The trickster of love Bobby Rush puts the 'blue' back in down-home blues
by Ted Drozdowski, photographs by Eric Antoniou
BOBBY RUSH MAY be the best live entertainer you've never seen or heard. Especially if you're a Boston Yankee.
See, Bostonians don't get to the deep South too often. And it's there that Rush who plays Cam-bridge's House of Blues in two weeks, on Friday, June 26 - is the Jheri Curl-crowned king of the chitlins circuit. He is the sultan of soul-blues sleaze: a fire-breathing combination of Muddy Waters and Redd Foxx who holds court before tens of thousands of screaming fans during sum-mer festivals in towns like Greenville, Mis-sissippi, and Helena, Arkansas.
It's there that his loyal followers are smit-ten with his river-deep singing and expert harmonica blowing, tickled by his bevy of big -bootied dancing belles, and driven to un-repentant whooping by his wolfish bedroom humor. Rush's mostly African-American supporters have made him not only a house-hold name in the South and in destinations of northward emigration like Chicago and Detroit, but a cottage industry as well. The devilishly handsome, master of the stage and the double-entendre sells hundreds of thou-sands of albums on the Waldoxy label and owns virtually the entire block surrounding his house in Jackson, Mississippi.
You probably don't have any of those al-bums, with titles like Loving a Big Fat Wom-an, One Monkey Don't Stop No Show, and Handy Man. But Bobby Rush wants to change that. Rush is looking to cross the color line and the Mason-Dixon line, so 18 months ago he started a campaign to win your heart even if you don't know it yet.
Part of that effort is playing places like the House of Blues, where our photographer Eric Antoniou was among the growing crowd of Boston Yankees (in Eric's case, via Greece) to catch Rush's act locally. There, Rush romped through two sets - changing sequined costumes, playing virtuoso lines on harmonica, and singing up the kind of storm that could only have blown out of the Mis-sissippi Delta.
And, like Sinatra, he did it his way. Rush has a performing style so politically incorrect so very un-Boston proper, let alone Cantabrigian - that he makes Jay Billington Bulworth seem like Alan Alda. During his first House of Blues show, in '96, he carried on a conversation with the dernere of a dancer named Scandelicious, sang a tune in which a blind man shouts "hey, baby" as he passes a fish house, and held up a pink pair of size 200 panties when he asked if anyone had seen his woman. My friend Joan turned to me, a bit red-faced, and said, "I don't know if I should laugh out loud or feel insult-ed." I suggested laughter, because Rush doesn't have a mean-spirited bone in his shimmying body. To him, a nod's as good as a wink, eh? And he laces his high jinks with plenty of both.
Down South, Rush's crazy cock-of-the-walk act doesn't even raise the question. Last month, when my wife Laurie and I caught him wooing a mostly African-American audience at Memphis's New Daisy Theater, it was love at first jive. By the time he got around to singing "Booga Bear," a number about the most intimate zone of the female anatomy that at least a dozen women had been hollering for all night, the crowd was loose and doubled over with laughter. So loose that a woman in the row before mine leaned back in her chair, spread her legs, and showed Bobby just where her "booga bear" was hibernatin'... as her boyfriend laughed.
NONE OF this, of course, says much about Rush's music. About the airtight way he leads his band through tunes and the vamping they lay down under his raunchy raps. About his command not only of his own material but of blues classics by Sonny Boy Williamson, Robert Nighthawk, and others from the '40s and '50s. About his 45 years in show business. Or about the many accolades he's won from blues fans and critics, and the Handy Awards - blues' equivalent of the Grammys- in his home.
Like many bluesmen, Rush began his career in earnest when he left Mississippi for Chicago in the '5Os. Then he was playing guitar and bass. And in the early '60s he put together a Chicago band that featured Luther "Guitar Junior" Johnson (who drove down from his current residence in New Hampshire to sit in on Rush's most recent House of Blues gig).
Back in those early years, Rush was also close to the late harmonica virtuoso Little Walter, who recorded the instrumental "Juke" and other hits for the Chess label. "I don't think I picked up my harp style from Walter," Rush says, "but I loved what he did. See, as a young man I listened to people who would talk the blues down, so I tried to mod-ify my licks to be hip. I fell for the lies about the blues not being cool. I even put my harp down - for years. I know now that what I did was wrong, because I love the gut-bucket blues. And when I started singing them again, that's when things slowly started to happen for me."
Indeed, Rush's ascent to the heights of deep-South soul-blues has taken 30 years. Over that time, his roots in an era when showmanship was box-office gold have grown stronger - even as the tradition of on-stage flamboyance has trickled out of most music. Today, he's an energizing anti-dote to the anti-theater aesthetic of alterna-tive rock that has dominated the club and concert scene for so much of the '90s.
"I come out of the old school of entertain-ers, Rush explains. "Singing is just a part of what you do, but entertaining is everything. You can teach yourself to play guitar or sing, but entertaining. . . you have to be born to it. And I was."
Rush also admits he's inspired by a tradi-tion he traces back to the pre-Prohibition heyday of Harlem's Cotton Club and its mas-ter of ceremonies, Cab Calloway. "I'm proud to be upholding that way of putting on a show," he says. "It's something that black and white audiences once enjoyed together at the Cotton Club and other places music and fun and sex. And I want to get that audience back together now. That nightclub style of humor has always been about sex. Really, life is about that. What good is success or money if you can't share it with your woman or your child? That's a basic thing with all mankind.
"When people see me for the first time, they might get hung up about the jokes and the girls on stage. I went to Amsterdam, of all places, and literally got booed because they expected just another blues singer. But now the same people who booed me love me. Once they see that the lyrics in the songs and the things I do on stage are jokes and usually jokes about myself being such hot stuff - they realize it's all in good fun. Why not talk about loving a big fat woman? Just because they don't do that on TV commercials doesn't mean overweight people don't exist and that they don't need love, too. Wherever there's a big fat man in the world, wherever there's a big fat woman well, there should be someone there to love and care about them, too.
"Like I say, I aim to entertain everybody and people know I'm making jokes, they know it's a show. But the bottom line is that everybody needs someone to love them and someone to love."
[ RUSH HOMEPAGE | PRESS ARCHIVE ]
