Johnny Bush, country singer, dies at age 85

Johnny Bush, a Texas singer whose rowdy honky- tonk hit “Whiskey River” became a signature song for his friend Willie Nelson, but whose own career was interrupted by a neurological condition that robbed him of his voice for years, died Oct. 16 at a hospital in San Antonio. He was 85.

The cause was complications from pneumonia, said Ronnie McHan, his drummer and touring manager. He added that Bush had recently tested negative for the coronavirus.

Bush was a drummer, guitarist, fiddler and singer-songwriter with a distinctive, vibrato-heavy tenor that earned him the nickname “the Caruso of country,” a nod to Italian opera star Enrico Caruso. In the late 1960s and ’70s he recorded a string of country hits, including versions of his mentor Ray Price’s “I’ll Be There,” Marty Robbins’s “You Gave Me a Mountain” and Willie Nelson’s “Undo the Right” and “What a Way to Live.”

But soon after signing with RCA Records, his new label tasked him with composing a song of his own. He responded by writing “Whiskey River” with Paul Stroud, whom Bush later described as “an old rodeo cowboy friend.” Bush said he began writing it while traveling from Nashville, Tenn., to Texas by bus, jotting down lyrics on a paper sack that someone had used to bring him a cheeseburger:

Whiskey River, take my mind Don’t let her memory torture me

Whiskey River, don’t run dry You’re all I got, take care of me

Released as a single in 1972, the song reached No. 14 on the country charts while receiving near-constant airplay on Texas country stations. Thick with fiddles, driven by a propulsive bass line, it was an infectious anthem about alcohol-induced forgetfulness and the solace offered by an “amber current,” when the memory of an old love has left you feeling cold.

The song was shaped in part by Nelson, whom Bush called for advice. “Whiskey River” only had one verse and one bridge, he said, and didn’t it need something more? “Well, you’ve already said what you need to say,” Nelson told him, according to a Texas Monthly report. “In a country song, you tell your life story in two and a half minutes.”

When Nelson recorded a rockified version of the song for “Shotgun Willie,” his influential 1973 outlaw-country album, “Whiskey River” became an even bigger hit; Nelson opened his concerts with it for decades.

Bush and Nelson had been friends since the 1950s, when both men were unknown musicians performing in San Antonio beer joints. For a time, it seemed that Bush had the more promising career: When they partnered together in a group called the Mission City Playboys, it was Bush who convinced Nelson to join as a guitarist, not a singer, according to Nelson’s 2015 autobiography, “It’s a Long Story.”

“He had a tremendous voice filled with feeling,” Nelson wrote. He recalled having to fight back tears when he heard Bush sing a country rendition of the pop standard “Stardust,” which “made me see that a great singer can sing any song in any genre. Johnny Bush was a great singer.”

Their group, he added, “was a band that went nowhere fast, but we had fun going there.”

Bush often cited Nelson as his chief inspiration as a songwriter, once declaring that he compared every song he ever wrote to Nelson’s “Funny How Time Slips Away.” Through Nelson, he also met Ray Price, his other musical lodestar, playing the drums in the singer’s Cherokee Cowboys group for several years in the 1960s.

He left when Price began moving in a more pop- oriented direction but took with him “the fiddle-’n’-steel sound and the two-step shuffle beat that remain, to this day, at the heart and soul of true Texas honky-tonk,” music critic Rick Mitchell wrote in the introduction to “Whiskey River (Take My Mind),” Bush’s 2007 memoir.