By Sarah Godcher

"I learned the blues on the Mississippi Delta. Before I learned it on the guitar I started playing it out on the stump in the middle of the field."

	Photo by Liz Linder

Harmony Department Chair Barbara London, who cosponsored Edwards' visit to campus, puts it more explicity: "It's saying what you mean with conviction, saying more with less --more heart and soul and less intellect. Fewer notes."

Edwards is the real deal -- an original Delta blues man and a contemporary of Robert Johnson and Big Joe Williams. He is one of a handful of blues musicians ever to teach a clinic at Berklee, but more importantly, he is one of the first men ever to play the blues as we know it today.

Growing up the son of a sharecropper in Shaw, Miss., Edwards found that making music was the best way to pass the time. In the winter, when it was too cold to work the farm, there was little else to do, he said. He began playing guitar in 1920, after his father ordered an instrument from a Sears and Roebuck catalog. When still a teenager, he left Mississippi to tour with Williams, embarking on a musical odyssey now in its eighth decade.

In his recent autobiography The World Don't Owe Me Nothing, Edwards describes his musical journey this way: "The blues is something that leads you on," he says. "Everywhere the blues took me was home."

In September 1998, Edwards' music took him to Boston, where he headlined the local Blues Festival on the Charles River Esplanade, following up the performance with informal jams at Redbones in Somerville and the House of Blues in Cambridge. An energetic Edwards also made time for the Berklee clinic, where he astounded students with the range of his creative soloing and the depth of his passion.

The octogenarian performs with a style and vigor unmatched in players a mere fraction of his age. Foot stomping and head shaking, he leans into the guitar and sends his fingers scrambling up the fingerboard, his eyes fixed on his left hand. Then, just when the run is about to end, his head pops up and he looks at his audience. A grin breaks across his face, and he nods at the crowd, as if to say, "Yeah, you liked that."

Like most bluesmen of his generation, Edwards had no formal musical training. He learned by doing, and his gigs in raucous juke joints served as on-the-job training. Edwards did not discuss guitar technique or melodic development during his clinic. He told stories of his life and his music; they are one in the same.

Still, Edwards believes there is a place for the blues in music schools like Berklee. "You can learn it in school," he said, then added, "You can learn it out of school, too."