RIP Alex "Little Bill" Wallace

Delta Blues native Alex "Little Bill" Wallace of Leland, Mississippi passed away on Sunday, August 10, 2009. "Little Bill" was one of the first delta blues men to play the electric guitar. Wallace influenced and performed with many great musicians including BB King, whom he played with in their younger days.
Photo: Alex "Little Bill" Wallace with Alex Thomas, Mississippi Blues Trail Director at the David "Honeyboy" Edwards marker ceremony on April 13, 2007.

Blues and Barbershop

Scott Barretta writes about the new home o fht Highway 61 Blues Museum in the Clarion Ledger:

The Highway 61 Blues Museum in Leland celebrates its move to a new home with live performances by local musicians T-Model Ford, Eddie Cusic, Eden Brent, Duff Durrough and Pat Thomas. Artist Cristen Barnard will be on hand to sign her poster for the ninth annual Highway 61 Blues Festival, which takes place on June 7 and will feature 92-year-old Honeyboy Edwards.

The museum, founded in 2002, celebrates the blues artists native to the mid-Delta region including Little Milton, Tyrone Davis, Jimmy Reed and dozens more. Its new location is the former Montgomery Hotel building at 307 North Broad St.

The new, larger space also allows for temporary exhibitions, and the first is a series of photographs of Delta artists by Murfreesboro, Tenn.-based Bill Steber. Since 1992, when he shot a session with Leland's James "Son" Thomas, Steber has returned more than 100 times to document the places and people of Mississippi blues.

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Belhaven College in Jackson, Mississippi hosts the Barbershop Harmony Society this weekend.

Dressed in matching red vests and bow ties, their voices carry on an American music tradition that emerged in the 19th century. The Jackson barbershop group Magnolia Chorus will perform, as well as two guest barbershop quartets - the Colorado group Redline and Tennessee's Lunch Break, whose members will compete during the Barbershop Harmony Society's International Convention in Nashville later in June.

Derrick said the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barbershop Quartet Singing in America was organized in the late 1930s, and by the 1960s, the organization claimed 48,000 Americans members. Derrick said Mississippi has chapters in Columbus and Biloxi, too. As one of the oldest American chapters, the Jackson group has around 35 members, and many will perform with the Magnolia Chorus at Belhaven.

"It's definitely a unique sound," he said. "It's traditional American music, and we'd like to get a lot of young folks involved."

Read the full story here: Barbershop group brings harmony to the stage

Honey Today, Hot Tamale

The Associated Press has this profile of interest: (Full story at the link) 'Honeyboy' Edwards outlasts them all

Edwards has a legacy that almost no living musician can match, and as the last Delta bluesman still standing he's found he's in demand. In the last year alone, he's released a new album, won Grammy and Handy Awards, appeared in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story and done interviews for three documentaries due out in 2009 and 2010.

With all the activity, though, Edwards finds he's often tired these days. He was in Tunica on May 8 for the Blues Music Awards, in Jackson May 9 and in Crystal Springs May 10 to play a festival on a bill that included Pinetop Perkins, one of the few musicians who can claim to know Edwards when he was a young man.

Edwards, who turns 93 on June 28, was scheduled for a day of rest upon his return to Chicago, then it's off to Europe for 10 dates. He still plays about 70 gigs a year and the calls keep coming.

Edwards learned the guitar growing up in Shaw and first started playing professionally in Memphis as a teenager. By the 1950s he had played with almost every bluesman of note - Tommy Johnson, Charlie Patton, Big Joe Williams, Sonny Boy Williamson I, Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters - across the decades.

He is believed to be among the last people to have seen Robert Johnson alive and was there the night the man legend says sold his soul to the devil died from poison. Of all the great blues musicians, Johnson's shadow has proven the longest, something Edwards admits he never would have imagined 70 years ago when his friend was killed, likely by a jealous husband who poisoned Johnson's whiskey. "Robert, he was really easy, I never heard him cussing with you," Edwards said. "He was a good musician. He liked whiskey and womens, that's all."

In news related to the Delta blues, the Chicago Reader has a piece on the history of the Delta tamale (full story at the link): On the Trail of the Delta Tamale - Southern food sleuths take on the murky origins of the mother-in-law sandwich

The SFA, which is based in Oxford, Mississippi, published its Tamale Trail documentary project (tamaletrail.com), a study of the Delta tamale that includes a map, a film, and a number of oral histories. One short segment on the “Chicago Connection” features an interview with a Mississippian who sold Delta tamales here in the 60s and 70s. He mentions a southern woman who sold mother-in-laws in the suburbs at the same time, which sparked the theory that the sandwich has southern origins.

