Otis Rush

Otis Rush is considered by many blues fans, critics and contemporaries to be one of the best blues performers to come out of Chicago in the late 50’s and early 60’s. Muddy Waters called him ‘one of the best’ and although not a fan of many of the ‘younger players’ of the time, Muddy became a regular devotee of the young guitar player. He, along with Buddy Guy and the late Magic Sam, are credited with creating the West Side sound (a slow burning, more jazz, rhythm and blues oriented sound with a rich, gospel tinged vocals) and yet Rush has never managed to secure the recognition that he truly deserved.

A south paw guitar player, Otis plays with his guitar flipped over and yet unlike so many other ‘lefties’, he never restrings his guitar in the standard direction opting instead to play with the low E string facing the floor. He bends his strings down towards the floor, often times pushing so hard that the high E hits the low E string for a sound that will actually make the hairs stand on the back of your neck. There are times when you are listening to Otis Rush and hear a slow slide along the neck, you imagine he’s working a slide. But Otis rarely uses a slide. Instead he uses his hands to imitate the sound. Watch him play and you will see something that will make your jaw drop; he can take an entire chord and shake it into a shimmering vibrato.

He has a devoted following in Europe and Japan and yet in the United States, the average music fan has probably never heard of him or if they have, it has only been in passing or perhaps on a blues compilation disc. But to the blues devotee, the name carries weight.

For Otis Rush, it’s been the story of his career.

Otis Rush, one of seven children, was born on Philadelphia, Mississippi on August 29th, 1934 to a family of farm workers. His introduction to music was through church and through an uncle who played the guitar around the house. “I’d be happy when he picked the guitar up,” Rush told Blues Guitar magazine, “I’m left handed, see, so I’d take the guitar and flip it over …” He went onto say that “as a kid I just liked the looks of the guitars, but I didn’t play”. So the first instrument he went with was the harmonica.

In 1948 Rush relocated to Chicago to move in with his older sister. He took a job at the Stock Yards and kept busy playing the harmonica. However after seeing Muddy Waters play on stage with Jimmy Rogers in 1953, Rush made the decision that playing the blues guitar was what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. Rush returned to the guitar with a fury and spent as much time playing and learning when he was not working. Within a year, Rush was fronting his own band under the name ‘Little Otis’. But before that, Otis caught his first gig because a club owner heard him practicing one night. Rush relayed this story in an interview with Blues Guitar magazine. “One night some guy came and said ‘Who’s that guy making that noise up there? I need a guy to come and play at my club tonight. My band stood me up.’ So he offered me four or five dollars, and I went and played – at 2711 Wentworth in Chicago. It was by myself, just stomping with my foot and playing. He said ‘Come back tomorrow night’. And I came back three or four nights… I’d been making a couple of hundred dollars a week (at his job at a warehouse), and I gave it up to make forty or fifty – just to play.”

It was a wise choice. In 1958, famed blues impresario Willie Dixon (who was scouting local act for blues label, Cobra Records) caught Otis Rush and his band and signed them to the label. “He was scouting for them and I was playing at the 708 Club with Louis Myers as the Four Aces. Matter of fact, Junior Wells was part of it for a while. We were playing together for two or three years before I cut “I Can’t Quit You, Baby”. A lot of good things happened at that club; that’s where I saw Robert Nighthawk”.

The brief partnership with Cobra yielded some of Otis’ best recordings. He recorded ‘I Can’t Quit You, Baby’, ‘ All Your Love’ (I Miss Loving), ‘Groaning The Blues’ and ‘Double Trouble’ while with Cobra (all which have become blues standards). ‘I Can’t Quit You, Baby’ reached Number 6 on the Billboard R&B charts. It was such a hit that Jimmy Page ‘borrowed’ the track for Led Zeppelin, even going as far as playing Rush’s solo note for note on his recording. While Otis was with Cobra he did a first for the blues with the introduction of the electric bass. Until then the bass being played was the stand up type. But Otis brought in an electric bass player and other bands sat up and took notice of the solid backbeat that an electric can offer. Shortly after this experiment, the days of the stand up fiddle bass in the blues was numbered.

In 1959 the Cobra label folded. Co-owner Ed Toscano, a heavy gambler lost the label due to gambling debts. Willie Dixon corralled Otis and took him to Chess Records. Chess, despite the fact that they promised him the moon, released only one single, ‘So Many Roads, So Many Trains’ in the two years he stayed with the label. Otis said in an interview that his time with Chess had less to do with producing his records but rather the fact that “Chess didn’t really need me when they signed me up. But they get you; they handcuff you, you know, where you can’t be making records for no one else. They weren’t interested in pushing me; they just wanted control”.

From Chess Otis went to Duke Records and had yet another disappointing time. Again, only one single was released, ‘Homework’. Rush walked away from Duke quickly and began to tour heavily. He did record a handful of tracks for Vanguard for a compilation of Chicago blues in 1965 but he stayed away from the studio for almost the rest of the decade. In 1969 Rush was brought into record an album at the famed Muscle Shoals Studio in Alabama under the production of Electric Flag members Michael Bloomfield and Nick Gravenites. The resulting album was ‘Mourning In The Morning’ which despite some downright stellar playing by Rush, was panned by critics for being trite and over-produced with insipid lyrics (provided by Bloomfield and Gravenites).

Now being represented by famed manager Albert Grossman, Rush was brought into Capitol Records in 1971. The album that he cut for Capitol, “Right Place, Wrong Time’, is still considered his finest work. Inexplicably Capitol let the disc sit in the vaults for five years without doing anything with it. And there it stayed until 1976 when Rush purchased the master from Capitol and had it released on the tiny Bullfrog label.

The remainder of the 70’s saw Otis touring and only occasionally recording here (including a somewhat uninspired recording for Delmark) and there, popping up in various ensembles or as a solo artist but primarily the man who was, at one time, considered a pioneer in the electric Chicago blues was floundering. By the end of the decade, Rush stopped touring and recording for two years but he never stopped playing. “I listened to records a lot, listened to sounds, and practiced. I’ve sat up 24 hours with it. You’ve got to get it mentally, and you’ve got to get it mechanically… I had to figure out if I wanted to play or not. I need to get myself together and either accept what’s going on or quit”. Fortunately for blues fans everywhere, Otis was nowhere near ready to quit.

Otis hit the trail again in the mid-80’s trying to revive his career, not an easy task after hiding in self-imposed exile for a few years. He released a few live recordings throughout the decade but sadly they all began to sound somewhat similar and interest in the aging blues man was fading quickly.
But by 1994, things began to look up. He released his first studio recording on Mercury Records “Ain’t Enough Coming In” which became a favorite among critics and writers of the time. Rush filled in his discography with two more live recordings and in 1998 recorded and released “Any Place I’m Going” in 1998 which earned him his first Grammy for Best Traditional Blues Album (1999).

Again, Rush returned to the road and released two more live albums (some of which had been recorded years earlier). In 2004 Otis suffered but survived a stroke.

But despite a rocky career, Otis Rush is still considered a legend and an innovator. He helped create a sound that goes on today and aided in the continued development of the music he loved. His influence so profound, blues guitarists the world over including Eric Clapton, Peter Green and Jeff Beck cite him as a major influence. But his influence at home remains unshakable and unmistakable. Stevie Ray Vaughn went as far as to name his band ‘Double Trouble’ after Rush’s single of the same name.

Ironic to see how perhaps the most popular blues man of this generation was inspired so greatly by a player who never seemed to get his due.

Not yet anyway.