Influential Chicago blues guitarist
OTIS RUSH
Legendary Chicago blues guitarist Otis Rush, whose passionate, jazz-tinged music influenced artists including Carlos Santana, Eric Clapton and Led Zeppelin, died Saturday, his longtime manager said. He was 84.
Rush died of complications from a stroke he suffered in 2003, manager Rick Bates said.
Rush was born in Philadelphia, Miss., and settled in Chicago as an adult and began playing in 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 of “I Can’t Quit You Baby,” which reached No. 6 on the Billboard R&B charts.
He was a key architect of the Chicago “West Side Sound” in the 1950s and ’60s, which modernized traditional blues with 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, whether it was at small clubs on Chicago’s West Side or sold-out venues in Europe and Japan.
“He was king of the hill in Chicago from the late 1950s into the 1970s and even the ’80s as a live artist,” Bates said.
But he received 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,” Bates said. “He was not a show business guy.”
Rush won a Grammy for traditional blues recording in 1999 for “Any Place I’m Going,” and he was inducted into the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame in 1984.
In one of his final appearances at the Chicago Blues Festival in 2016, Rush watched beneath a black Stetson hat from a wheelchair as he was honored by the city, according to the Chicago Tribune.
He is survived by his wife, Masaki Rush, eight children and numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren, according to a family statement.