Interview with Mary K. Lee

NEA: Congratulations on your award. What your reaction when you heard the news?

MR. EDWARDS: Well I was glad and I appreciate it very much.

NEA: Did you have friends and family that you were able to share it with?

MR. EDWARDS: Yeah I got two daughters here. One wants to come with me to D.C.

NEA: Tell me about growing up in Mississippi and learning how to play guitar and blues music.

MR. EDWARDS: I was about eight or nine years old when I started to play. My daddy played the guitar and violin. Every time he put his guitar down I'd pick it up. I kept picking around with it and he started to show me how to play. I played in the country dances and different things down by Greenwood Shaw, Mississippi in the Delta. When I got to be seventeen years old I was good enough to go on the road with Big Joe Williams. I was out on a tour with Big Joe from Greenwood to New Orleans. When I left him and went back home to the country, my sisters and them were standing around me and listening like they never heard nobody play before. They said, "Honey can play now."

NEA: When Alan Lomax recorded you, what was that experience like?

MR. EDWARDS: He recorded me in 1942 on a Monday in Clarksdale, Mississippi. He drove up to the house in a brand new '42 Hudson and I was there with my auntie. She had never seen no white folk with a big car like that, in '42. She said, "That man has a big car."

He asked her, "David Edwards lived here?"

She said, "I don't know. He stays here sometime." But she's scared to tell him yeah.

He said, "Well I just want him to do some recording. I want him to make records for me and everything. I'm from Washington. D.C., from the Library of Congress and I want him to record for me."

She then said, "Let me see if he's around here anywhere." She said, "There's a man out there in a big car."

And I said, "That's the one I've been saying I expected. Tell him I'm here."

She said, "Yeah, he's in here asleep. He'll be out in a few minutes though."

I got up, put on my clothes and went out to the car. We went to Clarksdale, Mississippi on highways 49 and 61. I rented a room in a house there and he rented a place in a school for the recording. We started recording about eleven, but a storm came up around a little before twelve and broke up the recording. We had to stop mid-way in the recording. Came up like a tornado. We stopped for about an hour and when it blew over we started the recording again and got through the session. He gave me twenty dollars and that was more money than I had in a long time. At that time that was a lot of money.

He'd recorded Muddy Waters and Son House the same week before he got to me. He was getting most of the black blues that he could find down through there then.

NEA: When do you think the blues was the most popular?

MR. EDWARDS: Most popular? Well the guitars, I'll tell you what, the guitars got real popular back in the late forties because they had started to make amplifiers to hook them up to. That gave the guitar player more push to get jobs. People could sit down and stand off and listen to what you were doing. Before that the piano player was starving the guitar player to death because the piano was made loud. They are really loud and you don't need nothing, no mikes to hook up to a piano. You could hear that two blocks down the street without it hooked up to anything. And with a guitar you had to be like two or three playing together, a violin, a guitar, probably a mandolin and drum thing, good they got hooked up with electricity. That's where you played in with four or five together they could hear you, make a lot of noise together.

But right now you could take a trio band playing with the good electric amplifiers and with people that can play good, and you could hold a crowd as good as you could with seven or eight pieces.

NEA: When you're teaching students, what advice do you give them?

MR. EDWARDS: What advice? I tell them if you're playing the blues - or whatever you're playing - to keep it up. It might pay off some day. If you like doing it, keep doing it. Don't ever quit.

When I was young I'd be walking sometime down the highway with my guitar on my back and people would be picking cotton beside the highway and say, "Boy you better take that guitar off your shoulder, you're going to starve to death, you get yourself one of these sacks now." I didn't pay them no attention. I just kept on a going because I liked my music.

I get to the town and that evening, when the field workers came back to town - the trucks would carry them out to the country to work on the farms and they'd bring them back into town in the evening - they'd get off the truck and drink whiskey and beer, you know. When they'd get there, I'd be playing on the street. They'd say, "Didn't I see you walking down the highway?" I said, "I come down that away." A man says, "I didn't know you were that good. I just thought you were somebody walking with a guitar." He'd be the first one that gave me a quarter. So people don't never know what you can do.

NEA: Do you think the students face any challenges continuing the tradition, the blues music?

MR. EDWARDS: Well I'm telling you, blues music it's not going to go. I don't care how much rock-n-roll and how much rap you got, there's always going to be somebody playing the blues. The blues is a truthful thing. Blues is just like a story. It's like you're going to school. Blues is not going to go nowhere. It may slow down but it ain't going no where. We got too many young blues players playing the blues now,, twenty-five and thirty years old playing the blues and they're not going to quit.

NEA: Now can you tell me what blues music has meant to you?

MR. EDWARDS: Well, in the later years blues music has done a lot to me and lots for me. I've been everywhere I've wanted to go playing the blues. I've been in China. I've been in Tokyo, Japan. I've been in Germany. I just left Germany three weeks ago. I've been in Finland. I don't know how many places I've been in Switzerland, Sweden, I've been all over there. I've been in Ireland, Belfast and Dublin. So I've been everywhere. I've been all over the world playing the blues.

NEA: I just had one final question. I was hoping you could tell me what you're looking forward to at the awards ceremony in DC?

MR. EDWARDS: I got five guitars but I don't know what to bring. I got a straight, electric, I don't know what to bring.

NEA: What are you looking forward to the most?

MR. EDWARDS: Well I'm looking forward to doing the best I can and enjoying it. That's the best.