Bobby Rush Aims To Keep the Blues Alive

Early in his career, blues singer-songwriter Bobby Rush, who was relatively unknown at the time, recruited guitarist Elmore James, already a notable musician who’d go on to become a Rock Hall Inductee, to play alongside him when he was performing at small Arkansas clubs like the Jitterbug. How’d he pull it off?

“I had been singing at juke joints around town,” says Rush in relating just one anecdote from his storied career. Bobby Rush performs with Austin Walkin Cane and DJ Pete London at 8 p.m. on Thursday, March 7, at the Beachland Ballroom. “In that band, Elmore James was the most popular one of all of us. I wanted him to play with me. It’s a drawn-out story, but there was a little lady in Mississippi getting married to a friend of mine. He saw her coming down the sidewalk one day and said, ‘Who is that pretty girl? I’d do anything to get that.’ I said, ‘Maybe I can help you out.’ I knew her and could make the introduction. He wanted $5 a night. I said ‘I can’t pay you that. I could give you $3.’ That’s how I got him to play with me. It was a dirty trick. That ain’t right.”

Those juke joint gigs gave Rush the confidence to buy a $7.50 bus ticket to Memphis where guys like B.B. King, Sonny Boy Williamson and Rufus Thomas worked on Beale Street. He worked on Beale Street and saved up enough money to move to St. Louis. After working there alongside the likes of Chuck Berry and Albert King, he migrated to Chicago.

“I thought I was in heaven,” he says of the Windy City. “Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters and Bo Diddley and Jimmy Reed were there. All the guys I could think of with my little country mind were in Chicago. That was like heaven to me. But then, the Lord took me to the Blue Island suburb. At that time, there weren’t any Black people that I knew of in Blue Island. I got this job playing behind a curtain. They wanted to hear my music but didn’t want to see my face as a Black man. That’s how I got off the ground. I put some musicians together and got a good band together with some musicians from down South.”

Significant success didn’t arrive until 1971 when “Chicken Heads” became a big hit. Prior to that, Rush “played every juke joint [I could] for no money and got pushed around just enough to  learn what I was doing.”

He cut “Chicken Heads” in 1968, but the track, a slow jam that starts with a funky bass riff before Rush’s woozy vocals come into the picture, didn’t come out until 1971.

“People thought it was nothing, a zero,” he says. “Then, when put it out, it went to No. 1. I had a No. 1 and James Brown had the No. 2 record and Bill Withers had the No. 3 record. To beat those two guys at that time was hard to do. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was just playing music and hoping to be popular enough for the girls.”

Eventually, Rush decided to move back to Mississippi, where his grandparents lived. He wrote his autobiography, I Ain’t Studdin’ Ya: My American Blues Story, based on researching his family background.

“I didn’t write the book so people would feel sorry for me,” he explains. “I wanted people to read and think, ‘If Bobby Rush can do it, I can do it.’”

He also cut the 2020 Rawer Than Raw album with his roots in mind.

“I was trying to take back what the white musicians had taken from the Black guys,” he says. “Black guys had changed their identities and tried to sound white. I said, ‘I’m going to take it back and be this Black guy.’ I write and joke and have fun, and that’s blackness. Then, I started to crossover. I have crossed over to a white audience. You can name a few black guys now who have a big Black audience, but black audiences don’t know who they are.”

His latest album, All of My Love, came out last year and won a Grammy for Best Traditional Blues album. Expect to hear some songs from it at the upcoming Beachland show, which will allow Rush to celebrate his remarkable legacy. When it comes to playing live, Rush  says he aims to entertain at a high level and rely upon his decades of experience.

“Oh, I just be Bobby Rush,” he says with modesty when asked about playing live. “I’m old and ugly, and I just be me. I have learned what to do on stage after 70-some years on stage. I know what not to do, and that’s important. It’s the really the same thing as I’ve been doing all my life. When I was a kid, I didn’t have a bathroom inside the house. We had to go out to the toilet. It looked bad and smelled bad. Now, I got nine bathrooms, and they look good and smell good, but you do the same thing in them. That hasn’t changed. That’s kind of like the music. I’m just trying to keep the blues alive. It’s the root of all music. If you don’t like the blues, you probably don’t like your momma.”

Coming soon: Cleveland Scene Daily newsletter. We’ll send you a handful of interesting Cleveland stories every morning. Subscribe now to not miss a thing.

Follow us: Google News | NewsBreak | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter