Still as Tupelo Honey

Or
Back to the Roots
David Honeyboy Edwards, last of the first generation of Delta blues singers, really has a reason to sing the blues, having died of congestive heart failure at the age of 96. Edwards was there from the start of the blues movement, hitchhiking or hopping freight trains from gig to gig, playing street corners, picnics, and fish fries. Basically, he was a vagrant with a guitar. But unlike Kenmore Square’s Mixed Nuts, he made great music. And played an actual guitar, not a hand-drawn cardboard cutout. Edwards took his incessant whining about life’s trials and tribulations, accompanied by intricate fingerpicking and slashing bottleneck-slide guitar work, from the street corners to seedy Chicago nightclubs in the 1950s, and then was championed by pretentious snobs who pretended they’d always big fans during the blues revival of the 1960s, when he started recording on major labels. Despite lacking a prerequisite heroin addiction, Edwards was elected to the Blues Hall of Fame in 1996 and named a National Heritage Fellow by the National Endowment for the Arts in 2002, a Grammy for blues album in 2008 and a lifetime achievement Grammy in 2010 before achieving the crowning glory of his career, a cameo appearance as himself in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.