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Bobby Rush

King of the Chitlin Circuit

Bobby Rush was born Emmet Ellis, Jr. on November 10, 1940 in the north Louisiana town of Homer. Bobby Rush built his first instrument, a primitive guitar or "diddley bow", and in his early teens he was donning a fake mustache and appearing at local juke joints as a solo artist. In the mid-1950s Bobby Rush moved up to Chicago, where his bands included Freddie King, Earl Hooker, and Luther Allison, while on jaunts back to his family home in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, he performed with Elmore James and James' cousin Boyd Gilmore. Bobby Rush began working as a bandleader already as a teenager. Bobby Rush's entrepreneurial flair is legendary among fellow musicians, who fondly recall his working in disguise as the emcee on his own gigs, earning double pay from an unknowing club owner, and his shuffling between three gigs a night with separate bands at West Side nightclubs. Bobby Rush's popularity as a live performer in Chicago set back the development of his recording career, but he began to achieve national acclaim in 1971 following the success of his hit Chicken Heads on Galaxy records. Over the next decade Bobby Rush recorded for labels including Jewel, Philadelphia International, Warner Brothers, and toured widely on the "chitlin circuit", the decades old network of clubs that stretches in a rough triangle between east Texas, north Florida, and Chicago. In the early 1980s Bobby Rush moved from Chicago to his current home of Jackson, Mississippi, where he recorded a series of albums for the LeJam, Ichiban, and Malaco labels. In 2003 Rush fulfilled his longtime dream of forming his own label, Deep Rush, recording the CD Undercover Lover and capturing the magic of his live show on DVD at the club Ground Zero in Clarksdale, Mississippi. Bobby Rush's showmanship is also prominently featured in Richard Pearce's documentary film The Road To Memphis, broadcast on PBS in September 2003 as part of Martin Scorsese's film series The Blues. In the last decade Bobby Rush has gained new audiences through performances at the Kennedy Center, Carnegie Hall, and on festival stages in Europe and Japan. But catch him on an average weekend and he's just as likely to be playing to packed houses in chitlin circuit clubs in places like Nesbit, Mississippi, Macon, Georgia, and Smackover, Arkansas, before mostly black, working class audiences that conventional blues wisdom suggests no longer exist.

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