![]() ![]() At the time when I was doing it, it wasn’t news. “They wanted to hear my music but didn’t want to see my face. “In 1951, I started playing in places with all-white audiences, where people wanted to hear the music I played behind a curtain many, many nights,” Rush says. Rush’s band at the time included the legendary slide-blues guitarist Elmore James. “My daddy messed me up,” he says with a laugh.Īfter his family relocated to Little Rock, Arkansas, Rush, now a teenager, started playing in juke joints in the late ’40s, donning a fake mustache that made club owners think he was older than he really was. When Rush heard Louis Jordan’s “Saturday Night Fish Fry” later, he was stuck on the blues. In my mind, that’s a lot to see," Rush recalls. “I said, ‘Daddy, how big was she?,’ and he said, ‘She was fat, about 350 pounds.’ I said, ‘What did she have on?,' He said, ‘Nothing but a dress.’ A fat lady falling down with nothing on but a dress. I thought he was going to sing ‘Glory Glory Hallelujah.’ He started singing, ‘Me and my gal went chinkapin hunting, she fell down and I saw something.'” “And I wanted to hear it because I thought it was about my mama,” Rush says. When Rush was around seven years old, he thought his father was going to sing him a gospel song, but instead he sang him a song about a girl his father knew when he was a young boy. ![]() Rush’s father, who was a pastor, was also a big influence early on and taught his son how to play guitar. But it was in Louisiana that the 83-year-old singer and guitarist, who’s been playing 200 shows a year for six decades, got his first taste of the blues, listening to it on the radio as a kid. ![]() Bobby Rush says he’s cut 374 records, but he didn’t record any of them in his home state of Louisiana until his most recent album, Porcupine Meat, which won a Grammy this year for Best Traditional Blues Album. ![]()
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