Touring the Blues Freeway | Nationwide Geographic

After touring with Big Joe for a time, Honeyboy discovered his personal path someday in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. “I was on a bridge. They was catchin’ crab on it—had the nets down with meat in ’em. Somebody say, ‘There’s a boy with a guitar. Can you play that guitar, boy?’ I started to play on that bridge, and people started stoppin’ catchin’ crabs and listenin’ to me. Gave me nickels and dimes. I say, ‘I don’t think I need Joe Williams.'” 

Honeyboy Edwards remains to be a blues grasp. Having listened to a recording he made in 1941, I’m astounded, listening to him in 1998, that the facility of his voice and enjoying has not diminished. In the blues, as he exhibits, the singer’s vocal timbre drives the emotional influence of the track as a lot because the lyrics. Like Willie Foster, Honeyboy is a residing historical past of the blues, with private information of each main blues determine from Charley Patton and Robert Johnson to Muddy Waters and Little Walter. When requested about Robert Johnson, he smiles for a second, thoughts flashing again. “He definitely liked the women and his whiskey.” 

The essential distinction between slavery and sharecropping, finest mirrored by bluesmen like Honeyboy Edwards, was the relative freedom to transfer: from discipline to discipline, from discipline to manufacturing unit. Moving on is a frequent theme within the blues, a chorus that is known as a code for freedom and alternative. 

By the flip of the century tens of 1000’s of African Americans had already left the South, some becoming a member of land rushes to Kansas and Oklahoma, others going to northern cities, the place alternatives appeared better and oppression much less. But with the appearance of World War I and the accompanying demand for elevated manufacturing within the industrial North, the true exodus from the Delta—and all the South—started. 

Honeyboy Edwards was not fairly two years previous in 1917 when Black America’s most generally learn newspaper, the Chicago Defender, ran this advert: “The Defender invites all to come north. Plenty of room for the good, sober, industrious men. Plenty of work. For those who will not work, the jails will take care of you. When you have served your 30 days at hard labor you will then have learned how to work. Anywhere in God’s country is far better than the southland…. Don’t let the crackers fool you. Come join the ranks of the free.” 

Eighty p.c of America’s ten million Blacks lived within the South in 1917, when the nation entered World War I. Chicago’s busy brickyards, meatpacking homes, and metal mills had lengthy attracted European immigrants, however the struggle halted this circulate. Meanwhile white manufacturing unit staff within the U.S. have been going to Europe to struggle, leaving a vacuum simply as industrial demand was hovering. Southern Black labor was an answer. Once below method, the motion out of the South ebbed solely throughout the Thirties Depression, with the numbers between 1940 and 1970 exceeding one million folks a decade. 

You may assume that in a area rife with racial pressure, the place Blacks typically outnumbered whites, the exodus was welcomed. Not so. “Where shall we get labor to take their places?” requested Alabama’s Montgomery Advertiser. In Mississippi legal guidelines imposed fines or jail on brokers—often Blacks—who inspired laborers to depart the state. Charles Johnson, a sociologist who traveled in Mississippi in 1917, famous that an agent “would walk briskly down the street through a group of Negroes, and without turning his head would say in a low tone: ‘Anybody want to go to Chicago, see me.'”