The Essence of the Blues
My Brother Michael & David
“Honeyboy” Edwards:
A Friendship For The Ages.
By Allan Dodds Frank
One of the world’s greatest and longest running musical partnerships
ended gently at 3 am Monday August 29 in Chicago when blues guitar
legend David “Honeyboy” Edwards died in his sleep. As the last of
the first generation Mississippi Delta bluesmen, his death closes a
chapter in the history of music. And it meant parting company with
his harmonica player/manager/biographer/record label owner and
closest friend Michael Robert Frank for the last time in their
39-year professional collaboration. Michael and Honeyboy had played
together for more than 38 years in hundreds of bars, auditoriums,
arenas and festivals all over the world.
At 96, Honeyboy was the last Mississippi bluesman alive who had
played with Robert Johnson, the man regarded as the king of the
blues guitar. When Honeyboy was 22, he was in Greenwood,
Mississippi, with Johnson the night he was poisoned and died,
presumably by a jealous husband, according to Honeyboy’s
autobiography “The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing,” which he told to my
brother Michael Robert Frank and co-author Janis Martinson.
At 17, Honeyboy, the son of a sharecropper, began venturing far from
home in Shaw Mississippi as an itinerant bluesman, playing his
guitar for nickels and dimes on the streets of Mississippi,
Tennessee Alabama, Arkansas and Louisiana. Between 1932 and 1956 he
played in 13 states, gambling, working odd jobs, and playing the
blues. He settled down in Chicago in 1956.
In 1972, my brother Michael Frank was just out of college and working as a social worker rescuing abused children when he met Honeyboy at Biddy Mulligan’s, a Northside Chicago bar that featured the blues. Michael, a budding harmonica player, had moved to Chicago from our hometown of Pittsburgh, Pa., to hear and meet blues musicians in local clubs. He considered the elder bluesmen as revolutionaries, during the depression and pre-civil rights era.
Honeyboy, Big Walter Horton, Sunnyland Slim and some of the other
old blues legends in Chicago began teaching Michael how to play,
sharing their stories, and tutoring him in the traditions and
nuances of the blues. Those lessons remained much in evidence when
Michael accompanied Honeyboy as he always complimented and filled in
the sound of the lead guitar player and singer and never played over
him.
The secret, I think, to their relationship was that Michael listened
to Honeyboy and appreciated his wisdom and life experience. Michael
absorbed the music and the stories. As my brother says: “Honeyboy
wasn’t like a father or even a grandfather to me. He was a friend,
business partner, musical partner and we shared plenty of hard times
together over 39 years.”
In his autobiography, Honeyboy details his wariness of white
dominance over the black sharecroppers he came from and the white
enforcement of crushing segregation. If he trusted anybody, it was
Michael and no matter who had an offer or a request, Honeyboy would
say, “Ask my manager.” He was never star-struck, a lesson he also
imparted to Michael.
I know, I was backstage at big shows with Michael and Honeyboy and
it was the big stars who wanted to hang with him. When Martin
Scorsese collected all the living greats at the blues for a historic
concert he filmed at Radio City Music Hall in New York in February,
2003, Honeyboy was the second act – a soloist that night.” Michael
and Honeyboy had to be backstage, so they gave my wife and me their
prime seats near the front. Sitting one row behind us was a star of
the second act, Steven Tyler of Aerosmith, his wife and his
daughter, the model and actress Liv Tyler. As Honeyboy was
playing one of his most classic numbers, “Gamblin' Man,” Tyler was
riveted. He whispered to his daughter: “Imagine how much this old
man knows.”
When Keith Richard appeared unannounced at a small and now defunct
blues club called The Boxcar in Southport, Ct. May 21, 2004 to hear
Honeyboy, he joined Michael and second guitarist Rocky Lawrence on
stage because he wanted to play a number with Honeyboy.
At a House of Blues special tribute to Honeyboy in Boston October 8,
2010 organized by The Reel Blues Fest, Bradford Whiford of
Aerosmith, James Montgomery and three dozen other bluesmen and women
clamored to join Honeyboy on stage and later- in the Blues
Foundation Room. Honeyboy –right down to his memorable venerable
face- oozed the blues just talking to you.
Although Honeyboy was not known for his songwriting and did not
compose many songs, his treatment of the blues classics was
unmatched, whether it was “Goin' Down Slow,” “Pony Blues” or Robert
Johnson’s “Sweet Home Chicago.” His fingers were lightning fast and
strong. Especially when he played slide guitar, Honeyboy’s sound was
instantly distinctive – penetrating and clear – note-by-note. He was
one of the few slide masters who played in standard tuning.
He liked to talk to his audiences and mix in a little history about
his life on the streets, riding boxcars during the depression and
playing with nearly every name of note in the entire history of the
blues. As Chicago Sun-Times writer David Hoekstra put it: Honeyboy
was the “Shaman of the Blues.”
If you can listen to his albums my brother produced on Earwig Music,
you will understand the loving sense of musical history that went
into making them. Check out Earwig for "Old Friends", “David
Honeyboy Edwards Delta Bluesman,” “Roaming & Rambling,” and “The
World Don’t Owe Me Nothing.”
As a special treat, I booked Michael and Honeyboy to play at my 60th
birthday party on the lawn at our house in Lyme, Ct. To accommodate
me, they performed in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, suburban New York
and New Jersey. Arriving exhausted after a Saturday night gig in
Boston, at age 92, Honeyboy insisted in napping in the car before he
played that Sunday afternoon.
His set was magical, a tour of the blues classics that he began with
a simple admonition. “Now listen up, cause I ain’t playing no dance
music.”