Here I Go Again Memory Lane
Whitesnake legend Bernie Marsden reflects on time spent with late bluesman Honeyboy Edwards
Iconsider myself to be lucky when I think about the music that was around when I was growing up. I started with The Shadows – Hank Marvin was my first guitar hero – and I then discovered the Mersey Beat phenomenon, which confirmed me as a Beatles fan. By the time I was 15, I was introduced to electric Chicago blues. I was given Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and Sonny Boy Williamson LPs, but I had to cast aside my Searchers and Freddie And The Dreamers LPs in order to have them. I suppose The Rolling Stones made me first aware of the blues; Brian Jones’s slide guitar on Little Red Rooster really resonated with me, but music from The Animals and The Yardbirds played a role, too.
From the age of 15, I was collecting as many blues LPs as I could afford. I was fortunate to have a friend who was a bit older than me who knew a thing or two about pre-war blues, which consisted of acoustic guitar, harmonica, pipe, a basic drum beat and the fiddle. My friend had a fine collection of 78rpm discs. I began to play along with the blues records after my friend told me to simply listen and learn. I still do that today. I heard Big Bill Broonzy, Skip James, Kokomo Arnold, and then an artist on a scratchy 78 on the Vocalion label I immediately recognised as Robert Johnson. By this time, I was hooked on the John Mayall and Eric Clapton Blues Breakers LP of 1966, so I knew Ramblin’ On My Mind was a Robert Johnson song. Since then, so since I was 15 years old, blues has been my main pleasure, and BB King soon came into the mix.
I think acoustic blues is an acquired taste. Many people that I know love Chicago electric blues, but a lot of people find acoustic stuff hard to listen to. I have a couple of theories on this. Listening to a full album of Charley Patton’s song after song can be tough, but you have to remember that those 1920s and 30s recording sessions were single songs, one for each side. Those old shellac discs were released two songs at a time only. If the disc was even moderately successful a follow-up would be released; there was no such thing as a long-playing record in the 1930s. Sometimes the recording was of a very high quality. A good example is Hambone Willie Newbern. Another is Kokomo Arnold, and Robert Johnson’s recordings have courted much discussion over the last 30 years – too much talking and not enough listening as far as I am concerned.
Times With Honeyboy
I was very fortunate to become very good friends with David ‘Honeyboy’ Edwards, the Mississippi-born blues singer born in 1915. I met him in 1996 in, of all places, the town hall of my hometown, Buckingham. Honeyboy worked side by side with Robert Johnson, working the street corners, juke joints and rent parties, and they travelled the South together, even venturing to Canada and New York in the early 1930s. I spent a lot of time with Honeyboy in the UK and I visited his home in Chicago.
Honeyboy was with Robert Johnson the night Johnson was poisoned during a juke joint gig. Legend has it that a jealous husband or boyfriend took the chance to pass poisoned whiskey to the young bluesman. Honeyboy more or less confirmed the story to me adding that, “Robert Johnson liked but two things: womens and whiskey.”
He witnessed the start of a terrible death that night. The whiskey was thought to be laced with strychnine, a point Honeyboy was quite animated about with me. He told me that he had used strychnine to get rid of rats when he was younger and that the poison left a strong, unpleasant odour; he said that he would have remembered the smell when Johnson fell sick that night. He added that Johnson would have more than likely consumed most of the bottle. This was normal, he told me, with Robert Johnson. And so ‘womens and whiskey’ saw the end of what people say was the greatest blues singer of all time.
Walkin’ The Blues
Well, I have a few views about that, too, and although it is true that as a guitar player and singer he was almost without equal at the time, it’s worth remembering how common in those days it was for songs to be ‘handed down’. Howlin’ Wolf’s famous song Spoonful was originally recorded by Charley Patton, who actually mentored Wolf in the 1920s. Johnson’s songs can pretty much all be traced from times before his recording sessions, but I can understand why Keith Richards suspected that another guitar player was on some tracks, although we will never know for sure.
Eric Clapton once stated that we should not be too academic about Robert Johnson, and just enjoy the man’s brilliant work as he recorded it in San Antonio, and later in Dallas, Texas. When I was in San Antonio on tour with Whitesnake, I walked around the town asking where the Gunter Hotel was. Nobody knew, but it was gone! I do agree with Eric Clapton’s thoughts on that score, though; Johnson really was an exceptional musician who produced brilliant music.
There is a whole section in my autobiography, Where’s My Guitar?, dedicated to the many bluesmen I’ve had the privilege of meeting and spending time with over the years. The final section of the entire book is about my time with Honeyboy. I spent a lot of my time asking about the guitars he and Johnson used, how they travelled those distances, and simply what was it like to be with Johnson. He told me they “hobo’d” or they would “ride the blinds”, jumping onto trains as they left stations, and did a hell of a lot of walking; I guess that’s where Walkin’ Blues came from.
It seems that they both played Stella guitars, probably ordered from the Sears and Roebuck catalogue service, and Honeyboy still used a pencil tied to the neck with string or with tight rubber bands for a capo. I’m sure that was the way Johnson must’ve done it as well. He told me that strings stayed on until they broke, but that he could usually repair them because they were very long in the old days. Honeyboy played with a thumbpick and a metal fingerpick – he told me Johnson did the same, but accompanied that with a flash of those white teeth and the comment, “But he was better than me!”
Apparently, Johnson would hear a snippet of a hit song of the day and then pretty much play it straight away. He could be mysterious, too, Honeyboy told me. He’d sometimes disappear during the night and not be seen for the next two months. On more than one occasion, Honeyboy hadn’t seen Johnson in months, and then he’d wake up in a room somewhere to find Johnson in there sleeping across from him.
I was in Honeyboy’s house in Chicago one time, and I asked him if he got fed up with people always asking about Johnson. His answer was thought out: “No, I don’t, but as good as he was, there were other players around that nobody even knows the name, an’ that’s a shame, but that boy sure could play the blues.”
I was privileged to spend one-to-one time with David Edwards; he sadly passed away in August 2011 in Chicago at the age of 96. The last link with Robert Johnson was gone. I had played with him, driven him around in rural England, been driven by him around the southside of Chicago, sold merchandise for him, and talked about Memphis Minnie, Big Joe Williams, Sonny Boy and Muddy Waters – I’m a lucky man. See you next month.
“Honeyboy told me how he and Johnson would ‘ride the blinds’, jumping onto trains as they left stations…” Bernie Marsden