As a longtime blues fan whose dad was from Chicago, I’ve written about the city’s urban electric blues scene as well as some of the greatest blues men and women who helped make the Windy City the epicenter of electric blues.
A vocalist and guitarist who never “made it” in the commercial sense is often overlooked in the Chicago blues pantheon, but he is still considered one of the all-time greats. I’m talking about Mississippi-born Otis Rush, who joined the ancestors on Sept. 29, 2018.
Join me in remembering the man and his music on this anniversary of his passing on.
”Black Music Sunday” is a weekly series highlighting all things Black music, with over 230 stories covering performers, genres, history, and more, each featuring its own vibrant soundtrack. I hope you’ll find some familiar tunes and perhaps an introduction to something new.
Though many Rush obituaries mention where he was born, they jump quickly to his musical start in Chicago. I think it is important to talk about his life before Chitown, because his beginnings shaped the sound of his blues.
Details of his start in life are inscribed on a historical trail marker at his birthplace outside of Philadelphia, Mississippi, in Neshoba County.
Otis Rush rose from the poverty of a Mississippi sharecropper’s life to international fame as one of the most passionate singers and brilliant guitarists in the blues world. Rush, the sixth of seven children, was born in 1935, according to family sources, although biographies often give his birth date as 1934. His mother, Julia Campbell Boyd, ended up raising her family alone on farms in Neshoba and Kemper counties. During the throes of the Great Depression in a segregated society, although times were hard, with the children often missing school to work in the cotton fields, Julia Boyd did own a wind-up Victrola record player. Rush heard blues records at home and on jukeboxes in Philadelphia when his mother would bring him to town. He began playing harmonica, and also sang in a church choir.
When his oldest brother, Leroy Boyd, was away from home, Otis started secretly playing Leroy’s guitar. With no musical training, he devised his own unorthodox method, playing left-handed with the guitar upside down. Rush’s distinctive style was rooted in his self-taught technique and his ability to transform sounds he heard into notes on his guitar. One sound he recalled from his childhood was Leroy's whistling.
As a young teen, Rush was already married, sharecropping cotton and corn on a five-acre plot. On Otis Lewis’s farm, Rush heard guitarist Vaughan Adams, a friend of his mother's, but there were few other blues musicians around Philadelphia. Rush only became inspired to be a professional musician after visiting his sister in Chicago. She took him to a Muddy Waters performance, and, as Rush recalled, “I flipped out, man. I said, ‘Damn. This is for me.’”
Talking Guitar magazine published a long interview with Rush in which he described his life while growing up. It was titled “Otis Rush: ‘This Is My Life Story’”:
Was there a lot of racism?
Yeah, a lot of that too. I’ve had to go around the back to restaurants. When white people are having dinner, I must wait till they get through eating. After they eat, then we could eat. I’m not kidding. The rest rooms, they had signs up there – “White” and “Colored.” You know I’m telling the truth. It was all over. You’d go to a restaurant, even on the highway, and it’d say, “Colored, go around the back.” When we wanted some food, we can’t order from the front. But I don’t want to get into that. Like I say, it’s been a hell of an experience.
You’ve said that your hard times started around the time you were five years old.
That’s right. My mother didn’t have a husband. There were seven of us – five boys and two girls, and she had to raise us by herself. I’m what they call a bastard. All my brothers had another father – they’re half-brothers – and I have one whole sister, Odie Mae. There’s also Leroy, Lorenzo, Eugene, and Wilmon. The other sister is Elizabeth. The seven of us had to support each other.
Did you ever work in a field?
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah! From five years old. My mother and older brothers and sisters be out in the field picking cotton, pulling corn, or something. I’m lookin’ at them workin’, and I wanted my mother to compliment me. Every time I’d pull some cotton, I’d give it to her and let her put it in her sack – she used to drag the sacks. She said, “Boy, you’re doin’ great!” She kept on telling me how great I worked. I get tired and go sit in the shade, so at some point she said, “Come on, boy.” I said, “What, mom?” “You pick that cotton like you been pickin’.” I didn’t want to pick it. She said, “You better come on, boy, I ain’t gonna tell you no more.” So at six, seven years old, man, I’m working my ass off. I had to pick that cotton. At nine or ten years old, my goodness, I was plowin’ the mule, turning this land over with the plow. No tractor – they had ’em, but not on this farm.
The white man let us go to school when the weather was so bad out there that we can’t go to work. And we’d be prayin’ for bad weather all the time! [Laughs.] We would hope for a storm, so today we could go to school. I went to school, man, but not like I should have. I’d be in school, I have all these plans for today – this is my great day – and [knocks three times, then says in a loud, gruff voice] “Junior in there?” They called me Junior and Bud then. “Is he in there? Send him out here.” Then he’d say, “Come on, boy. I want you to go out here and cut them bushes and do that bottom over there.” I come out of that school mad, man! I felt like kickin’ my own ass. But, hey, you better get up and go – don’t you be seein’ that damn tree with that limb hangin’ out like that with them ropes around it? Shit. I come out of there – and no argument! My teacher don’t argue, just, “You got to go! You got to go, Junior!”
Were you aware of lynchings?
