By Rashod Ollison
The Virginian-Pilot
Mar 19, 2017
Explaining Bobby Rush to outsiders is no easy task. To fully appreciate his music, its greasy intricacies, one has to be intimate with, or at least empathetic toward, a certain culture. One that includes shelling purple hull peas on the front porch with Big Mama, catching fireflies in Mason jars, shedding your workday self when the “eagle flies on Friday” to go out and play the grown-up way. The rain scent of summer melon, the stinging potency of home-brew, the familiarity of laughter rippling with a thousand meanings – Rush’s music embodies all of that and more.
His blues, or what he calls “folk funk,” encapsulates a Southern juke joint culture the mainstream has long bastardized or gentrified. In Rush’s 60-plus years as a blues journeyman, as old friends like Johnnie Taylor and B.B. King found pop success, the Louisiana native has remained true to his slick but homey sound. Decades later, the slim, flashy 83-year-old artist still gives an unabashedly bawdy stage show.
Last month, the mainstream finally gave Rush his due, awarding him a Grammy in the best traditional blues category for his latest album, “Porcupine Meat.”
[video=youtube;t-ulP7k7RVw]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-ulP7k7RVw[/video]
“It took me 39 years to do this,” says Rush, calling from his home in Jackson, Miss. “The president of the label always wanted me on the label and would ask me. But I was doing my own thing on my own label and what have you. I just didn’t think it would be a good idea. Then I met [producer] Scott Billington, and it made sense for me to do it.”
Rush signed with Rounder Records, the American roots label, last spring. The company’s biggest acts include bluegrass queen Alison Kraus and jazz-roots fusionist Bela Fleck – not exactly a place for the decidedly raunchy blues that has garnered Rush the tag “king of the chitlin circuit.” But the transition to a company with bigger resources made sense.
“I just had people spending money that I didn’t have before,” Rush says, “and I got better studios and better musicians that I couldn’t hire before. With Rounder, there was no money issue. Then I could just bring me to the table. When they first came to me, I thought they were gonna ask me to do something else. No, they just wanted Bobby Rush. I didn’t have a problem with that.”
“Porcupine Meat” is perhaps the most polished set in Rush’s long career, which includes more than 30 albums. A big part of it has to do with the quality of the recording itself – the balanced engineering and the warmth of the sound throughout. Rush’s attractively frayed, Delta-dusted baritone is as engaged as ever, surrounded by sympathetic musicians echoing the best of vintage Stax: hard-driving grooves accented with exclamatory horns.
Rush wrote or co-wrote all of the songs on “Porcupine Meat,” most of which are earthy, sometimes hilarious takes on the ups and downs of love. Like the great blues men and women who paved the way for the artist born Emmett Ellis Jr. in Depression-era Louisiana, Rush uses the music to speak frankly about adult matters. Sometimes salty and never saccharine, the language is often metaphorical. Take the title track: a study of a lopsided love affair broken down Rush-style.
“Where I’m coming from with that, I’m not talking about an animal,” Rush says. “I’m talking about being compatible – being in love with someone that don’t love you, someone treating you wrong when they should be treating you right. You don’t wanna leave because it’s too good to throw away, but it’s too dangerous to keep. That’s what you call porcupine meat – damned if you do, damned if you don’t. I came up with every inch of that.”
Rush still has the same work ethic that carried him from Louisiana to Arkansas in 1947, and from Arkansas to Chicago about a decade later. It was in the Windy City, a magnet for Southern migrants during the Great Migration, where the son of a preacher man became Bobby Rush and started working in the blues clubs. Rush taught himself to play harmonica and guitar as he crafted a sound and stage presence that married the flash of citified musicians with the ragged grace of church-raised artists from the country. Even then, his music wasn’t strictly one thing – folksy, sure, but it echoed the urban aspirations of people just like him, working-class folks who still pack nightclubs to see him.
[video=youtube;3rh6Hl8BHPw]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rh6Hl8BHPw[/video]
“I still got to adapt for the folks who were with me for 50, 60 years,” Rush says. “And what they liked when they were 20-something is different. But I approach it in a way that they can understand it then and understand it now. I can’t modify it too much or I’ll lose them. Some of them had on miniskirts when they first started coming to see me; they ain’t wearing them no more.”
Rush’s ribald humor sometimes overshadows the gift of his musicianship, which Martin Scorsese highlighted in the 2003 documentary, “The Blues.” By then, Rush had long since become “king of the chitlin circuit,” averaging about 200 shows a year around the world. They usually feature a full band and two female “shake dancers,” as Rush works the stage, resplendent in snazzy shirts and a long Jheri curl.
“I admit to myself that I’m a grown man and I talk grown talk,” Rush says. “When you see my show, I got grown people with me and it’s a grown show. When I do things for younger people or it’s family-oriented, I know what to do with that, too. There’s a time and place for everything. I know what to do in a nightclub and what the people want when they come see me there, and I know what to do come Sunday morning.”
A Grammy win can potentially guarantee a bigger asking price for his gigs. And Rush says he has no intentions of slowing down. After more than three decades in Chicago, he escaped the “snow and cold” for Mississippi, where he also spent several of his formative years as a musician. Those decades of honing his craft on the outskirts of town, of staying true to a culture so many would rather erase, coalesce on “Porcupine Meat,” an artistic triumph after 60 years. The circle is complete.
“I’m so happy about this CD because it gave me the opportunity to record in Louisiana,” Rush says. “I never cut a record there, in the place where I was born. How good can a man feel to come back to his home state, work with homegrown musicians, do a record and win a Grammy? How good can a man feel? It don’t get no better than that.”