Engler says that Mexicans, Greeks, Armenians, and Poles probably all had a role in the development of the mother-in-law. But he doesn’t discount the southern influence, pointing to a 1921 Tribune article about African-American tamaleros’ efforts to unionize. “Those probably were homemade Delta tamales,” he says.

The tamales at J’s are handmade in batches of three dozen by Yoland Cannon, a native of Leland, Mississippi, who runs a construction company and drives around town advertising them on the side of his truck. He grew up with hot tamales but only learned to make them about a year ago—from a “secret” source in the south. (Based on the way he tells the rest of the story, it sounds like that might be his mother.)

“Chicago ain’t nothing but a big old Mississippi,” says Cannon, whose intended market is southern emigres who buy tamales frozen back home and bring them up south—which is to say that, at least with respect to Delta tamales, the Great Migration continues.

According to Edge, who’ll be in town with Camp Chicago, it’s been flowing backward as well. “I’m seeing the exchange between Mississippi and Chicago working both ways,” he says. “I’m seeing ‘Windy City gyros’ and Chicago hot dogs in Mississippi. It’s people in their 20s and 30s—they’re moving back home.”

Robert Johnson Blues Foundation Hall of Fame

Raymond Reeves writes about the Robert Johnson Blues Foundation Hall of Fame dinner and shares the teacher behind the Robert Johnson devil myth (read the full story: Playin' the blues)

Ask a music expert about the birthplace of the blues, and the answer will be quick and simple: the Mississippi Delta. But central Mississippi can stake a claim as well, as the birthplace of one of this genre's most influential figures.

Robert Johnson [of Hazlehurst], who, legend says, sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads of highways 61 and 49 in Clarksdale, will be honored this weekend with the annual Blues Jam. The event, in its fourth year, is organized by the Robert Johnson Blues Foundation and features an awards banquet at Jackson's TelCom Center on Friday and a festival in Crystal Springs on Saturday.

The banquet, scheduled for downtown Jackson on Friday night, includes the induction of the latest class into the foundation's hall of fame: David "Honeyboy" Edwards, the last living blues artist known to have played with Johnson, and the late Ike Zinnerman, who will be represented by members of his family. Zinnerman apparently played such a role in Johnson's life that his influence is reflected in the famous legend regarding Johnson's talent.

"Ike Zinnerman is the great bluesman who shared his knowledge of the guitar with Robert Johnson," Clapton wrote. "The (Johnson) family says that, when Robert Johnson came down to study with Ike Zinnerman, he was not that great of a guitarist, quite frankly. When he studied with him, he worked with him so intensely that when he went back to the Delta people were saying 'Man, what happened to you? You must have sold your soul to the devil.'"

U.S. 61 to get Blues Trail marker

The Associated Press reports:

Gov. Haley Barbour on Thursday will unveil a marker designating U.S. 61 as part of the Mississippi Blues Trail. The ceremony will be held at the Tunica Visitors Center on U.S. 61 in Tunica.

"As the most famed stretch of roadway in Mississippi's storied history, it's only fitting that the highway be permanently and officially designated as the Blues Highway to honor the many talented artists whose travels made it come alive as one of most enduring cultural icons," Barbour said in a statement.

Among the dozens of blues artists who recorded songs about U.S. 61 were Mississippians Sunnyland Slim, James Son Thomas, David Honeyboy Edwards, Big Joe Williams, Joe McCoy, Charlie Musslewhite, Johnny Young, Eddie Burns, Blind Mississippi Morris, and Mississippi Fred McDowell.

