Why read The World Don't Owe Me Nothing?

Book cover of The World Don't Owe Me Nothing: The Life and Times of Delta Bluesman Honeyboy Edwards

Book description

This vivid oral snapshot of an America that planted the blues is full of rhythmic grace. From the son of a sharecropper to an itinerant bluesman, Honeyboy’s stories of good friends Charlie Patton, Big Walter Horton, Little Walter Jacobs, and Robert Johnson are a godsend to blues fans. History buffs…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The World Don't Owe Me Nothing as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Adam Gussow

Author

I’ve been assigning The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing in Southern Studies classes at Ole Miss for the past twenty years; the incarcerated students in my blues lit class at Parchman said this was their favorite book.

Honeyboy, born in 1915, grew up in the bad old Mississippi Delta, back when cottonfield sharecropping, lynching, and prison farms were the givens. The blues were his way out. He learned his trade, rambled widely, took his pleasures where he found them.

“I had three ways of making it,” he writes. “Women, my guitar, and the dice.” He knew all the great bluesmen,…

From Adam's list on the Blues set in Mississippi, Chicago, Florida.