September 4, 2011 · 4:10 PM
↓ Jump to Comments

IN REMEMBRANCE: 9-4-2011

DAVID HONEYBOY EDWARDS, DELTA BLUESMAN

Jack Vartoogian/FrontRowPhotos

David Honeyboy Edwards performing in New York in 1991.

By BILL FRISKICS-WARREN

Published: August 29, 2011

 

David Honeyboy Edwards, believed to have been the oldest surviving member of the first generation of Delta blues singers, died on Monday at his home in Chicago. He was 96.

His death was announced by his manager, Michael Frank.

Mr. Edwards’s career spanned nearly the entire recorded history of the blues, from its early years in the Mississippi Delta to its migration to the nightclubs of Chicago and its emergence as an international phenomenon.

Over eight decades Mr. Edwards knew or played with virtually every major figure who worked in the idiom, including Charley Patton, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. He was probably best known, though, as the last living link to Robert Johnson, widely hailed as the King of the Delta Blues. The two traveled together, performing on street corners and at picnics, dances and fish fries during the 1930s.

“We would walk through the country with our guitars on our shoulders, stop at people’s houses, play a little music, walk on,” Mr. Edwards said in an interview with the blues historian Robert Palmer, recalling his peripatetic years with Johnson. “We could hitchhike, transfer from truck to truck, or, if we couldn’t catch one of them, we’d go to the train yard, ’cause the railroad was all through that part of the country then.” He added, “Man, we played for a lot of peoples.”

Mr. Edwards had earlier apprenticed with the country bluesman Big Joe Williams. Unlike Williams and many of his other peers, however, Mr. Edwards did not record commercially until after World War II. Field recordings he made for the Library of Congress under the supervision of the folklorist Alan Lomax in 1942 are the only documents of Mr. Edwards’s music from his years in the Delta.

Citing the interplay between his coarse, keening vocals and his syncopated “talking” guitar on recordings like “Wind Howling Blues,” many historians regard these performances as classic examples of the deep, down-home blues that shaped rhythm and blues and rock ’n’ roll.

Mr. Edwards was especially renowned for his intricate fingerpicking and his slashing bottleneck-slide guitar work. Though he played in much the same traditional style throughout his career, he also enjoyed the distinction of being one of the first Delta blues musicians to perform with a saxophonist and drummer.

David Edwards was born June 28, 1915, in Shaw, Miss., in the Delta region. His parents, who worked as sharecroppers, gave him the nickname Honey, which later became Honeyboy. His mother played the guitar; his father, a fiddler and guitarist, performed at local social events. Mr. Edwards’s father bought him his first guitar and taught him to play traditional folk ballads.

His first real exposure to the blues came in 1929, when the celebrated country bluesman Tommy Johnson came to pick cotton at Wildwood Plantation, the farm near Greenwood where the Edwards family lived at the time.

“They’d pick cotton all through the day, and at night they’d sit around and play the guitars,” Mr. Edwards recalled in his autobiography, “The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing” (Chicago Review Press, 1997). “Drinking that white whiskey, that moonshine, I’d just sit and look at them. I’d say, ‘I wish I could play.’ ”

After spending the better part of two decades as an itinerant musician, Mr. Edwards made Chicago his permanent home in the 1950s. He performed frequently in its clubs and at the open-air market on Maxwell Street, but he recorded only sporadically during his first years there, notably for the independent Artist and Chess labels.

Mr. Edwards achieved new popularity during the blues revival of the 1960s. Near the end of the decade he appeared with Willie Dixon and Buddy Guy on sessions that produced both volumes of the album “Blues Jam in Chicago” by the British rock band Fleetwood Mac.

In 1972 Mr. Edwards met Mr. Frank, a blues aficionado and harmonica player, who would be his booking agent, manager and collaborator, on both stage and record, for the rest of his life.

Mr. Edwards was elected to the Blues Hall of Fame in 1996 and named a National Heritage Fellow by the National Endowment for the Arts in 2002. In 2007 he appeared as himself in the movie “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.”

Survivors include a daughter, a stepdaughter and several grandchildren.

Mr. Edwards won a Grammy Award in 2008 for the album “Last of the Great Mississippi Delta Bluesmen: Live in Dallas,” a collaboration with Henry Townsend, Pinetop Perkins (who died in March) and Robert Lockwood Jr., and a lifetime achievement Grammy in 2010.

He was still playing as many as 100 shows a year when he stopped touring, in 2008, and he continued to perform occasionally until this year. His last appearance was at a blues festival in Clarksdale, Miss., in April.

SOURCE:  http://www.nytimes.com

************************************************************************************

STETSON KENNEDY, WHO INFILTRATED AND EXPOSED THE KLAN

By

Published: August 30, 2011

 

Stetson Kennedy, a folklorist and social crusader who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the 1940s and wrote a lurid exposé of its activities, “I Rode With the Ku Klux Klan,” died on Saturday in St. Augustine, Fla. He was 94.

August 30, 2011

Keystone Features/Getty Images

Stetson Kennedy, author of “I Rode With the Ku Klux Klan,” with a Klan pamphlet in February 1947.