Honeyboy on Blues and Rap

Honeyboy Edwards and Bobby Rush are playing in Ontario on Sunday. The Star has a short interview with Honeyboy: "The blues will always be with us, Mississippi Delta blues legend David 'Honeyboy' Edwards admits over the phone from his home in Chicago, but he's worried about how to win over a new generation of African Americans who seem to have turned their backs on their own musical legacy. 'More white people care about the blues these days,' said the 92-year-old guitarist and singer. 'The black kids are doing rap, and there's no feeling in rap. It's just rhymes and a beat. You need music to give a song its feeling. And that means you've got to learn to play an instrument. You need an instrument for the blues to survive. And the rap kids aren't interested.'" (Read More Here)

"The Color of Blues" Photography Exhibit

Join fellow blues artists and enthusiasts at the opening reception of "The Color of Blues" photography exhibit this Friday from 5:30 to 9 p.m. at Schimmel's Fine Dining, 2615 North State Street in Jackson, Mississippi. The full color exhibit, which opened for the nationally acclaimed Smithsonian's American music roots "New Harmonies" exhibit, features the work of Mississippi photographer Marianne Todd. The exhibit features such artists as BB King, Bo Diddley, David "Honeyboy" Edwards, Bobby Rush, Sam Carr, Patrice Moncell and the legendary House Rockers. The reception includes live entertainment by blues musician Chris Gill. Come out for a cultural evening, light hors d'oeuvres and some great blues music and visual art.

Honeyboy - the convincing bluesman

This profile in the London Telegraph of David "Honeyboy" Edwards includes three videos (David 'Honeyboy' Edwards performs Gamblin Man' --- He Plays and describes learning the guitar --- He tells stories about life on stage) and tells his story from the Mississippi Delta to Chicago to European success:

On a perfect Chicago summer afternoon, the man regarded as an oracle of Mississippi blues lore is scouring a pawn shop for a guitar case. David "Honeyboy" Edwards approaches this task with a veteran's eye, but his battered features crease when he's told I want to ask some questions.

"What's the matter?" chides his manager. "Tired of talking about yourself?" Honeyboy, a very sprightly 92, agrees that he's weary. But an English tour is on the horizon and tickets must be sold. Yet where to start? Honeyboy's a legend of Delta blues, the last man standing of pre-Second World War American music. So is he surprised to be playing the blues aged 92?

"I should have been dead 50, 60 years ago," he says. "God just wasn't ready for me. Because I used to raise hell and drink. I've had my fun!"

Fun, alongside hard times: born to sharecropping parents in the heart of the Mississippi Delta, Honeyboy began picking cotton as a small child. His grandmother told vivid stories of slavery days, and sharecropping was, in many ways, legitimised slavery, with plantation life devouring his parents. "The doctor we had was the same one that went to the mule," he says. "Working for them white folks, you have a doctor come to you about twice. If the doctor talk to your boss and say, 'Well, he ain't goin' to get well,' then the boss quit spending money on you."

Honeyboy - he attracted the nickname as a child - set out to find his fortune aged 16 by jumping a train to Memphis. This was 1931, Depression-era America, so Honeyboy joined the hoboes. Between stints of farm work he begged and rode trains. "I'd ride the rods, too, underneath, because the cops would never look down there for you. The rods are kind of rough, though. The train be running so fast it would throw rocks up and they'd hit you."

Arrested for riding a freight train, he was sentenced to 30 days' hard labour on a county farm. Barely surviving the chain gang, he returned to sharecropping briefly before setting out for good in 1932....He witnessed Charley Patton and Tommy Johnson, the musicians regarded as Delta blues founders, play his plantation. Big Joe Williams tutored him in music and hoboing; he busked with the Memphis Jug Band; befriended Howlin' Wolf when both were teenage farmhands. In 1942 Alan Lomax recorded him for the Library of Congress and in 1945 he took the teenage harmonica prodigy Little Walter to Chicago.

In Chicago Honeyboy was signed by seminal blues label Chess Records....on Monday he starts an eight-date English tour, a trek that would leave a young rocker weary. Surely the pace must make a man born in 1915 feel, well, shattered? And England is only the last stop of a 30-date journey around Europe. "Touring can be hard," he says. "Getting' up stairs is difficult. I just have to walk slow."....Honeyboy lives in Chicago's tough South Side - carjacked in 1996, he boasts of stabbing the thief ("I cut him good!") and carrying a pistol ("Crack makes them boys go crazy"). Which is perhaps why he remains such a convincing bluesman. (Read the full story here)

Friday News Roundup

Hattiesburg native Hot Dollar has new material out: a single "Streets On Lock" and the album "My Dreams...A Day in the Life." DJBooth.net has an interview with this up and coming rapper.

Bluesman David Honeyboy Edwards, a Shaw, Mississippi native, is approaching his 92nd birthday in Chicago and as this article makes clear "sees no reason to slow down."

Gary Clark Jr - the "future of blues music in Texas" - plays with Mississippian Pinetop Perkins tonight at Antone's in Austin, Texas.