Chicago bluesman inspired Clapton and Beck but worried about paying his bills

Otis Rush, who has died aged 84, was one of the last of the great bluesmen, emerging from Chicago in the 1950s and exerting a profound influence on guitar virtuosos such as Eric Clapton, Steve Ray Vaughan, Jeff Beck, Peter Green and Duane Allman.

Along with such peers as Buddy Guy and Magic Sam, Rush helped establish the Chicago ‘‘West Side Sound’’ in the 1950s and

1960s that gave the traditional blues a jazzier, electric feel. No song more typified his intense, passionate style than his 1956 breakout hit, a smouldering version of Willie Dixon’s I Can’t Quit You Baby, which was covered by Led

Zeppelin on their debut album and by the Rolling

Stones on their

2016 album Blue and Lonesome.

Rush was placed at No 53 on the list of Rolling Stone’s 100 greatest guitarists, the magazine describing him as ‘‘a gunslinging cross of Muddy Waters and BB King – as well as a knockout songwriter’’. But for all the respect he garnered from his fellow musicians and the adoration of aficionados, Rush’s career often faltered, and he never felt as if he had reached the level he wanted.

‘‘I don’t do nothin’ but worry,’’ he once said. ‘‘Yeah, that’s about what I do, worry about my damn hard times and bills.’’

Otis Rush was born in Philadelphia, Mississippi, one of seven children. He worked on a sharecropping farm before moving to Chicago with his family when he was 14. When he was still in his teens he saw Muddy Waters perform and took up the guitar in earnest, though as a left-hander he played a right-handed guitar upside down.

He began going to clubs and practising at home, supporting himself by working in a steel mill and as a truck driver. In 1953 he began appearing as Little Otis, then in 1956 I Can’t Quit You Baby, on the Cobra label, set him on the road to stardom.

He recorded some of his best-known tracks for Cobra, such as Double Trouble and All Your Love (I Miss Loving) – which was covered by John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton on lead guitar – but the label folded in

1958 thanks to its owner’s gambling debts, and two years later Rush signed for the renowned Chess label.

However, many of his subsequent recordings, for Chess and then for Delmark, were often delayed or went unreleased altogether; one example was Right Place, Wrong Time, which he recorded in 1971 for Capitol Records, which declined to put it out.

Rush bought the master tapes from them and it went out on a Japanese label. It was eventually released in the US in 1976 by a small company, Bullfrog, and went on to become one of Rush’s best-loved albums.

Rush did not help himself, developing a reputation as an occasionally moody and erratic live performer, delivering a blistering set one night but lacklustre fare the next.

He once walked out on a session when he felt that his amplifier didn’t sound right – and never finished the session. Without his involvement, Alligator Records, an independent blues label, re-edited and resequenced an album he had previously recorded for a Swedish label, leading to a longstanding feud with Alligator that played out in the pages of Living Blues magazine.

Rush was also scathing about the very notion of the West Side Sound, remarking: ‘‘The public came up with this, not me. You know, they had the West Side, South Side and North Side. They started naming it Chicago blues. I don’t know – Chicago blues, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York. Who cares? It’s blues, you know?’’

Disillusioned by the many bumps in the road, in the late 1970s he retired from the business, but returned in 1985 with a US tour and a 1988 live album, Tops, recorded at the San Francisco Blues Festival. He never embraced the traditional rocker’s lifestyle, however. ‘‘He preferred to go out and play and go back and sleep in his own bed,’’ his manager Rick Bates recalled. ‘‘He was not a showbusiness guy.’’

But for all his career stumbles, the standing in which Rush was held never wavered. In 1994 he released his first album for 16 years, Ain’t Enough Comin’ In, and the following year he supported grunge maestros Pearl Jam, thrilling a younger crowd with his ferocious set – though Rush looked somewhat bemused at the crowd-surfing.

In 1999 he won a Grammy for Best Traditional Blues Recording for the track Any Place I’m Going. His career wound down after he suffered a stroke in 2003, but in 2016 he appeared at the Chicago Blues Festival sitting onstage as the city’s mayor, Rahm Emanuel, declared June 12 to be Otis Rush Day in the city. In April this year the Jazz Foundation of America honoured him with a Lifetime Achievement Award, ‘‘for a lifetime of genius and leaving an indelible mark in the world of blues and the universal language of music’’.

He is survived by his wife, Masaki, and by their two daughters. He also had two daughters and two sons from a previous marriage. – Telegraph Group

‘‘He preferred to go out and play and go back and sleep in his own bed. He was not a showbusiness guy.’’ Manager Rick Bates