Even in a city teeming with blues guitar masters, Otis Rush towered above. His guitar tone — corrosive, piercing, etched in darkness and anguish — shaped the sound of Chicago blues, and resonated around the world.
His death Saturday at age 84 was announced on his website by his wife, Masaki Rush. On Wednesday, the medical examiner’s office reported that Rush died from “complications of choking on food.”
He was largely inactive the last 15 years, after suffering a stroke in 2003. But his legacy remains assured as one of the architects of the West Side sound that was a cornerstone of Chicago blues in the ’50s and ’60s.
As a contemporary of such blues slingers as Buddy Guy and Magic Sam, Rush carved out a distinctive sound. His impassioned, minor-key tone and keening vocals filtered into several generations of rock guitarists, including Eric Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Carlos Santana and Fleetwood Mac’s Peter Green.
In one of his final appearances on stage, at the Chicago Blues Festival in 2016, Rush watched beneath a black Stetson hat from a wheelchair as he was honored by the city of Chicago. An all-star band paid him tribute with a slow-burn version of his first single, the 1956 blues classic “I Can’t Quit You Baby.” The events brought a smile from the typically reserved, often intensely serious blues great.
“I don’t do nothin’ but worry,” he once told an interviewer, even after his fame was assured. “Yeah, that’s about what I do, worry about my damn hard times and bills.”
His guitar playing took on a razor-sharp intensity, informed by a life that was both bursting with possibility and burdened by hardship.
Rush was born in Philadelphia, Miss., in 1934 and worked on a sharecropping farm before moving to Chicago 14 years later with his family. After Rush’s mother took him to see Muddy Waters perform, the self-taught left-hander started playing guitar, unaware that he was holding a conventionally tuned guitar upside down and backward. Almost instantly, he sounded like no one else. The teenage Rush could soon be heard blasting his guitar out of his third-floor apartment window on Wentworth Avenue, and he began listening to records and hanging out in clubs along West Roosevelt Avenue. His omnivorous musical tastes influenced his style; soon he began injecting the jazzy inflections of Kenny Burrell and the organ chords of Jimmy Smith into his playing.
His style amplified his emotions, clusters of sixteenth notes often played in a dark-tinged minor key that sounded both thrilling and chilling. Rush paid his rent working in a steel mill and driving a truck, among other jobs, but his music couldn’t be denied. His distinctiveness was indelibly captured on “I Can’t Quit You Baby,” his first single for Cobra Record Corp. in 1956. He cut some of his greatest tracks over the next two years with Cobra, including “My Love Will Never Die,” “Groanin’ the Blues,” “Three Times a Fool,” “Double Trouble” and “All Your Love (I Miss Loving).” If he had done nothing else but his Cobra recordings in 1956-58, he would still be revered as a blues great.
He and his bands brought a visceral energy to their performances that made Rush an in-demand act, even after Cobra went bankrupt in 1958. His five-piece band of the early ’60s — which included Mighty Joe Young on second guitar, saxophonist Abb Locke, bassist James Green and drummer Casey Jones — is widely regarded as one of the city’s best-ever blues ensembles.
As his reputation expanded beyond Chicago, a generation of young guitarists soaked up his influence. His ’60s recordings included a session with a young up-and-comer named Duane Allman, co-founder of the Allman Brothers, and the air-tight Muscle Shoals (Ala.) rhythm section. In the ’70s, Chicago-based Delmark Records began documenting his studio sessions, and Rush became a mainstay in the North Side clubs.
In the early ’80s, Rush took a few years off from performing, but as an elder statesman he found himself again in demand. When Pearl Jam headlined Soldier Field in 1995, the Seattle band enlisted Rush as an opener. The guitarist played a ferocious set, punctuated by a horn section, and flashed a bemused smile as his newfound fans began body-surfing to his music.
In 2003, in one of his final performances before his stroke, Rush played through a driving rain as a Chicago Blues Festival headliner. The gloomy weather was somehow fitting for an artist whose music was suffused in foreboding, the sense that the world was closing down on him. The cry in his voice as he opened “All Your Love (I Miss Loving)” said as much. He closed with an aching version of Brook Benton’s “Rainy Night in Georgia,” the blues saturating every syllable as he sang, “I believe it’s raining all over the world.”
