Black Music Sunday: Remembering Otis Rush and his Chicago blues

As a longtime blues fan whose dad was from Chicago, I’ve written about the city’s urban electric blues scene as well as some of the greatest blues men and women who helped make the Windy City the epicenter of electric blues. 

A vocalist and guitarist who never “made it” in the commercial sense is often overlooked in the Chicago blues pantheon, but he is still considered one of the all-time greats. I’m talking about Mississippi-born Otis Rush, who joined the ancestors on Sept. 29, 2018.

Join me in remembering the man and his music on this anniversary of his passing on.

”Black Music Sunday” is a weekly series highlighting all things Black music, with over 230 stories covering performers, genres, history, and more, each featuring its own vibrant soundtrack. I hope you’ll find some familiar tunes and perhaps an introduction to something new.

Though many Rush obituaries mention where he was born, they jump quickly to his musical start in Chicago. I think it is important to talk about his life before Chitown, because his beginnings shaped the sound of his blues.

Details of his start in life are inscribed on a historical trail marker at his birthplace outside of Philadelphia, Mississippi, in Neshoba County.

Otis Rush rose from the poverty of a Mississippi sharecropper’s life to international fame as one of the most passionate singers and brilliant guitarists in the blues world. Rush, the sixth of seven children, was born in 1935, according to family sources, although biographies often give his birth date as 1934. His mother, Julia Campbell Boyd, ended up raising her family alone on farms in Neshoba and Kemper counties. During the throes of the Great Depression in a segregated society, although times were hard, with the children often missing school to work in the cotton fields, Julia Boyd did own a wind-up Victrola record player. Rush heard blues records at home and on jukeboxes in Philadelphia when his mother would bring him to town. He began playing harmonica, and also sang in a church choir.

When his oldest brother, Leroy Boyd, was away from home, Otis started secretly playing Leroy’s guitar. With no musical training, he devised his own unorthodox method, playing left-handed with the guitar upside down. Rush’s distinctive style was rooted in his self-taught technique and his ability to transform sounds he heard into notes on his guitar. One sound he recalled from his childhood was Leroy’s whistling.

As a young teen, Rush was already married, sharecropping cotton and corn on a five-acre plot. On Otis Lewis’s farm, Rush heard guitarist Vaughan Adams, a friend of his mother’s, but there were few other blues musicians around Philadelphia. Rush only became inspired to be a professional musician after visiting his sister in Chicago. She took him to a Muddy Waters performance, and, as Rush recalled, “I flipped out, man. I said, ‘Damn. This is for me.’”

Talking Guitar magazine published a long interview with Rush in which he described his life while growing up. It was titled “Otis Rush: ‘This Is My Life Story’”:

Was there a lot of racism?

Yeah, a lot of that too. I’ve had to go around the back to restaurants. When white people are having dinner, I must wait till they get through eating. After they eat, then we could eat. I’m not kidding. The rest rooms, they had signs up there – “White” and “Colored.” You know I’m telling the truth. It was all over. You’d go to a restaurant, even on the highway, and it’d say, “Colored, go around the back.” When we wanted some food, we can’t order from the front. But I don’t want to get into that. Like I say, it’s been a hell of an experience.

You’ve said that your hard times started around the time you were five years old.

That’s right. My mother didn’t have a husband. There were seven of us – five boys and two girls, and she had to raise us by herself. I’m what they call a bastard. All my brothers had another father – they’re half-brothers – and I have one whole sister, Odie Mae. There’s also Leroy, Lorenzo, Eugene, and Wilmon. The other sister is Elizabeth. The seven of us had to support each other.

Did you ever work in a field?

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah! From five years old. My mother and older brothers and sisters be out in the field picking cotton, pulling corn, or something. I’m lookin’ at them workin’, and I wanted my mother to compliment me. Every time I’d pull some cotton, I’d give it to her and let her put it in her sack – she used to drag the sacks. She said, “Boy, you’re doin’ great!” She kept on telling me how great I worked. I get tired and go sit in the shade, so at some point she said, “Come on, boy.” I said, “What, mom?” “You pick that cotton like you been pickin’.” I didn’t want to pick it. She said, “You better come on, boy, I ain’t gonna tell you no more.” So at six, seven years old, man, I’m working my ass off. I had to pick that cotton. At nine or ten years old, my goodness, I was plowin’ the mule, turning this land over with the plow. No tractor – they had ’em, but not on this farm.

The white man let us go to school when the weather was so bad out there that we can’t go to work. And we’d be prayin’ for bad weather all the time! [Laughs.] We would hope for a storm, so today we could go to school. I went to school, man, but not like I should have. I’d be in school, I have all these plans for today – this is my great day – and [knocks three times, then says in a loud, gruff voice] “Junior in there?” They called me Junior and Bud then. “Is he in there? Send him out here.” Then he’d say, “Come on, boy. I want you to go out here and cut them bushes and do that bottom over there.” I come out of that school mad, man! I felt like kickin’ my own ass. But, hey, you better get up and go – don’t you be seein’ that damn tree with that limb hangin’ out like that with them ropes around it? Shit. I come out of there – and no argument! My teacher don’t argue, just, “You got to go! You got to go, Junior!”

Were you aware of lynchings?

Was I aware of them?! I knew all the time what they’ll do! I’m livin’ there, man! I’m livin’ in Philadelphia, Mississippi.

His introduction to the Chicago music scene is described in his 2018 obituary in The Guardian, written by music historian Tony Russell:

Around 1948-49 he moved to Chicago, from where one of his sisters had been writing home about the blues scene. He worked on his guitar-playing, performed in clubs and by the mid-50s had enough of a reputation for Willie Dixon, Chicago’s leading A&R man, to sign him to a label he was helping to launch. I Can’t Quit You Baby, his 1956 debut for Cobra, was astonishing, full of suspense and passionately sung, with a brief but petrifying guitar solo.

Over the next two years he followed it with tracks such as My Love Will Never Die, Groaning the Blues and Double Trouble, a broadside of social dissatisfaction: “Some of this generation is millionaires, but I ain’t got decent clothes to wear.” (Stevie Ray Vaughan would borrow the title for his band.) These early sides – for which he said he was never paid – possessed a screaming modern intensity that sharply distinguished him from older bluesmen such as Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf.

Here he is performing his first hit “I Can’t Quit You Baby,” which was written by Willie Dixon, followed by “Double Trouble.”