Bobby Rush Revue

After more than sixty years of recording and touring, Rush is still doing over 200 shows a year from Mississippi to Japan and California to Los Angeles, and headlining major festivals and concerts for upwards of 20,000 people a night. Rush's stage show is built around big-bottomed female dancers, ribald humor and hip-shaking grooves have made Rush today's most popular blues attraction among African-American audiences. With more than 100 albums on his résumé, according to Rolling Stone magazine he's the reigning king of the Chitlin' Circuit, the network of clubs, theaters, halls and juke joints that first sprang up in the 1920s to cater to black audiences in the bad old days of segregation. A range of historic entertainers that includes Bessie Smith, Cab Calloway, B.B. King, Nat "King" Cole and Ray Charles emerged from this milieu. And Rush is proud to bear the torch for that tradition, and more.
?"What I do goes back to the days of black vaudeville and Broadway, and — with my dancers on stage — even back to Africa," Rush says. "It's a spiritual thing, entwined with the deepest black roots, and with my latest releases, I'm taking those roots in a new direction so all kinds of audiences can experience my music and what it's about."?
Rush began absorbing the blues almost from his birth in Homer, Louisiana, on November 10, 1935. "My first guitar was a piece of wire nailed up on a wall with a brick keeping it raised up on top and a bottle keeping it raised on the bottom," he relates. "One day the brick fell out and hit me in the head, so I reversed the brick and the bottle.??"I might be hard-headed," he adds, chuckling, "but I'm a fast learner."?
Rush quickly moved on to an actual six-string and the harmonica. He started playing juke joints in his teens, wearing a fake mustache so owners would think him old enough to perform in their clubs. In 1953 his family relocated to Chicago, where his musical education shifted to hyperspeed under the spell of Waters, Wolf, Williamson and the rest of the big dogs on the scene. Rush ran errands for slide six-string king Elmore James and got guitar lessons from Howlin' Wolf. He traded harmonica licks with Little Walter and begin sitting in with his heroes.
?In the '60s Rush became a bandleader in order to realize the fresh funky soul-blues sound that he was developing in his head.??"James Brown was just two years older than me, and we both focused on that funk thing, driving on that one-chord beat," Rush explains. "But James put modern words to it. I was walking the funk walk and talking the countrified blues talk — with the kinds of stories and lyrics that people who grew up down South listening to John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf and bluesmen like that could relate to. And that's been my trademark."
?After 1971's percolating "Chicken Heads" became his first hit and cracked the R&B Top 40, Rush's dedication increased. He then received his first Gold-Certified record for "Chicken Heads" in 1971, followed by "Sue" in 1981, and "Ain't Studdin' Ya" in 1991. After the success of "Chicken Heads" he relocated to Mississippi to be among the highest population of his core black blues-loving audience and put together a 12-piece touring ensemble. Record deals with Philadelphia International and Malaco came as his star rose, and his performances kept growing from the small juke joints where he'd started into nightclubs, civic auditoriums and, by the mid-'80s, Las Vegas casinos and the world's most prominent blues festivals. Rush's ascent was depicted in The Road to Memphis, a film co-starring B.B. King that was part of the 2003 PBS series Martin Scorsese Presents: The Blues.