Honeyboy Edwards Birthplace — Shaw, Mississippi

David 'Honeyboy' Edwards was born on June 28, 1915, in Shaw, Mississippi, in Bolivar County, and became one of the last surviving eyewitnesses to the Delta blues of the 1930s. He knew Robert Johnson personally — was reportedly present on the night Johnson was poisoned in 1938 — and played alongside Charley Patton, Son House, and Tommy McClennan in the juke joints and work camps of the Delta. Alan Lomax recorded him for the Library of Congress in 1942. He led the itinerant, hand-to-mouth life of a travelling Delta bluesman for decades before settling in Chicago.

Edwards's recordings were sporadic across his long life, but his 2008 autobiography The World Don't Owe Me Nothing is one of the finest firsthand accounts of Delta blues life ever written. He continued performing into his nineties, a living connection to the pre-war Delta world, and his testimony about Robert Johnson has shaped how historians understand that era. He died in Chicago in 2011 at the age of 96.

Shaw is a small Delta town in Bolivar County, south of Cleveland, Mississippi. A Mississippi Blues Trail marker acknowledges Edwards's birth and Delta origins. The town is within easy driving distance of Cleveland and Dockery Farms, making it part of a natural blues heritage circuit through Bolivar County.