The Duke of Delmar
LIKE MANY A great rock album, The Joe Edwards Story, when it gets written (and it should), has the potential to become a two-volume set. The master developer and man of a million floral shirts recently sat down with SLM to discuss how and why the Delmar Loop came into existence. And it all began with Edwards’ pop-culture-memorabilia-filled restaurant and music club that’s known around the world. Blueberry Hill turns 50 on September 8.
After I graduated from John Burroughs and then Duke, I still didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I had amassed an amazing record collection: 30,000 45-RPM records, all cataloged alphabetically; 12,000 78-RPM records; and a lot of cylinders from before that. The local R&B station would give me the records they would never magazine, the BBC, magazine, … They all named ours the best jukebox in the United States. One called it the best in the world. The accolades started in the mid-’70s and continue to this day.
