Otis Rush

April 29, 1935 – September 29, 2018

A pioneer of the Chicago blues scene, guitarist/singer Otis Rush enjoyed a recording career that spanned more than six decades.

Born near Philadelphia, he was a self-taught musician from the age of eight, and played his instrument lefthanded and upside down. He moved to Chicago in 1949 and found work in the local steel mills and stockyards and as a truck driver, and pursued music as a vocation after attending a Muddy Waters concert. He developed a style of guitar playing based on jazz foundations, which he embellished with an impassioned tenor voice. Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Peter Green and Carlos Santana are among those who cited him as an influence on their own technique.

His first single, a version of the Willie Dixon-penned I Can’t Quit You Baby, put him on the map immediately. The song was of course later re-recorded faithfully by Led Zeppelin on their self-titled debut album. His expansive catalogue includes All Your Love (I Miss Loving), which John Mayall covered, and Double Trouble, a song that Stevie Ray Vaughan named his backing band after.

Rush’s career was plagued by problems with record labels, including the bankruptcy of his first one, Cobra Records. Later recordings were often unreleased or delayed.

Having retired from performing in the late 1970s, Rush returned to action the following decade. In 1999 he won a Grammy for Best Traditional Blues

Album for Any Place I’m Going. That record proved to be his final studio album of original material.

Rush had suffered a stroke in 2003, the complications of which eventually took his life. He was 83. DL