David "Honeyboy" Edwards was born in Shaw, Mississippi, in 1915 and learned music from a father who played guitar and violin. At 14 he left home to travel with bluesman Big Joe Williams, a dangerous choice in a Jim Crow South where vagrancy laws targeted young Black men traveling without proof of employment. He hitchhiked on trucks, hopped freight trains, and followed the money to remote levee camps on payday, small-town street corners on Saturdays, and rural juke joints, projecting an unamplified acoustic guitar over rowdy crowds for hours. He claimed no permanent address because anywhere was home, and along the way he shared stages with Charley Patton, Tommy Johnson, Johnny Shines, and his close friend Robert Johnson, whose 1938 death from poisoned whiskey Edwards witnessed at age 23.

This episode reframes Edwards not as a footnote to the ...