The Blues has been described in many ways, but to Honeyboy Edwards it is ‘a leading thing,’ an irresistible feeling that has called him on – away from the home, away from the comfort, away from the arms of loving women. The Blues has taken him along a path that strangely parallels the development of this haunting musical genre.
From sharecropper’s son to itinerant Bluesman, Honeyboy’s life reads like a distillation of classic Blues legends. His good friends and musical partners have included Blues pioneers Charlie Patton, Big Walter Horton and Robert Johnson. He personally saw and knew some of the first Blues musicians in the Delta – artists who were never recorded and have been lost to history.
By age fourteen Edwards was playing Delta juke joints and picnics with Big Joe Williams. Later, he jumped a freight train to play riverboats, juke joints and good timing houses from the Delta to Texas to Chicago. Edwards’ recording career started in 1942 when he cut some fifteen sides for Alan Lomax and the Library of Congress. In the 1950’s, he settled down in Chicago. There, Honeyboy Edwards took up the electric Blues and to this day occasionally plays with a band, but he is best known as one of the few remaining acoustic Delta Bluesmen.
The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing is 212 pages of remarkable first-person recollections of the exciting life of David ‘Honeyboy’ Edwards, which is also a history of the Blues.
— (Blues Foundation press release, 1999.)