![]() “A Black man will pay another Black man what he’s worth,” he said. Rush moved from Chicago to Jackson in 1983, to be closer to family and the Black fans who frequented the Black-owned juke joints where he’d found a loyal audience - and better money. In one of our interviews, Rush said he wished he could go back in time and ask the friend, “Why you recommend me to a place where I got to play behind the curtain? Why you think I would do that?” The job was offered to him by a Black musician friend. The memoir includes a story about a gig in the 1950s he took in a small theater outside Chicago, where he and his band were forced to play behind a curtain. Part of the hurt came from discovering that racism in the North was comparable to what he knew in the South. “Hidden behind the hurt of her infidelity were feelings of inadequacy,” he writes. The chapter of his book where he discovers Hazel was cheating on him - including with a police officer who put Rush in jail for a night in order to be with her - is one of many where he admits feeling inferior to his more successful friends. Rush was ultimately more successful living the blues in Chicago than playing them. In his memoir, he recalls the harp player explaining, “That’s how you git it dirty - make them notes bend.” Rush’s book is strewn with lessons in life and music gleaned from legends like Waters, Jimmy Reed and Little Walter, a neighbor who taught him the basics of tongue-blocking, a harmonica technique. In 1969, he opened Bobby’s Barbeque House. He bought a hot dog cart to park outside clubs where he played - and ended up making more money selling hot dogs. He was in Chicago over a decade before he cut his first single, “Someday,” released in ’64. Being in the thick of ourselves with our own groove,” he writes. In “juke joints we fixed onto being segregated. ![]() It is where he befriended Elmore James, learned to wear his hair like Big Joe Turner, absorbed the harp playing of Sonny Boy Williamson, and first saw the Rabbit Foot Minstrels, the Black vaudeville group that he briefly joined.Īrkansas is also where Rush fell in love with the spaces where African-American culture flourished in the segregated South, and changed his name. In his book, the Arkansas Delta years are when Rush becomes a character in the history of the blues. By his early teens, Rush was regularly sneaking into the music clubs in nearby Pine Bluff, a hub of Black culture and commerce. Rush’s family moved to Sherrill, a small town in the Arkansas Delta, when he was still a child. She was my babysitter, and my dad was her chauffeur,” he said. ![]() “Many times when I was in the public, she wasn’t my mom. Rush, the sixth of 10 children, said his mother acted differently when the family went into town. His father, Ellis Sr., was a preacher and sharecropper his mother, Mattie, a mixed-race homemaker who passed for white. “All I know is in 1947, I was plowing in the field with a mule,” he said. Much later, Rolling Stone christened him “The King of the Chitlin Circuit,” an acknowledgment of the years he spent touring the network of small clubs for Black performers and audiences, mainly in the South, in a 1973 Silver Eagle Trailways bus he customized himself. His first guitar was a diddley bow he made from hay wire nailed to the side of his childhood home. Rush has relied on practical improvisations, often in unglamorous circumstances, his entire life. “I never seen anything like that before,” Rush said by phone a week later, from his home in Jackson, Miss. It was early May, and the swarming was so bad that the blues musician wove the insects into his lyrics: “Somebody come get these damn bugs.” He later moved to the ground in front of the stage, determined to continue his show in the dark, beyond the reach of the termite-attracting lights. ![]() The air was thick with termites when Bobby Rush stepped onto an outdoor stage in New Orleans for one of his first live performances in over a year - an uncharacteristically long break, the result of pandemic shutdowns, in a career that began in the wake of World War II. ![]()
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