Memphis Blues Tribute to David Honeyboy Edwards
by Everett Spruill
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Price
$3,500
Dimensions
28.000 x 22.000 x 1.000 inches
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Title
Memphis Blues Tribute to David Honeyboy Edwards
Artist
Everett Spruill
Medium
Painting - Collage From Recycled Paper
Description
Memphis Blues is my tribute to David Honeyboy Edwards. Created entirely from recycled paper, this custom framed collage features a solo guitarist. I began creating collages around 1990, two years after the passing of Romare Bearden. My desire to document the inventors and legends of Americas' art form, and carry on the legacy of Bearden, inspired the "Old School Jazz and Blues Series. The first works were small collages, made with magazine cut-outs and repurposed materials juxtaposed and combined with graffiti techniques creating a cubist effect.
Edwards was born in Shaw, Mississippi. At the age of 14, he left home to travel with the bluesman Big Joe Williams, beginning life as an itinerant musician, which he maintained through the 1930s and 1940s. He performed with the famed blues musician Robert Johnson, with whom he developed a close friendship. Edwards was present on the night Johnson drank the poisoned whiskey that killed him, and his story has become the definitive version of Johnson's demise. Edwards also knew and played with other leading bluesmen in the Mississippi Delta, including Charley Patton, Tommy Johnson, and Johnny Shines. He described the itinerant bluesman's life:
On Saturday, somebody like me or Robert Johnson would go into one of these little towns, play for nickels and dimes. And sometimes, you know, you could be playin' and have such a big crowd that it would block the whole street. Then the police would come around, and then I'd go to another town and where I could play at. But most of the time, they would let you play. Then sometimes the man who owned a country store would give us something like a couple of dollars to play on a Saturday afternoon. 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...we might hop a freight, go to St. Louis or Chicago. Or we might hear about where a job was paying off – a highway crew, a railroad job, a levee camp there along the river, or someplace in the country where a lot of people were workin' on a farm. You could go there and play and everybody would hand you some money. I didn't have a special place then. Anywhere was home. Where I do good, I stay. When it gets bad and dull, I'm gone.
Uploaded
October 30th, 2012
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