Edwards was born in
Shaw, Mississippi. He learned to play music from his father, a guitarist and violinist. At the age of 14, he left home to travel with the bluesman
Big Joe Williams, beginning life as an itinerant musician, which he maintained through the 1930s and 1940s. He performed with the famed blues musician
Robert Johnson, with whom he developed a close friendship. Edwards was present on the night Johnson drank the poisoned whiskey that killed him, and his story has become the definitive version of Johnson's demise. Edwards also knew and played with other leading bluesmen in the Mississippi Delta, including
Charley Patton,
Tommy Johnson, and
Johnny Shines. He described the itinerant bluesman's life: The
folklorist Alan Lomax recorded Edwards in
Clarksdale, Mississippi, in 1942 for the
Library of Congress. He did not record commercially until 1951, when he recorded "Who May Be Your Regular Be" for
Arc under the name Mr. Honey. and produced by the
ethnomusicologist Peter B. Lowry.
Kansas City Red played for Edwards for a brief period, and Earwig recorded them in 1981, along with
Sunnyland Slim and
Floyd Jones, for the album
Old Friends Together for the First Time. His autobiography, ''The World Don't Owe Me Nothing: The Life and Times of Delta Bluesman Honeyboy Edwards'', published in 1997 by the
Chicago Review Press, recounts his life from childhood, his travels through the American South, and his arrival in Chicago in the early 1950s. A companion CD with the same title was released by
Earwig Music. His long association with the Earwig label and with his manager,
Michael Frank, led to several late-career albums on various
independent labels from the 1980s on. He also recorded at a church turned recording studio in
Salina, Kansas, and released albums on the APO label. Edwards continued the rambling life he described in his autobiography, touring well into his 90s. Between 1996 and 2000, he was nominated for eight
W. C. Handy/Blues Music Awards, including for his albums
White Windows, ''The World Don't Owe Me Nothin'
, Mississippi Delta Blues Man
, and a 2007 album on which he appears with Robert Lockwood Jr., Henry Townsend and Pinetop Perkins titled Last of the Great Mississippi Delta Bluesmen: Live In Dallas''. Edwards died of
congestive heart failure at his home on August 29, 2011, at about 3 a.m. According to events listings on the Metromix Chicago website, he had been scheduled to perform at noon that day, at the
Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago's Millennium Park. ==Discography==