#BOBBY RUSH BLUES. SIX DECADES ON HOW TO#
#BOBBY RUSH BLUES. SIX DECADES ON MOVIE#
#BOBBY RUSH BLUES. SIX DECADES ON FULL#

In Chicago, he built himself a reputation as an entertaining performer but little else – he worked a hotdog stand, opened a barbecue outlet, collected scrap metal, grafting hard to support his family. Shifting to Memphis, Rush was befriended and schooled in the basics of the music industry by Rufus Thomas and Albert King, then, in 1953, joined the great migration of African Americans northwards. He changed his name to Bobby Rush – out of respect for his father, who was now a preacher and blues was considered the devil’s music – and worked juke joints where sharecroppers would drink and dance. I’m not defending minstrels, I’m just saying it was a bridge for a lot of us to enter the entertainment industry.” “Minstrels also created Black vaudeville, and Sammy Davis Jr and others came out of that.

“ Bessie Smith and Louis Jordan and many others started out with minstrels,” he states. Aged 15, he joined the Rabbit’s Foot Minstrels troupe as a singer and dancer, dabbing burnt cork on his face (as was then expected of minstrels) before performing. Determined to perform, and being tall and confident, he began sitting in with blues musicians playing local juke joints (shanty bars often built on plantations).

#BOBBY RUSH BLUES. SIX DECADES ON FULL#

It’s Black folks’ oldest blues song in America – making a way out of no way.”Įmmet Jr decided to make his own way aged 13, leaving home to work full time as a farm labourer. But Daddy and Momma loved us and raised us right and, even if they had very little money, made sure we got the essentials. Grew up picking cotton and got little schooling. “We didn’t have no electricity in our home,” says Rush. Life is so short that I take the good as the overlap of the bad.”īorn Emmet Ellis Jr in Homer, Louisiana, to sharecropping parents, segregation overshadowed a dirt poor upbringing. All those hills and valleys I’ve climbed, well, someone always came through and lifted me out. “My thing has always been to not give up, to keep on pushing – as Curtis Mayfield sang.

Musicians helped him on the hard road to success but James Brown, both when Rush was a junior and later a veteran, left him out of pocket when he offered largesse. “I didn’t want anyone to read the book and feel sorry for me,” says Rush of a life that has seen him get shot, jailed, badly injured when his tour bus crashed and, most punishingly, lose three of his children to sickle cell anaemia.

#BOBBY RUSH BLUES. SIX DECADES ON HOW TO#

Add to this a new manager with a vision of how to take Rush forward and he entered his 80s doing better business than ever. Rush describes his show (or “revue”) as “Black vaudeville” – song, dance, storytelling, often bawdy humour – and these elements provided the key to his breakthrough: The Road to Memphis, the 2003 documentary that was easily the strongest effort in Martin Scorsese’s The Blues series, and followed Rush as he worked, his personality and performances winning over new listeners. “I encourage people to wear a smile, not a frown.” “People love my show cos I emphasise good times,” he says. Instead, his growing audience is due purely to his skill as an entertainer. Unlike John Lee Hooker and Johnny Cash, who were both successfully repositioned in their twilight years, Rush never enjoyed early fame.

#BOBBY RUSH BLUES. SIX DECADES ON MOVIE#

Considering he started performing aged 13 and released his first record in 1964, what’s most remarkable is a work ethic that has seen him win wider acclaim and audiences in recent years – picking up Grammys in 20, appearing in the Eddie Murphy movie Dolemite Is My Name and joining Queens of the Stone Age on stage – than ever before. Rush’s 2021 autobiography I Aint Studdin’ Ya details this and many other scrapes in an epic American life. But it sure beat up on me like nothing else before.” I survived through God’s grace and the fact that I’ve always kept fit, never touched drugs or alcohol. “It was before they had the vaccines and I got real ill, hospitalised for five weeks. “I was the first person in Mississippi to get Covid,” says Rush. This was after he recovered from coronavirus.

Bobby rush blues. six decades on