The world don't owe me nothing

by Honeyboy Edwards

From sharecropper's son to itinerant bluesman, Honeyboy's life reads like a distillation of the classic blues legends. His good friends and musical partners were blues pioneers Charlie Patton, Big Walker Horton, Tommy McClennan, Sunnyland Slim, and Robert Johnson, among many others. He saw some of the first blues musicians in the Delta: Tommy Johnson, Son House, and older artists unrecorded and lost to us. Honeyboy went on the road to play guitar at age seventeen with Big Joe Williams. He hopped the freight trains of blues lore - the Pea Vine, the Southern, and the Yellow Dog - and played the riverboats, juke joints, and good-timing houses along the dusty roads of the Delta. In the thirties, Honeyboy was playing in Handy Park on Beale Street during that seminal era of Memphis's music scene. Eventually the blues led him to Texas, to Deep Ellum in Dallas and to Houston, where he and the blues took on a new sound. In the late forties he brought a teenaged Little Walter to Chicago and toge