Bobby Rush: “Blues Singer–Plus”

Abstract

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Bobby Rush's musical career has taken him from Homer, Louisiana, to Arkansas, Chicago, and to his current home in Jackson, Mississippi, where he has lived since early 1980s. His first instrument was a one-strand diddley bow made from a broom wire. His father Emmit Ellis St. was a minister who played guitar and harmonica in his church and encouraged his son's interest in music. Rush (born Emmit Ellis Jr.) first that [he] really loved as a child while listening to Nashville's 50,000-watt radio station WLAC and its disc jockey Bill Alien, who hosted a late-night blues program heard throughout South. Allen promoted records by Ray Charles, Fats Domino, Little Richard, and John Lee Hooker with his jive commercials. On air for forty-five years, Alien inspired a love for blues in generations of his black and white southern listeners. The consummate entertainer, Rush frequently changes clothes between songs, and he dances and interacts with his audience during his performance. He reaches out to women in his audience and tries to put them in my arm, and kind of give them upper hand. He also proudly works Chitlin' Circuit of black clubs in small Mississippi Delta towns like Tchula. Describing his music as a cross range of sound, Rush draws his inspiration from diverse performers, including John Lee Hooker, Prince, Tony Joe White, Johnny Cash, Ray Charles, and Muddy Waters. Together they give him what he calls the fusion. I think that's why I draw white and black. Bobby Rush in his own words ... When I first heard blues, I was just a young boy who listened to a record radio station in Nashville, Tennessee. Bill Alien. Hoss Man was a guy who I knew from when I was born in a little place called Homer, Louisiana, who really played blues on radio. When I first heard it as a young kid, that's kind of when I recognized that I really loved blues. I guess I was already loving it, but I just recognized what I was listening to and what I was about. I'm just talking about a seven, eight-year-old kid. There may have been a few times that I heard blues not recalling what station that I was listening to, but I'm thinking at that time about only radio station that was playing blues was WLAC, which was a station out of Nashville. There was another station out of Memphis that at one time was hosted by B.B. King: WDIA. But other than two of them, where I was coming from there was no other way to get blues--other than to sing them myself or hear somebody in my neighborhood singing them. I liked what I heard. In fact, if you talk about black music, blues was only thing I heard a black man or woman singing. So I fell in hue and in love with kind of thing that I could relate to. I could relate to what I knew. That was my first establishing myself, being a blues man. My personally defining blues: to me, it doesn't have to be things that are bad or good. The blues go in both directions. You can be happy about some things and have blues, but it's a temporary happiness. When a guy feels bad, he comes to club. He's down. I try to sing song so I can lift them up, entertain them, make them forget about their problems. It's just a temporary thing that makes you forget about your problems. For me to define what is blues and what's not blues--I think it's very, very hard to say you don't have blues when you often have problems, whether you've got money, whether you're living in a rich neighborhood--or no matter where you live. There's a time you feel bad, and that's blues. It could be president of United States. He has blues because things are not going right, just as they're set out to go. He has blues. It's hard times. The ends not meeting, things just not going right. That's blues to me. …