, in its idiosyncracies — a trait that later served him well as a senior statesman of Delta blues, but one which rendered him a secondary figure for years on the more structured postwar Chicago blues band scene. As the original purveyors of Delta blues faded away, however, Honeyboy was well prepared to carry the tradition into the 21st century. Recording for and traveling with Michael Frank of Earwig Records, Edwards became a favorite at concerts and festivals around the world and may have played in more countries than any bluesman other than B.B. King. When ill health finally sidelined him at the age of 95 (or 96), Honeyboy’s fire finally burned out on Aug. 29, 2011, in Chicago. He left a legacy not only of cherished music and memories but of a Blues Hall of Fame Classic of Blues Literature, his autobiography <i>The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing.<i>
— Jim O’Neal
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