About Bobby Rush
Bobby Rush is an American blues musician, composer, and singer. His style incorporates elements of blues, rap, and funk, as well as a comic sense about blues tropes.
Rush has won twelve Blues Music Awards and in 2017, at the age of 83, he won his first Grammy Award for the album Porcupine Meat. He is inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame, Mississippi Musicians Hall of Fame, and Rhythm & Blues Music Hall of Fame.
Rush is the son of Emmett and Mattie Ellis. His father was a pastor whose guitar and harmonica playing provided early musical influences. As a young child he began experimenting with music using a sugarcane syrup bucket and a broom-wire diddley bow. Around 1947, he and the family moved to Pine Bluff, Arkansas, where his father took on the pastorate of a church and was a farmer.
It was here that Rush would become friends with Elmore James, the slide player Boyd Gilmore , and the piano player Johnny "Big Moose" Walker; eventually forming a band to support his singing and harmonica and guitar playing. His band, Bobby Rush and the Four Jivers, consisted of Gilmore, Walker, Pinetop Perkins, and Robert Plunkett. Through Gilmore, Rush became friends with Clarksdale musician Ike Turner.
Still a teen, Rush donned a fake moustache to play in local juke joints with the band, fascinated by enthusiasm of the crowds. His 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 Little Walter and Muddy Waters who lived nearby. Little Walter got him a job at a club called Skins where they played behind a curtain for a white audience, and began working for Jimmy Reed. Through these connections he began performing on a circuit with Etta James, Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, and Jimmy Reed.
In the early 1970s a song he wrote, "Chicken Heads", released by Galaxy, became his breakout record after being picked up from a small label started by the former Vee Jay Records producer Calvin Carter. It reached No. 34 the Billboard R&B chart in 1971. "Chicken Heads" would become Rush's first certified gold certified record in 1971, and would later re-enter the Billboard chart 30 years after its release as a result of being featured in the film Black Snake Moan.
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