Legendary Chicago blues guitarist Otis Rush dies at 84

Legendary Chicago blues guitarist Otis Rush (pictured) whose passionate, jazz-tinged music influenced artists from Carlos Santana and Eric Clapton to the rock band Led Zeppelin, died on Saturday at the age of 84, his long-time manager said. Rush succumbed to complications from a stroke he suffered in 2003, manager Rick Bates said. Born in Philadelphia, Mississippi, Rush settled in Chicago as an adult and began playing the local clubs, wearing a cowboy hat and sometimes strumming his guitar upside down for effect. He catapulted to international fame in 1956 with his first recording on Cobra Records, I Can’t Quit

You Baby, which reached No. 6 in the Billboard R&B charts. He was a key architect of the Chicago “West Side Sound” in the 1950s and 1960s, which modernised traditional blues to introduce more of a jazzy, amplified sound. “He was one of the last great blues guitar heroes. He was an electric God,” said Gregg Parker, chief executive and a founder of the Chicago Blues Museum. Rush loved to play to live audiences, from small clubs on the West Side of Chicago to sold-out venues in Europe and Japan. “He was king of the hill in Chicago from the late 1950s to the 1970s and even the 1980s as a live artist,” said Bates. But he got less national and international attention than some other blues musicians because he wasn’t a big promoter. “He preferred to go out and play, and go back and sleep in his own bed,” said Bates. “He was not a show business guy.”