Archie Edwards (4 September 1918–18 June 1998), musician, was born in Union Hall, Franklin County, and was the son of James Roy Edwards, a sharecropper and moonshiner, and Pearl Spencer Edwards. Inspired by his father, who played the banjo, harmonica, and guitar at home and at local dances, Edwards had begun to play guitar by the age of seven, and several years later he and three of his brothers pooled their money and sent away for a mail-order instrument. Picking up pointers from other local African American musicians and from recordings of southern blues guitarists, Edwards began to venture out to house parties with his elder brother. He became a master of the Piedmont blues, a syncopated, intricate finger-picking style rooted in the Appalachian foothills.
Edwards attended school through the eighth grade and in the mid-1930s worked at a local sawmill. After leaving home in August 1938, he joined a sister in New Jersey, where he worked as a chauffeur and cook. He later moved to Columbus, Ohio, where he found employment at a hotel. Edwards joined the army in 1940 and during World War II served as a military police officer at bases in the United States and in the Pacific. He left the service in January 1947, but after being called up as a reservist during the Korean War he spent a year training troops in the quartermaster laundry division at Fort Lee, Virginia. Late in the 1940s Edwards attended a barber school in Richmond and completed a two-year apprenticeship. In 1951 he began a career with the Washington, D.C., city government, working first as a truck driver and later as a security guard until retiring in 1981. He also bought and operated a taxicab to supplement his income.
Edwards and his first wife, Mary Smith Edwards, had one son before their marriage ended in divorce. In 1954 he married Frances Reed Connyers. They raised her daughter and son from her previous marriage and several foster children.
In 1959 Edwards bought a barbershop in northeast Washington, D.C. Inspired by a chance meeting with his boyhood idol, Mississippi John Hurt, with whom he became close friends, he began in 1964 to play concerts and festivals, including a show that year with Hurt and Nehemiah Curtis "Skip" James. Appearing at local venues, Edwards worked with a loose assemblage of like-minded musicians called the Travelling Blues Workshop. He also hosted weekend sessions at his barbershop, featuring artists such as Hurt as well as amateur players.
A 1978 barbershop session attracted a German talent scout who signed Edwards to tour Europe with the American Folk Blues Festival. From this experience emerged Edwards's debut album, Living Country Blues USA, Original Field Recordings Volume 6: The Road Is Rough and Rocky (1982). With two partners he formed a trio that toured the United States, Canada, and Europe during the 1980s. Committed to teaching and preserving the musical traditions he had learned as a child, Edwards in 1987 cofounded the D.C. Blues Society, which held its first meetings at his barbershop. Two years later he released his second album, Blues 'N Bones, a collection of blues numbers, ballads, and African American folk narratives. Songs recorded during a Canadian tour in 1986 were compiled on a 2001 release entitled The Toronto Sessions.
A fine songwriter with a dozen compositions to his credit, Edwards was a relaxed performer, storyteller, social critic, and blues historian. He projected authenticity, and wherever he performed, listeners responded to him and to his stories. In 1993 the governor of Maryland declared 19 September as Archie Edwards Day in recognition of his role as a teacher and cultural advocate. Archie Edwards died of cancer at his home in Seat Pleasant, Maryland, on 18 June 1998 and was buried in Fort Lincoln Cemetery, in Brentwood, Prince George's County, Maryland. Local musicians, inspired by his legacy, established the Archie Edwards Blues Heritage Foundation to serve as a museum and educational center.
Sources Consulted:
Barry Lee Pearson, Virginia Piedmont Blues: The Lives and Art of Two Virginia Bluesmen (1990), with autobiographical material and portraits; birth date in Birth Certificate, Franklin Co., Bureau of Vital Statistics, Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Health, Record Group 36, Library of Virginia; Washington Post, 17 July 1975, 22 May 1987, 29 Aug. 2003; obituaries in Washington Post, 21 June 1998, and Baltimore Sun, 24 June 1998; memorial in Washington History 12 (spring/summer 2000): 143–144.
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Barry Lee Pearson.
How to cite this page:
Barry Lee Pearson, "Archie Edwards (1918–1998)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2022 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Edwards_Archie, accessed [today's date]).
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