David “Honeyboy” Edwards was born in the heart of the Mississippi Delta in 1915. He left his hometown of Shaw and the sharecropper's life as a teenager, when he met Delta bluesman Big Joe Williams. Following Big Joe, he hopped the freight trains of blues lore -- the Pea Vine, the Southern, the Yellow Dog. He learned to play on dusty street corners in small southern towns and the good-timing houses of New Orleans. In 1942 Library of Congress archivist and folklorist Alan Lomax caught up with the fast-moving, itinerant Honeyboy in Clarksdale, Mississippi and recorded 15 of his stories and songs for the Library of Congress collection. These recordings "virtually summarized what Delta musicianship of that decade had to offer”. Frequently sought out by film-makers, historians, and writers for his recollections of earlier days and important musicians, Honeyboy has been a featured musician and narrator in half a dozen films and is mentioned in most of the major books about blues. In 1997, his own book, The World Don't Owe Me Nothing: The Life and Times of Delta Bluesman Honeyboy Edwards, was published. This account is a deeply personal story of his early life as a sharecropper's son and his years as an itinerant musician. It also offers a "vivid oral snapshot of an America that planted the blues." The World Don't Owe Me Nothing has received high critical acclaim. It was declared a "Best Blues Book" by Living Blues Magazine and was honored with the Handy Award for Literature. Honeyboy Edwards was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1996 and was the Blues Music Awards Acoustic Artist of the Year 2007. Honeyboy received a Grammy for the album “Last of the Great Mississippi Delta Bluesmen – Live in Dallas”. The T-Bone Walker Blues Fest and Music City Texas Theater are honored to have David “Honeyboy” Edwards grace our stage.
"Delta blues veteran David Honeyboy Edwards has remained utterly true to his roots through a career that began in Mississippi in the 1930s. A Honeyboy Edwards show is a rare, unselfconscious performance of living blues history."
