With his 93rd birthday a month away, David ''Honeyboy'' Edwards still plays about 70 gigs a year and the calls keep coming.
As the last Delta bluesman still standing, Edwards has found himself in demand. In the past year alone, he has released a new album, won Grammy and Handy Awards, appeared in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story and done interviews for three documentaries due out in 2009 and 2010.
A native of Shaw, Miss., Edwards was honored Friday during the Robert Johnson Blues Foundation ceremony in Jackson.
Edwards learned the guitar growing up in Shaw, started playing professionally at age 17 in Memphis and by the 1950s had played with almost every bluesman of note.
Though much time has passed, little about Edwards' style has changed. His latest album, Roamin' and Ramblin', offers the kind of music Edwards would have played as he traveled first the Delta, then the region.
''Blues ain't never going anywhere,'' Edwards said. 'It can get slow. . . . You can take that same blues, make it uptempo, a shuffle blues, that's what rock 'n' roll did with it. So blues ain't going nowhere.''
USE IT WHILE YOU CAN
Nobel literature prize winner Doris Lessing says winning the prestigious prize in 2007 was ''a bloody disaster,'' according to excerpts of a British Broadcasting Corp. interview to be aired Monday.
Due to constant media demands for interviews and photo shoots, the 88-year-old author said she no longer has the energy to take on writing a full novel.
''This is why I keep telling anyone younger than me, don't imagine you'll have it forever,'' she said. ``Use it while you've got it because it'll go. It's sliding away like water down a plughole.''
