David “Honeyboy” Edwards was born in the Mississippi Delta town of Shaw back in 1915. He grew up in farming country, where cotton polka-dotted the land. Most folks didn’t have radios. Music was something people made for themselves.

Edwards, now 90, says he learned how to play guitar when he was 9 years old from his father, who was a sharecropper.

“My father, he was a guitar player and a violin player, but he played a lot of ragtime stuff,” Edwards says.

By the time he was a teenager, he had discovered he was good at two things: playing the blues and gambling, especially dice. While others would work in the fields picking cotton for 75 cents a day, Edwards says, he used to go to the levee towns where construction workers would earn three dollars a day building embankments to protect farmland. He would travel to the towns by hopping on freight trains with names like the Pea Vine or the Yellow Dog.

Upon reaching the towns, which were flush with money, Edwards would ply his trade and make more money than most people had at that time, which was during the Depression.

“I’d take my guitar and go out on the job,” he says. “Start playing blues on a Friday and Saturday night. Sunday, we would start the gambling. Sunday evening, I would leave there with $40 or $50 in my pocket. That was a lot of money.

“I’d go to one of those little towns, and I’d get a room for three or four dollars a week. I’d lay up and eat all week with them old girls and things.”

While playing the blues all over the Delta, Edwards became acquainted with the most mythic blues artist of all time: Robert Johnson, the author of such classics as “Love in Vain” and “Crossroads” who, according to legend, acquired his formidable blues skills by selling his soul to the devil.

Though Edwards does not mention any Faustian arrangements, he does recall that Johnson’s talents seemed to materialize almost out of thin air.

“When I first met him, he was trying to play harp with Son House and them,” he says. “He played guitar a little but not much. He went on by himself and he come back later that year with all the blues he had recorded: ‘Hellbound on My Trail,’ ‘Come In My Kitchen,’ ‘Crossroads.’ He came back famous. I don’t know how he did it.”

Edwards recalls that Johnson was a quiet person with a couple of vices that led to his demise at the age of 27. “He wasn’t a rough guy,” Edwards says. “The only thing about him was that he was crazy about whiskey and women. That was his death. He got poisoned by a man’s wife.”

The night that Johnson was poisoned, Edwards says, he went to the venue where the blues legend was supposed to perform. He found his friend sitting in a corner with a guitar looking really sick. “The people come in and wanted him to play ‘Terraplane Blues’ and ‘Kind-Hearted Woman Blues,’” Edwards says. “He said ‘I don’t feel good,’ and the people thought he was sick on whiskey. They found out it wasn’t that. He died on a Wednesday morning.”

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Four years later, Edwards staked his own claim as a Delta blues artist when he was recorded by folklorist and musicologist Alan Lomax for his historic Library of Congress project. Lomax discovered Edwards while he was performing in a courtyard on a hot summer’s day in Friars Point, Mississippi. Edwards recalls that he was just playing his guitar and harp while sweating and drinking whiskey when Lomax approached him to document him playing some songs. A few days later, Lomax and Edwards holed up in a rented room inside a Mississippi schoolhouse.

“We went there and started recording and everything,” Edwards says. “We got midway through recording and a big tornado storm cut us out.”

The tornado passed 45 minutes later, and Edwards cut 14 tracks in record time. “It didn’t take me long, cause I was knockin’ ‘em out like Lightnin’ Hopkins,” Edwards says.

That day was just the beginning of Edwards’ recorded legacy. He went on to record for the legendary blues label Chess Records in the ‘50s. Twenty years later, in 1972, Edwards met a young blues harpist named Michael Frank. The two perform together often, and Frank started a record label titled Earwig to release the music of Edwards and his legendary friends like Big Walter Horton.

One of Edwards’ most recent releases, 1997’s The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing, features Edwards covering Johnson’s “Crossroads” and playing originals like “Every Now and Then,” a tune where his slide guitar sounds like lightning streaking across the night sky. The whole album, which also features spoken word remembrances, is blues unvarnished by lavish production, distilled to the genre’s essential element: raw emotion.

Edwards doesn’t plan on quitting anytime soon for practical purposes. “Well, I don’t know nothing else to do,” he says. “This is what God wanted me to do, and that is what I’m doing.”

DAVID “HONEYBOY” EDWARDS PLAYS MONTEREY LIVE, 414 ALVARADO ST. IN MONTEREY, TUESDAY AT 7:30PM WITH BLUES HARP PLAYER MICHAEL FRANK. $12/ADVANCE; $14/AT THE DOOR.375-5483.