The way Honeyboy Edwards plays is the way it’s played. Doesn’t make a difference it it’s Sunflower County, Miss. or  “Space,” in Evanston (which is where I caught him last week at the Second Annual Blues on the North Shore Festival). It doesn’t matter who’s playing with him, either, and that fact was clear in the eyes and hands of guitarist John Primer, bassist Aron Burton and drummers Willie Big-Eyes Smith, followed by his son, Kenny.

Edwards is 94 years old, and where he takes the song is his prerogative.  It may not get there in 12 bars. It may get there sooner. Maybe later. The only flaw is in the listener. 
John Primer didn’t just keep his eyes on Honeyboy: at times his fingers never left the steady security of the bass strings. He’d find the rest of the guitar, and take off on a tear, at a nod from Honeyboy, who would take back the song as quickly as he gave it. If you want to understand what accompaniment is, this was as good a lesson as any. It’s about listening, no matter how many times you think you’ve heard the song. 

I could say I got to talk with Honeyboy, but mostly I got to listen, throwing out a timid question to keep him going, in hopes of hearing anything like the stories he told to Janis Martinson and Earwig Records founder Michael Robert Frank, whose as-told-to biography of Edwards “The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing” is as close as you’ll get to the canon of Honeyboy’s tales. Just let the man speak and get out of the way.

Jeff Dale, an old Southsider, rescued me by buying Edwards a beer. Frank helped with some whiskey. Before long, Edwards was sliding into extemporaneous riffs of his life in the Delta – jumping trains with Big Walter, the government man asking his mother questions, for the 1920 Census. Some were the 8-bar versions, some 12, some of indefinite time and structure. Quite a few were little more than a killer line (Why’d you hop a train to Oklahoma? We was looking for some (women)…). 

The only regret I have is Honeyboy’s tales kept me from the full set of Big Jack Johnson, though the walls shook with his playing, and he managed to get a largely sit-down crowd rocking. Therein is the only drawback of a venue like “Space” and a clientele that had paid for tables and seats. Space is generous in geometry and acoustics, though it lacks the elbow-to-elbow feel of Bill’s Blues Bar, where Jeff Dale and the South Woodlawners played the following night, with the Columbia College Blues Ensemble for openers. For Honeyboy, it seems altogether appropriate to sit down, shut up and listen. For the other players (Bob Corritore, Patrick Rynn, Chris James, Primer, Big-Eyes and Kenny Smith, Bob Stone, Johnson, among others), it seemed a shame no one kicked over a chair or two and pitched a wang-dang-doodle. It would have done Koko Taylor proud. She was laid to rest earlier that day. But in Evanston, the show went on, around a 94-year-old who’s still telling his story. In his time. 

--Geoff Mohan, Performer and attendee of Blues on the North Shore