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A Delta legend makes a rare visit
BY TED DROZDOWSKI
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Guitarist and singer David "Honeyboy" Edwards, whose travels bring him to Arlington next Saturday, began performing when the notion of touring was an impulse, not a requirement to support new records. This was, after all, a time when records were barely a decade old and Herbert Hoover was in the White House. Going on the road meant hopping a freight with his pal Big Joe Williams or Robert Johnson. Much has changed since then, but Edwards, who at 88 is one of the very last of the original Delta bluesmen, hasn’t changed so much. He still sings and plays as if the dust of the plantations were in his throat and his guitar needed to cut through the clatter of a Saturday-night fish fry or a crowded juke joint full of dancers. And he’s still both wise and worldly — qualities he needed to develop quickly when as a youth he traveled the South with a guitar slung across his back. "You’d better be off the streets and in the fields during the day if you were black back then, ’cause they’d haul you into jail for vagrancy and put you to work, and you didn’t know when they’d let he out," he told me when we last spoke, about three years ago, over belts of Jack Daniel’s at the House of Blues in Harvard Square. Edwards, who relocated from Mississippi to Chicago in the 1950s, is about to make a rare trip East for a New England tour that includes a stop at the Arlington Regent Theatre. He’ll be joined on the tour by Frank Morey, the blues-steeped Lowell singer-songwriter whose national debut, The Delmark Sessions (Delmark), came out last year. The Regent show will also feature world-class blues guitarist Ronnie Earl. Although Delmark is a Chicago-based label, there’s a deeper connection between Edwards and Morey. Despite the nearly 60 years’ difference in their ages, they became pals last year when a stop on one of Morey’s tours put him in Chicago at a bar where Edwards was on the bill. "I was wondering if it was going to be a novelty," Morey says. "You know, the 87-year-old bluesman gets up to play. But then he started slashing at his guitar and these moments of absolute magic started to happen. And he’s a storyteller as well as a musician. Every song he plays, he’ll set up with a little tale of how he picked it up." Afterward, Morey and Edwards shared a table, and Edwards spent hours sharing his experiences with women, music, gambling, and the other pursuits of the itinerant players who developed the blues. A bond was formed. "He’s a great guy," says Morey, "and hopefully over the run of these dates I’ll learn from him." Edwards has already made his life’s lessons more widely available in his autobiography, 1998’s The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing (Chicago Review Press), and in the dozens of albums he’s recorded. Some of his best include the acoustic Crawling Kingsnake (Testament), the live World Don’t Owe Me Nothing (Earwig), and the exceptional Mississippi Delta Bluesman, which gets right to the heart of his music. But he’s best in performance, where his keening falsetto and the cries of his guitar evoke a sense of both history and mystery that’s rarely heard today. Honeyboy Edwards, Frank Morey, and Ronnie Earl play next Saturday, September 6, at the Regent Theatre, 7 Medford Street in Arlington. Tickets are $20, or $40 for VIP seats including a reception with the artists; call (781) 646-4849.
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