Was I aware of them?! I knew all the time what they’ll do! I’m livin’ there, man! I’m livin’ in Philadelphia, Mississippi.
His introduction to the Chicago music scene is described in his 2018 obituary in The Guardian, written by music historian Tony Russell:
Around 1948-49 he moved to Chicago, from where one of his sisters had been writing home about the blues scene. He worked on his guitar-playing, performed in clubs and by the mid-50s had enough of a reputation for Willie Dixon, Chicago’s leading A&R man, to sign him to a label he was helping to launch. I Can’t Quit You Baby, his 1956 debut for Cobra, was astonishing, full of suspense and passionately sung, with a brief but petrifying guitar solo.
Over the next two years he followed it with tracks such as My Love Will Never Die, Groaning the Blues and Double Trouble, a broadside of social dissatisfaction: “Some of this generation is millionaires, but I ain’t got decent clothes to wear.” (Stevie Ray Vaughan would borrow the title for his band.) These early sides – for which he said he was never paid – possessed a screaming modern intensity that sharply distinguished him from older bluesmen such as Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf.
Here he is performing his first hit “I Can’t Quit You Baby,” which was written by Willie Dixon, followed by “Double Trouble.”
Lyrics:
I lay awake at night
Sparks of love, I'm just so troubled
It's hard to keep a job
Laid off, I'm having double trouble
Hey, hey, yeah
They say you can make it if you try
Yes, some of this generation is millionaires
It's hard for me to keep these clothes to wear
You laughed at me walking, baby
When I had no place to go
Bad luck and trouble taking me
I have no money to show
But hey, hey, to make it, you got to try
Baby, that's no lie
Yes, some of this generation is millionaires
It's hard for me to keep these clothes to wear
(Note: While many stories about Rush’s death include references to Eric Clapton and their association and performances together, I chose not to post any of those videos here because of Clapton’s repulsive open racism against the very people upon whose music he built his rep and chops, and his anti-vaccine crap. ‘Nuff said.)
Music reviewer Bill Friskics-Warren wrote Rush’s obituary for The New York Times:
Otis Rush, Influential Blues Singer and Guitarist, Is Dead at 83
A richly emotive singer and a guitarist of great skill and imagination, Mr. Rush was in the vanguard of a small circle of late-1950s innovators, including Buddy Guy and Magic Sam, whose music, steeped in R&B, heralded a new era for Chicago blues.
While Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, his predecessors from the city’s South Side, popularized an amplified update of the bare-bones sound of the Mississippi Delta, Mr. Rush’s modernized variant — which came to be called the West Side sound because of its prevalence in nightclubs in that part of town — was at once more lyrical and more rhythmically complex.
“The sound was a radical departure from the down-home records that dominated the market at the time,” the producer Neil Slaven, contrasting Chicago’s West Side sound with its South Side counterpart, observed in the notes to a compilation of Mr. Rush’s 1950s recordings for the independent Cobra label.
Mr. Rush’s output for Cobra showcased his lacerating, vibrato-laden electric guitar lines and his gritty, gospel-inspired vocals — throaty mid-register groaning, thrilling leaps of falsetto. Holding sway beyond Chicago, his adopted hometown, this early body of work served as a rich repository of material for the blues-rock bands of the 1960s.
Friskics-Warren also described Rush’s unique playing style:
Mr. Rush’s guitar technique owed a debt to the discursive single-string voicings of jazz players like Kenny Burrell and jazz-inspired bluesmen like T-Bone Walker and B. B. King. But it was also attributable to the fact that Mr. Rush played his instrument left-handed and upside down. Curling the little finger of his pick hand around the bottom E string of his guitar enabled him to bend and extend notes, to dazzling emotional effect.
British guitarist Fil Henley goes into more detail about Rush’s playing style:
Eugene Chadborn reviewed Rush’s album “Right Place, Wrong Time” for AllMusic. He detailed how it was originally recorded in 1971 but languished until it was released in 1976:
This recording session was not released until five years after it was done. One can imagine the tapes practically smoldering in their cases, the music is so hot. Sorry, there is nothing "wrong" about this blues album at all. Otis Rush was a great blues expander, a man whose guitar playing was in every molecule pure blues. On his solos on this album he strips the idea of the blues down to very simple gestures (i.e., a bent string, but bent in such a subtle way that the seasoned blues listener will be surprised).
Here’s Rush performing “Right Place, Wrong Time” live at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1986:
Video interviews with Rush don’t seem to exist on YouTube or Vimeo, except for this brief clip. But I did find a 34-minute 1994 audio interview in Northeastern University’s archives, conducted by music critic Larry Katz from the Boston Herald. In the interview, Rush talks about the music he listened to while growing up (country western and gospel), his move to Chicago, and his economic situation and frustrations with record companies.
In 1999, Rush won the Best Traditional Blues Recording Grammy Award for his album "Any Place I'm Going."
Here he is live at the 2001 Chicago Blues Festival:
Rush suffered a serious stroke in 2003, which ended his touring and performing. His death in 2018 was due to complications from that stroke.
Please join me in the comments section below for more of his music, and Rush fans—please post your favorites.