| Bluesman
By Brett Anderson 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. 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. “I never seen anything like that before,” Rush said by phone a week later, from his home in Jackson, Miss. “I could hardly play my guitar.” Rush has relied on practical improvisations, often in unglamorous circumstances, his entire life. His first guitar was a diddley bow he made from hay wire nailed to the side of his childhood home. 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. On the heels of winning his second Grammy in March, and on the verge of publishing a memoir in June, Rush, now in his 80s, is enjoying a moment of recognition. A lesser-known figure compared to many of the luminaries he has considered friends and mentors, including Elmore James, Muddy Waters and B.B. King, Rush is one of the last remaining Black blues musicians who experienced the horror of Jim Crow-era racism and participated, however tangentially, in the genre’s postwar flowering. “I may be the oldest blues singer around, me and Buddy Guy,” he said in October, during the first of several conversations, this one via video conference. Rush sat at the edge of a couch at his son’s house in Jackson, slouching to peer into a laptop screen and trotted out a quip he uses onstage: “If I’m not the oldest, I’m the ugliest.” He wore the same New Orleans Saints baseball cap over his Jheri curls during an in-person interview a week later, at the Grammy Museum in Cleveland, Miss. Speaking through a mask, he reflected from a dressing room chair about the “heavy” experience of outliving so many contemporaries. He was there to accept the Crossroads of American Music Award, a lifetime achievement of sorts. “I’ve known so many of these cats,” he said. “I’ve lived the history.” Scott Billington, a veteran producer who has worked with many blues musicians, including Rush, said the singer, guitarist and harmonica player is indeed among the last of a dying breed. “Bobby’s almost unique in the blues world today, because he has connections that go back so far,” he said. “He’s made this transition into a sort of iconic American figure.” Rush believes the racial awakening triggered by the murder of George Floyd, and reinforced by the pandemic, leaves him well positioned to reach a public primed to hear the blues with fresh ears. “I think what we thought was forwards wasn’t forwards,” he said of the suggestion that Floyd’s killing represented a step backward in the struggle for racial justice. “I been having feet on my neck all my life.” Sign up for the Louder Newsletter Stay on top of the latest in pop and jazz with reviews, interviews, podcasts and more from The New York Times music critics. Get it sent to your inbox. Rush’s memoir, “I Ain’t Studdin’ Ya: My American Blues Story,” written with Herb Powell and due out June 22, is frank about many things, including the reason he’s received so many standing ovations in recent years. “I’ve got enough good sense to know they are not applauding because I’m a household name,” he writes. “What they’re standing for is that I’m still here, doing it my way.” For much of his career, Rush tailored his show — a mix of soul, funk and blues interspersed with bawdy storytelling — to an audience he says was “99 percent Black.” He went decades without ever cracking into the broader, mainly white audience that brought fame (if not always fortune) to the blues’ biggest stars. That started to change around the turn of this century, when Rush starred in “The Road to Memphis,” one in a series of documentaries about the blues, executive produced by Martin Scorsese, that aired on PBS in 2003. Rush was a senior citizen by then, or about to be. His book offers three possible birth years — 1940, 1937 and 1934. Rush claims not to know the answer. “All I know is in 1947, I was plowing in the field with a mule,” he said. Rush was born Emmett Ellis Jr. in northwest Louisiana. His father, Ellis Sr., was a preacher and sharecropper; his mother, Mattie, a mixed-race homemaker who passed for white. Rush, the sixth of 10 children, said his mother acted differently when the family went into town. “Many times when I was in the public, she wasn’t my mom. She was my babysitter, and my dad was her chauffeur,” he said. “It was a strange situation.” Rush’s family moved to Sherrill, a small town in the Arkansas Delta, when he was still a child. By his early teens, Rush was regularly sneaking into the music clubs in nearby Pine Bluff, a hub of Black culture and commerce. In his book, the Arkansas Delta years are when Rush becomes a character in the history of the blues. 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. Arkansas is also where Rush fell in love with the spaces where African-American culture flourished in the segregated South, and changed his name. In “juke joints we fixed onto being segregated. Being in the thick of ourselves with our own groove,” he writes. “There was freedom in these places.” | 