Frank Edwards

Frank Edwards shared the fate of many country blues musicians in lacking steady performance dates or studio work across a span of nearly eight decades. His first sessions took place in the early 1940s for the Okeh imprint and yielded only a handful of tracks, yet those sides generated enough notice to draw the interest of a prominent New York booking firm whose usual clients were dance orchestras and radio acts rather than down-home blues players. During the middle of the decade the Taps Agency tried without success to persuade Edwards to relocate from Atlanta to the larger city. As a result, decades passed before any further material appeared under his name. In the late 1940s Regal producer Fred Mendelsohn captured several Atlanta performances that remained unreleased until the 1960s. Not until 1972 did the Trix label issue the full-length album Done Some Travelin’, now regarded as a landmark recording.

Edwards’s career also mirrored the northward migration undertaken by numerous Mississippi blues artists around the time of the Second World War. His traveling companion during that period was fellow musician Tommy McClennan. In 1941 Edwards cut eight titles for Okeh under producer Frank Melrose, with accompaniment supplied by Robert Brown, better known as Washboard Sam. Although the war and the subsequent recording ban curtailed wider distribution, a portion of those sides eventually reached the public. Edwards then returned to the South and settled permanently in Atlanta.

On guitar, harmonica, and vocals he required no additional support. His sets mixed fresh treatments of such standards as “Good Morning Little School Girl” and “When the Saints Go Marching In” with original compositions addressing topics that ranged from incarceration (“Alcatraz Blues”) to fashion (“Mini Dress Wearer”) and even poultry theft (“Chicken Raid”). Despite the appeal of this material, Edwards could not rely on music alone for income and supplemented his earnings through carpentry, house painting, and plumbing. Apart from a two-year period after a house fire destroyed his instrument, he continued performing the blues throughout his life. Roughly two hours before his death he finished a session in North Carolina; shortly afterward he suffered a fatal heart attack while being transported by ambulance to a hospital.