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Saying it with feeling; the real deal Delta blues

Who: Honeyboy Edwards Where: Dusty’s When: Sunday, April 6 Here's a musical history lesson you cannot afford to miss.

Who: Honeyboy Edwards

Where: Dusty’s

When: Sunday, April 6

Here's a musical history lesson you cannot afford to miss. One of the last surviving original Delta bluesmen, David "Honeyboy" Edwards, is on his way to Whistler, and while the Mississippi music man may be 88-years-old, he still has a lot to say and a lot to play.

Edwards is still recording, still singing and still teaching the ways of the blues in pubs, clubs and music schools across North America. In an interview from his home in Chicago, the softly spoken friend of the late and legendary big names of the game, like Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson and Big Joe Williams, shared some of his stories with us. He rolled off dates, gigs and famous colleagues spanning more than 70 years as if it was yesterday.

Edwards decided to walk in the footsteps of fellow blues greats when only a teenager. He began playing guitar in 1920, with lessons from his father. Like most bluesmen of his generation, Edwards had no formal musical training. He learned by doing time playing in farmhouses, in dance halls, raucous juke joints and on private properties for people who took him in along the way. In between jobs he'd jump trains to nowhere, making money off hustling with dice, often meeting women along the way who’d take care of him. The stories are all there in the songs, a key element to singing the blues – where life and the music are one and the same.

In his autobiography, The World Don't Owe Me Nothing, Edwards described his long musical journey: "The blues is something that leads you on," he said. "Everywhere the blues took me was home."

Honeyboy Edwards was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1996. His guitar and vocal performances are moving and intense. Listening to his live performances, one readily understands how Honeyboy Edwards has been captivating audiences around the world for decades.

Pique:

What type of blues do you like playing?

HB:

I play a mix of blues, from the low-down dirty to the more up-tempo stuff but mainly the Delta blues. Me, Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson, Big Joe Williams, we all played the Delta blues but we changed our style to the boogie woogie blues for people to dance to. Rob Johnson started that. He came out and he got famous right away. He learnt it to himself and other musicians came behind him.

Pique

:
Why do you think the blues is still so popular today?

HB

: It’s a true thing. The blues started from slavery. People would work all day long and they weren’t allowed to talk to each other or sing so instead they would hum so the day didn’t seem so long. Then in the 1920s, guys came out and started playing it in front of people in the name of the blues and the slaves.

Pique

: What do you think of artists in today’s world who take elements of the blues and put it into pop or hip hop songs?

HB

: They’re just doing their thing and whoever like it can like it. I like some pop songs but most of them don’t have a feeling to it. They just do something that other people have done for them or what they’re told to do but when you play music yourself, it’s in your heart cos you gotta learn how to read it and hear it before you make it. With the blues you gotta have something to say and then you gotta mean it.

Pique:

What advice do you have for the next generation of musicians then ?

HB

: I tell them if you're playing the blues, or whatever music, to keep doing it. Don't ever quit. As a boy I'd be walking down the road with my guitar with no place to go and people were picking cotton just staring at me. Some folk would say, "Boy you better give up that guitar on your back, you're going to starve to death, you get yourself one of these jobs now." I didn't pay them no attention. I just kept doing my music. I’d get to the town that evening and when the workers finished on the farms they'd be at the joints drinking and when they'd get there, I'd be playing. They'd shake their heads and say, "Didn't I see you walking down the highway?" I’d say "yes" and they’d say they didn’t know I was any good and be the first to give me a quarter. So people don't ever know what you can do.

Pique

:
You chose the path of music when you were very young, while most people went into farming, so it must have been quite daring to become a musician.

HB

: I first started playing on the streets as a kid and people would give me nickels and dimes and quarters and I started to get good so papa and I started in playing in the clubs and caverns. Like a three-piece together. I hopped the trains and went to New Orleans and while down there, I got asked to record in Houston, Texas and I got a band out there, a five-piece, and started making a lot of money and started doing a lot of recording. I eventually made enough that I didn’t have to get a job. I didn’t feel like I was working and yet I was making money. I been doing that ever since. Festivals are the best. For every one I play, I get one to three thousand dollars to put right in my belt. I got New Orleans coming up and another one in Washington. Three thousand right there, ha, ha.

Pique

: You did an album with Eric Clapton, who’s known for singing the blues, but how do you feel about all the other new players coming through the ranks?

HB

: More white boys are playing the blues now than ever. Some of them can play as good as I can but most of them can’t. Just a few though but their voice is still not like our voice. Even in Japan, out of Tokyo we got some Japanese boys who play damn good guitar but they can’t sing. They just go "oy oy." The thing with the blues, it’s not just the music, you gotta say something behind it too. You got to have a speech to really make it blast off and sound like the blues.