Bobby Rush sings blues, entertains at Caffe Lena gig
Bobby Rush earned the title “King of the Chitlin Circuit” for his raunchy, hard-hitting funkand-blues shows on the Blackowned-and-operated network of clubs in the South and Midwest in the 1960s and 1970s. But his career stretches back to 1951, recording sessions and live shows with Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry and premainstream fame B.B. King to name a few.
Despite having a career that dates back well more than 70 years, it wasn’t until the 2000s that Rush connected with a broader (whiter) audience. In 2017, he won a Grammy for Best Traditional Blues Album for the full-band “Porcupine Meat” and repeated the feat in 2021 with the solo acoustic “Rawer than Raw.”
The 88-year-old Rush is the last of his generation of blues singers still alive, much less finding increased success, and on Thursday night he was at Caffe Lena for a solo acoustic set. For 85 minutes, Rush entertained the 50 or so folks in attendance with autobiographical stories and context on his career, jokes and his quirky spin on country blues.
As a musician, Rush displayed a mastery of the form. Maintaining a primitive, steady beat with his foot, he alternated between sitting and playing the acoustic guitar and standing to blow some mouth harp during his performance. On both instruments, his playing was fluid and slick.
His voice was strong, but more importantly Rush displayed a keen wit and ribald sense of humor that dispels the notion that the blues is chiefly a genre for expressing sadness and hard luck stories.
After offering up some detailed, comic sex-and-relationship advice to two 60-something
married couples seated in front of the stage, Rush played “I Got 3 Problems,” a harmonica-andvocal lamentation on having “problems with my woman, my girlfriend and my wife.” Before that, he offered up a pair of surreally ridiculous tales of marital infidelity, “Cabbage Head Blues” and “Garbage Man,” that had Rush and the audience cracking up by the end.
Midway through his set, Rush told a story about how he had a guitar as a young boy in 1930 that he kept hidden, it would upset his preacher father. Instead, his dad played him the beginning of a lewd limerick. This served as the inspiration for and a segue into Rush’s most famous song, the very funky (even as a one-man acoustic piece) and not about poultry “Chicken Head” and “Bowlegged Woman, Knock-kneed Man.”
For his penultimate song, Rush delivered a solid rendition of the highly euphemistic “Night Fishin’.” But immediately preceding it, he offered up some thoughts that summed himself and the evening up nicely.
“I’m a musician, but it’s about entertainment,” he said. “I’m here to entertain you.”
Based on the fact that he sold out the supply of autobiographies and dozens of CDS he brought with him and the way folks lined up to have Rush sign them, it’s safe to say the audience was highly entertained.