Happy Birthday Bobby Rush (with side serving of history)

        In the age of Stadium Rock with limos ferrying artists in and out for audiences of tens of thousands, it’s hard for today’s younger fans to grasp what has happened, roots wise, to bring popular American music to its current status. Yeah, I know, “Why are you waxing philosophical today and on this tack, Mike?” Well… because today is the 85^th birthday of a man most Americans are unfamiliar with, but whose career in music, spanning more than 60 years is instructive, from an historical standpoint.  Bobby Rush is one of the men (and women) who, like Little Willie John, Muddy Waters, BB King, Big Mama Thornton, Roy Brown and numerous others, were precursors and way-pavers for LLoyd Price, Little Richard, Fats, James Brown and Ike and Tina. 

        In the post war music scene, there were white performers who worked for generally white audiences in theaters and clubs and there were Black performers who worked Black clubs which were “safe” for Black audiences. This “tour,” if you will, of frequently small Black venues (with some exceptions in large cities, such as Chicago’s Regal Theater, D.C.’s Howard Theater, and of course the Apollo in Harlem, was known as the Chitlin’ Circuit. It was a time when Billboard magazine had segregated hit lists, and would continue doing so until 1956, when Black artists/titles were listed with white contemporaries on the Billboard Hot 100 for the first time. Prior to the desegregation of Billboard’s charts in 1959, Black artists (other than “acceptable” crossovers like Basie, Ellington, et al) were classified separately, on a “Race record chart (1945-49), changed in 1949 to the “Rhythm and Blues” chart, still segregated, until 1959.

        Similarly, most record stores didn’t carry such records as were produced.  Blues fans in America who wished to hear the products of artists on labels such as Okeh, Black Swan, or even the Black artist records produced by Columbia, beginning in 1921 but marketed primarily to Blacks, either had to “go to town” meaning a relatively large urban center, or buy them by mail, which many did.      

       This was important for several reasons. The first being that many, if not most, radio stations in late 1930s and early 40s simply didn’t play what were then called “race” records, which were early rhythm and blues performed by black artists. When the Great Depression impoverished the (already economically stricken) Black community in America, buying records and /or phonographs to play them on, was essentially impossible and, to all intents and purposes, killed the “race” record business such as it was.  Almost every major music company removed race records from their catalogs as the country turned to the radio. Black listenership for the radio consistently stayed below ten percent of the total Black population during this time, since the music they enjoyed did not get airtime.

        This semi-exclusion of Black artists on the radio was further cemented when commercial networks like NBC and CBS started to hire White singers to cover Black music. This practice would continue well into the 1950s, subjecting young fans, like me, to the aural abuse of Pat Boone covering Little Richard – badly, but I digress.  It was not until after World War II that rhythm and blues, a term spanning some sub-genres of race records, gained significant radio airtime.

        Even then, if you were a kid like me, born in 1942 and growing up on Rock and Roll starting at about 10 years of age, the chances of hearing blues artists in Hagerstown, Md were twofold – slim and none. One station played light classics and “popular’ music, the other played what my parents (trained musicians) called “hillbilly” music. My discovery of the late-night FM ionosphere “bounce” opened a new musical vista.  Upstairs, at night, on my portable radio, I got seminal “White” Rock and Roll from WKBW in Buffalo, NY, but better yet (at least for me) was the discovery of WLAC in Nashville, TN. where “John R.” and “The Hoss Man,   two white guys, were playing what, to me was just great music- rythm and blues of all sorts.    

  

      Many Chitlin circuit graduates such as BB King, John Lee Hooker, Buddy Guy, Ike and Tina, and others too numerous to mention,  later went on to broad mainstream and worldwide acceptance thanks, in no small part, to the appreciative appropriation of blues by a gifted generation of European  musicians such as John Mayall, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Peter Green, Van Morrison, et al., who, interestingly enough, could neither hear it on the BBC or, prior to the mid-50s, buy blues records on the retail market in the UK. (Morrison’s work with John Lee Hooker is like a father-son reunion spanning 3000 miles.)

       My subject today, Bobby Rush, was born Emmett Ellis, Jr. in Homer, Louisiana, the son of a rural pastor whose guitar and harmonica playing provided early musical influences. As a young child he began experimenting with music playing a sugarcane syrup bucket and a broom-wire diddley bow. Around 1947, the family moved to Pine Bluff, Arkansas, where his father took on the pastorate of a church. In Arkansas, Rush would become friends with (later Blues legend himself) Elmore James, eventually forming a band to support Rush’s singing, and harmonica and guitar playing.

       While still in his teens, Rush donned a fake moustache to play in local juke joints with the band, fascinated by enthusiasm of the crowds. The family relocated to Chicago in 1953, where he became part of the local blues scene in the following decade. In Chicago he met and befriended his neighbor, Muddy Waters, and began working for Jimmy Reed. Through these connections he began performing on “The Circuit” with Etta James, Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, and Jimmy Reed.

        Bobby Rush remained and remains at 85, a small venue, gritty blues/soul/ type of guy. He still plays small venues, with his great veteran band and two backup singers who are the greatest test of spandex ever seen in public. Along the way he has won a Grammy award, not for record sales but for being what he has always been, a real, no shit legendary blues  performer, still working a sort of integrated chitlin’ circuit and loving life. Happy birthday, Bobby Rush.