Karen Pulfer Focht
Bobby Rush in Memphis 2015 © Karen Pulfer Focht-ALL RIGHTS RESERVED-NOT FOR USE WITHOUT WRITTEN PERMISSION
Bobby Rush is humble, sincere, harsh, witty, forthright. The no-nonsense entertainer is acutely aware where he is in life and how he got there. Yet he will tell you this: “God has allowed me and blessed me to live long enough to know I don’t know nothing. When a man tell what he know, he won’t talk long because man don’t know nothing.”
Anyone who has observed and pondered things for decades knows what he means, a variation of the old saw that “the more you know, the less you understand.” But don’t let that fool you.
Rush has been performing since he was a teenager, from the Chitlin’ Circuit to the Great Wall of China, and has won scads of awards, although it wasn’t until last year at age 83 that he took home a Grammy. He won Best Traditional Blues Album for Porcupine Meat, a lyric of which goes like this: “Too fat to eat, too lean to throw away.”
He’s still touring, vigorous as ever, giving his audiences what they’ve come to love from him. And what a remarkable journey it continues to be.
Back in 2015, photographer Karen Pulfer Focht and I decided that we’d track Rush down in hopes of getting a few minutes with him. It was part of our ongoing effort to document the singular culture of the Mid-South, including its musical legends. Just weeks before, B.B. King had died and we were very much aware that the ranks were thinning. In January of this year alone, we’ve lost Denise LaSalle and Preston Shannon.
So on that summer day, we drove to Clarksdale, Mississippi, where Rush was being inducted into the Rhythm & Blues Music Hall of Fame.
Focht had met Rush before and taken pictures, so we figured we might be able to grab a few minutes if he wasn’t too busy with soundchecks and preparations. We did catch up with him, but he was surrounded by a phalanx of Canadian TV people who had been with him for a couple of days.
Good fortune was with us, though. The Canadians took a break around 6 p.m. and Rush led us to a room in the Clarksdale Civic Auditorium where we could talk.
Rush knew Focht, but nothing about me, so he spoke carefully, thoughtfully, and a bit guardedly. He hadn’t quite figured out where I intended to go with the interview, and a lifetime of these conversations and press coverage had made him cautious about media and wary of perceptions.
Rush right away offered up cautionary tales about the press. Not of inaccuracies or mistakes, but something more far-reaching, perhaps even insidious.
“I went to Oklahoma one time many years ago,” he said. “The writer wrote about how he liked the show and how the girl was on the stage dancing. He wrote, ‘Now, Bobby Rush is a little raunchy. He’s a little at the edge.’”
It was clearly a positive review, but Rush — whose stage performance thrives on his own style of storytelling and includes his notorious shake dancers — was acutely aware that his act was at the edge, so much so that he feared getting pushed off of it. “Not by the public, not by my audience, but the man who wrote about me being this edge kind of a guy.” The one-dimensional description fueled expectations. “They set people up for failure before they see it.”
Rush concluded that Karen and I were legit and not pursuing an agenda. “Most of the time the interview is not for the person you interview. It’s for the benefit of the person doing the interview,” he said pointedly. “What’s enthused me about this interview is your persistence. You don’t let me go. Karen won’t let me go. That means she wants to talk to me, and she didn’t disrespect me. This is what makes me tick. Respect for what I have to do. Respect for what I have to say and how I say it and what I talk about.”
I went into the interview thinking I’d get a musician’s reminiscences of his career playing the blues, maybe some anecdotes about B.B. King and the Chitlin’ Circuit. (Rolling Stone magazine declared Rush to be King of the Chitlin’ Circuit a few years ago, revealing to white audiences what the entertainer’s African-American fans had already long known.)
Instead, I got an education. The first part of which was that, even though Rush does play the blues, he doesn’t embrace the label. His more than 300 recorded tunes include forays into soul and funk — he has an album titled Folk Funk — and he shines as a storyteller, incorporating all those styles.
“People come out to be entertained,” he said. “Not to be sung to and not to be played to. I’m an entertainer that plays guitar. I’m not a guitar player that sings. There is a difference.”
You see it in his involvement within every aspect of the job.
“When I was 15 years old, I wanted to write a song until I found a writer. I wanted to produce until I found me a producer. I wanted to promote myself until I found somebody to promote me. I was going to book myself until I found an agent. I was going to manage myself until I found a manager. Almost 50 years later, B.B. King came to me and he said, ‘Bobby Rush, I need you to produce a song for me.’ I said, ‘Me? I’m trying to do me.’ What I was looking for, it was under my nose all the time. I was this guy.”
Rush was born to be an entertainer (who happens to play guitar) and he didn’t waste time going after it. As that ambitious teen, he would famously put on a fake mustache so he could look old enough to perform in clubs. He started out on the edge and he stayed there.
“You can teach a man how to play guitar,” he said. “You can teach him how to blow a horn. You can teach him how to play most things, but you can’t teach a man to do what I do or what Elvis Presley do. You got to be born to do that.”
And yet he’s an exemplar of hard work and savvy perception. That fake-mustachioed teenager also was carefully watching audiences, studying what it took to be someone who could entertain crowds for decades, one show at a time. For a very long time.
“I’ve been here all the time doing what I do,” he said. “I’m what everybody watches. They may not tell you, but most black men and women watch what I do. I set the trend.”
Here’s how Rush described what he does: “I started writing about these kind of things because that’s life. I just write a good song, a good story, and tell it in a funny way that you can laugh about it. Because the truth always hurts, and the truth ain’t funny, but I try to tell it in a funny way. When someone come and steal your woman from you, especially a godless man, you can laugh about it because it sounds jokey — but it ain’t funny. It bypasses people’s heads because I said it so jokified. I got to give you something to laugh about. If I don’t give you something to laugh about, they probably wouldn’t play the songs on the radio because they’d be too political.”