Related

The cause was complications of bleeding of the brain, said his wife, Sandra Parks.

Mr. Kennedy developed his sense of racial injustice early. A native of Jacksonville, Fla., he saw the hardships of black Floridians when he knocked on doors collecting payments for his father’s furniture store. His social concerns developed further when he began collecting folklore data for the Federal Writers’ Project in Key West, Tampa and camps for turpentine workers in north Florida, where conditions were close to slavery.

After being rejected by the Army because of a bad back, he threw himself into unmasking the Ku Klux Klan as well as the Columbians, a Georgia neo-Nazi group. He was inspired in part by a tale told by an interview subject whose friend had been the victim of a racial murder in Key West.

As an agent for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, Mr. Kennedy, by his own account, infiltrated the Klavern in Stone Mountain and worked as a Klavalier, or Klan strong-arm man. He leaked his findings to, among others, the Washington Post columnist Drew Pearson, the Anti-Defamation League and the producers of the radio show “Superman,” who used information about the Klan’s rituals and code words in a multi-episode story titled “Clan of the Fiery Cross.”

In a celebrated exploit, he stole financial information from a wastebasket outside the office of the Klan’s Imperial Wizard, Sam Roper, in Atlanta.

The information led the Internal Revenue Service to challenge the group’s status as a charitable organization and demand nearly $700,000 in back taxes. He helped draft the brief that Georgia used to revoke the Klan’s national corporate charter in 1947.

After writing a series of articles on the Klan for the left-wing newspaper The Daily Compass — some with datelines like “Inside the Invisible Empire” and “Somewhere in Klan Territory” — he published “I Rode With the Ku Klux Klan” in 1954. It was republished in 1990 as “The Klan Unmasked.”

In 2006, Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt, the authors of “Freakonomics,” reported in The New York Times that Mr. Kennedy had greatly exaggerated and dramatized his Klan-busting. The authors had interviewed Mr. Kennedy for their book and used his information about Klan symbolism, language and gestures to illustrate an economic point, but in telling Mr. Kennedy’s story they elicited new interest in his claims, especially from a Florida writer, Ben Green.

Mr. Green, while researching the life of Harry T. Moore, a black civil rights advocate murdered in 1952, and collaborating for a time with Mr. Kennedy on the project, read Mr. Kennedy’s archives in Atlanta and at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem.

Mr. Green concluded that Mr. Kennedy had relied heavily on the experiences of a man identified by the pseudonym John Brown, a union worker and former Klan official who had changed his ways and offered to infiltrate the Klan. Mr. Kennedy later confirmed that he had relied in part on an informant and that he had woven some of his testimony into his first-person account to make it more compelling. But he was unapologetic.

“I wanted to show what was happening at the time,” he told The Florida Times-Union of Jacksonville in 2006. “Who gives a damn how it’s written? It is the one and only document of the working Klan.”

William Stetson Kennedy was born on Oct. 5, 1916, in Jacksonville, where he developed an interest in local turns of phrase and sayings that he called “folksays,” jotting them down in notebooks.

While attending the University of Florida, where he took a writing course with Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, he struck out on his own to do field work in Key West. There he married the first of his seven wives, a Cuban who gave him entree into the local émigré community for his folklore work. While gathering material for the Federal Writers’ Project, he traveled across Florida with the writer Zora Neale Hurston.

His Florida research found its way into “Palmetto Country” (1942), a folkloric survey of territory from southern Alabama and Georgia down to Key West, and the series American Folkways, edited by Erskine Caldwell. In 1994 he returned to folklore in “South Florida Folklife,” written with Peggy Bulger and Tina Bucuvalas, and “Grits and Grunts: Folkloric Key West” (2008).

Most of his writing was devoted to campaigns for social justice. A series on racial segregation written with Elizabeth Gardner for The Daily Compass in 1949 formed the basis of “Jim Crow Guide to the U.S.A.” His other books included “Passage to Violence” (1954), a fictionalized version of his Klan experiences; “Southern Exposure” (1946), and “After Appomattox: How the South Won the War” (1995).

In addition to his wife, Sandra, Mr. Kennedy is survived by a son, Loren; a grandson, and several stepchildren.

Mr. Kennedy pursued the Klan and racist politicians through a variety of means. In 1950 he ran a write-in campaign for senator. Woody Guthrie, who lived on Mr. Kennedy’s lakeside property near Jacksonville, writing 88 songs there, composed a campaign song for him, titled “Stetson Kennedy,” declaring:

Stetson Kennedy, he’s that man;

Walks and talks across our land;

Talkin’ out against the Ku Klux Klan.

For every fiery cross and note;

I’ll get Kennedy a hundred votes.

Ridicule, too, formed part of Mr. Kennedy’s arsenal. In 1947 he tried, unsuccessfully, to incorporate his own shadow Klan so that he could sue the real Klan whenever it used the same name. He appointed himself Imperial Wizard and installed, as senior officers, an African-American, a Roman Catholic, a Jew, a Japanese-American and a Cherokee.

SOURCE:  http://www.nytimes.com

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

FROM THE ARCHIVES

Leave a comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Leave a comment