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 will marvel at his unique perspective and firsthand accounts of the 1927 Mississippi River floo, vagrancy laws, makeshift courts in the back of seed stores, plantation life and the Depression.

All too often, books about and supposedly by folk blues musicians come across as products that are essentially undergraduate social science field trip term papers about people who seem to be regarded as being somewhat pathetic and somewhat provincially exotic and titillating at the same time.

More often than not, such books strike me as having been thought up and executed by some ivy-league type throwback to the likes of the ever so ideological or, in any case, bookish Tom Sawyer rather than some updated extension of a Huck Finn, whose insights and representations of the idiomatic textures of his friend Jim's world are as unspoiled and reliable as those of old Mark Twain himself.

Obviously, if somebody who is not native to the down-home conventions that the blues idiom stylizes into aesthetic statement is going to collaborate with someone who has remained as close to his regional roots as Honeyboy Edwards has, that person must achieve a rapport that is as close to family membership or, in any case, neighborhood membership as possible, so that personal complexities can be seen in proper individual perspective.