In three years at Rolling Stone, I’ve done interviews with lots of musicians. The best of them usually end up in the magazine, but some gems occasionally fall through the cracks.
In June, 2006, I went to a show at BB King Blues Club featuring two true legends of Mississippi Delta blues, Robert "Junior" Lockwood and David "Honeyboy" Edwards. Both were 91 years old at the time and contemporaries of Robert Johnson: Lockwood learned how to play guitar from Johnson, who lived with his mother for ten years, and, at some point, Lockwood added the "Junior" to his name to emphasize the connection. Edwards was a colleague and friend of Johnson's who was there on the night in 1938 when the iconic bluesman — who sold his soul to the devil to play guitar so well — was poisoned for sleeping with another man's wife.
The interviews were fascinating and we hoped to make them into a piece about these two giants in the history of American music still touring the country in their 90s. As often happens, the piece was pushed back a few times to make room for more breaking news and, at some point, it fell off our radar. When Lockwood died in late 2006, we were able to use some of the interview with him in our obituary. But the Honeyboy Edwards interview never ran at all. I was looking through old transcripts recently and realized that some of this stuff is too fascinating — and historically important — to exist only as a Word file on my hard drive. So here it is.
