It's undeniable that the most arresting aspect of Bobby Rush's appeal is his flamboyant showmanship, with an em-phasis on hardcore nitty gritty soul--blues funk, outrageous humor, and blatant eroticism. Watching him perform at the New Daisy Theatre early last month I kept having hallucinatory flashbacks that took me back to the Union Hill Mis-sionary Baptist Church in Chattanooga and the astonishing performance dis-plays of its pastor, the Rev. William Ryan, who is one of the best "showmen for the Lord" that I've ever seen. Bob-by Rush and Rev. Ryan were tied to-gether in the "ancestral racial code" of wild style Black performance.

Bobby Rush ... Rev. Ryan ... Rush Ryan - they kept crisscrossing and blending in-and-out of one another in my mind in beautiful, blurry surrealistic kaleidoscopic patterns. Rush has made a lot of records throughout his career including signature tunes like Chicken Heads, Sue, Wearing It Out, Big Fat Woman, and Booga Bear but it's his live stage show, pure uncut funky down-home old school chitlin' circuit entertainment, that has created his legend. It's clear that Rush and Ryan are sources of audientic Black musical culture, demonstrating a spirit that makes it easy for an original creator to overshadow a would-be imitator evervtime. I'll concede that Whites like Johnny Lang [a blond haired. teenager from North Dakota] and Eric Clapton can play blues guitar, and that Whites can play blues harmonica pretty good," Rush says, "but they can't do what I do." What Rush does is give his audiences a 'democratic" erot-ic blues-soul ritual, with him as player-trickster testifying to the women in the house, and a crew of female background dancers whipping up the sexual heat in the menfolk, while the band intensifies the whole experience with the opening of rhythmic spiritual doors through which you can recognize el-ements of blues, jazz, rhythm and blues, soul, funk - all forms of Black popular music.

Rush employs Black music and dance in an ethnically and historically deter-mined style in an effort to prompt his community to employ traditions that will enable their spiritual fulfillment. You see Whites down on Beale Street wearing T-shirts with the alleged color-blind slogan "No Black, No White, Just Blues." But Bobby Rush is really com-ing out of a 'ritual place" of Blackness loaded with spiritual meanings and be-haviors that connect contemporary African Americans to the primordial life force of their African ancestors.

Rush has traditionally been a chitlin' circuit entertainer, barnstorming all over the country, performing for work-ing class Black audiences in venues like the New Club Paradise here in Memphis. But in recent years he has started playing the blues festival cir-cuit, too, during the summer months, and attracting enough attention from Whites to secure booking in blues clubs catering to that mar-ket. He wants cross over to the mainstream market, but he doesn't want to have to dilute his soul power for acceptance in that market.

His independence is real important to Rush, which means in-tegrity. "I've formed a partnership with Keith A. Federman [a young White guy who serves as Rush's Artist Representative]," Rush says, "but he works for me. I'm the last of the independent soulmen. I don't have a White manager who controls me, tells me what I can say or play or think. I'm my own man. Not many in this business can say this now days, not even those riding high in the blues world."