A History Lesson
Things have changed,” Rush said. “From a physical standpoint things have changed, but mentally, everything has remained the same.”
What’s called the Chitlin’ Circuit was significant not only because it was where you could hear the music of African Americans in the Mid-South. It was also where food was currency.
“Most of the time the Chitlin’ Circuit was 99 percent black people because slaughterhouses, when they killed pigs, horses, cows, what have you, the inside of them we called the chitlins, which is their guts. They didn’t sell them, they gave them away. Black people cleaned them and ate them. Now they sell them in the store. Chitlins. ‘Chitterlings.’”
He said, “We used to work for the food. The Chitlin’ Circuit meant that you got chitlins, chili, hamburgers, fries, potatoes, or what have you. That’s what you had for dinner. I used to work for 10 hamburgers a night. Eat four, me and the band, and sell the other six. We’d sell six for 25 cents apiece. That’s a dollar and a half a night. We were making two dollars a day. Dollar and a half, two dollars, three dollars a night won’t fit in your wallet — a lot of money. My day job wasn’t paying but $12.50 a month.”
Outside of the Chitlin’ Circuit, the music was appreciated as long as it was heard, and the band not seen. So the players performed behind a curtain.
“This was in Illinois,” Rush said. He knew J.B. Lenoir, who had a political hit with 1954’s “Eisenhower Blues,” but Lenoir’s sensibilities didn’t necessarily jibe with white audiences. “J.B. had this job,” Rush said, “but he didn’t want to work it. I said, ‘Well, I’ll work it,’ because I didn’t know about the racial thing. He did. He didn’t want to work it because it was a downstroke to him — working behind a curtain all night because the all-white audience didn’t want to see our faces.”
Things have changed and they've remained the same. “A white guy can play the same music I play and they’ll pay him. I play the music, I’m a black guy, they won’t pay me as much. That’s it. Would you rather play behind the curtain and get paid or come out from behind the curtain and don’t get paid but you play the same? Which is worse? Half a dozen in one hand, six in the other.”
Musicians, Rush said, didn’t have black and white issues. “Most musicians just want to play music. Problem was, people who hired the musicians wanted to make a difference in their pay scale. When you make a different pay scale, then the people who are getting paid feel there’s a difference in who’s important. If you get $50 a night and I’m getting $20 a night, who do you think is going to think themselves important?”
He acknowledged that there has been improvement. “Yes, you got a lot of guys who want to see the better guy get better money,” he said. “If you got a hit record, you got a hit record. If you’re the better musician, you’re the better musician. But then they would be like, ‘Who you know?’ and ‘Who hired you?’ Like a turtle race — which one’s the fastest? It depends on who you’re racing against. Surely a turtle is real fast to a snail. It’s not very fast to a rabbit. That’s the way it is.”
Even as Rush started moving into the big time, there were still lessons to be learned.
“I was in New York City with B.B. King and Ray Charles,” he said. “They had the hit records, and I didn’t. I was an opening act. I had been there two or three days on Broadway. People loved me, loved B.B. King, loved Ray Charles. Quite naturally I thought I was this big man. I was changing my show for the next night because I could do that because I had a band who played top 40 music. I could change it up because I’d rather do some things going on in the jukebox. That top 10, top 20.
“B.B. and Ray were sitting in a room with me and Ray said, ‘Bobby Rush?’ I said, ‘Yes sir?’ all politely. He said, ‘Why are you changing your show?’ I said, ‘Because I’ve been here three days. I’m going to change my show around.’ He said, ‘No, no. Change it up is fine if they don’t like it, but if people like your show — don’t change your show. Change towns if you been here too long.’ I haven’t changed my show since.”
Philosophy of life
Rush in his 80s is a man who has gained perspective about what’s important.
“I spoke at B.B. King’s funeral,” he said. “I told the audience that I was blessed and happy to be at his funeral, not because he died, but to be a friend of his so long and learned what I learned from him. I was thankful to be knowing him for 60-some- odd years.”
And there are the awards — and he’s earned a lot of them. Besides last year’s Grammy and the Rhythm & Blues Music Hall of Fame, he’s also in the Blues Hall of Fame, is a multiple Blues Music Award winner, and was the 2015 B.B. King Entertainer of the Year.
But Rush was circumspect about all the honors. He wondered if he’s really deserving. “I have put in a lot of days, a lot of hours, a lot of ups, a lot of downs to get here,” he said. “I have probably stepped on people unintentionally that I shouldn’t have stepped on. I probably said some things I shouldn’t have said. I probably did some things I shouldn’t have did. At the time I did them, it was the best choice because that’s all I know. So, I’m bothered about whether they’re giving me this award because I earned it or there ain’t nobody else to give it to.”
His fans would immediately shout, “Of course you earned it, Bobby!” but they don’t have the perspective that he does. “There are people dead and gone now that had an opportunity [to get an award], but since I’m here, what I receive I take in the name of the one who didn’t have a chance, but had the talent and the work.”
Rush is similarly attuned to those around him, younger and perhaps in need of some wisdom. “Sometimes I believe they think I’m crazy,” he said. “That I’m an old man who don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m just blowing smoke. That will happen in life until you’re dead and gone, then people are, ‘Ah, he was right!’ When I was a young man, I was talking the same talk. I think people kind of respect what I say now because of my age, not because of what I say. I think they listen a little bit because that old man may be right.”
Karen Pulfer Focht, who took the photos for this story, has more photos and a video at her blog.
