David "Honeyboy" Edwards

Last May, during a conference on "Race, Gender & the Blues" at Dominican University, the master harmonica player Sugar Blue addressed the theme in an impassioned, unforgettable soliloquy. Lamenting that blues increasingly has been expropriated by white...

Pinetop Perkins lived the blues. Born on a cotton plantation near Belzoni, Miss., in 1913, he worked the fields from age 7, drove a truck for a living at 18 and got stabbed in the arm in his late 20s. The barroom attack tore his tendons and cut his...

You can't find the blues on radio very easily these days, unless you hunt low down on the dial in the small hours of the morning. Same with TV -- a vast wasteland, as far as real blues is concerned. Record stores -- remember those? -- no longer can...

Ask Jody Williams about Howlin' Wolf's legacy, and he'll rattle off remarkable numbers about the old Chicago bluesman. Not chart statistics. Measurements. "Well, he was a pretty big man," said Williams, 78, who played guitar for Wolf (a.k.a. Chester...

David "Honeyboy" Edwards, the son of a sharecropper, the grandson of a slave and — for an extraordinary 80-plus years — the voice of the Delta blues, died Monday at his home in Chicago, said his longtime manager, Michael Frank. He was 96 and...

Pinetop Perkins, a regal piano player who was one of the last of the original Mississippi Delta blues musicians, died Monday of cardiac arrest at his home in Austin, Texas. He was 97. "He was absolutely the premier blues piano player," said Bruce...

DAVID 'HONEYBOY' EDWARDS, 96 Delta blues singer, guitarist David "Honeyboy" Edwards, the once-itinerant Delta blues singer and guitarist who late in life won two Grammy Awards, died Monday of congestive heart failure. Such was his longevity that, as a...