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Hoboing With Honeyboy

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Music: Jazz & Blues: Blues

28/08/2012

BBC Radio 6 Music - Hoboing With Honeyboy

A profile of the original hobo, bluesman David 'Honeyboy' Edwards.

A celebration of the original hobo, David 'Honeyboy' Edwards, whose death in 2011 severed a vital link to the music, memories and imagination infusing all blues music.

Celebrating the original hobo, bluesman David "Honeyboy" Edwards, whose death in 2011, severed a vital link to the music, memories and imagination that infuses all blues music. 

American-based music journalist and broadcaster Gianluca Tramontana conjures the "Wild and tangled forests, the broad, unhasting river flows, somewhere 'twixt Memphis and Tupelo", to get to the heart and home of Honeyboy. 

Honeyboy Edwards was among the first generation of pre-war Mississippi blues musicians that rambled the countryside playing juke joints, picnics, house parties: anywhere music was needed. 

He knew the first blues musicians to be recorded, such as Charlie Patton, and travelled with the founding fathers of blues music including Robert Johnson. 

Honeyboy was one of hundreds of thousands teenagers hopping freight trains during the Great Depression. He travelled in search of work - to play music, but his weakness for gambling, wine and women often got him into trouble. 

After the war he settled in Chicago where his reputation as the greatest country blues musician took hold. 

Honeyboy's death in 2011 marked the end of an era, that lives in the hearts of music lovers around the world. His life story is mostly untold, but it's a crucial slice of American history that has been in the shadows.

Tramontana hobos across the country - taking in Chicago, New York, Mississippi and the National Hobo Convention in Iowa - to understand the world and ways of a different type of American hero.

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