The Blues Thread

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Rehearsal for the Hubert Sumlin Tribute Concert, Feb. 24, 2012. RIP James Cotton. <a href="https://t.co/3qw9k2Vdr9">pic.twitter.com/3qw9k2Vdr9</a></p>&mdash; Keith Richards (@officialKeef) <a href="https://twitter.com/officialKeef/status/842804848739471361">March 17, 2017</a></blockquote>
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By Rashod Ollison
The Virginian-Pilot
Mar 19, 2017
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Explaining Bobby Rush to outsiders is no easy task. To fully appreciate his music, its greasy intricacies, one has to be intimate with, or at least empathetic toward, a certain culture. One that includes shelling purple hull peas on the front porch with Big Mama, catching fireflies in Mason jars, shedding your workday self when the “eagle flies on Friday” to go out and play the grown-up way. The rain scent of summer melon, the stinging potency of home-brew, the familiarity of laughter rippling with a thousand meanings – Rush’s music embodies all of that and more.

His blues, or what he calls “folk funk,” encapsulates a Southern juke joint culture the mainstream has long bastardized or gentrified. In Rush’s 60-plus years as a blues journeyman, as old friends like Johnnie Taylor and B.B. King found pop success, the Louisiana native has remained true to his slick but homey sound. Decades later, the slim, flashy 83-year-old artist still gives an unabashedly bawdy stage show.

Last month, the mainstream finally gave Rush his due, awarding him a Grammy in the best traditional blues category for his latest album, “Porcupine Meat.”
[video=youtube;t-ulP7k7RVw]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-ulP7k7RVw[/video]
“It took me 39 years to do this,” says Rush, calling from his home in Jackson, Miss. “The president of the label always wanted me on the label and would ask me. But I was doing my own thing on my own label and what have you. I just didn’t think it would be a good idea. Then I met [producer] Scott Billington, and it made sense for me to do it.”

Rush signed with Rounder Records, the American roots label, last spring. The company’s biggest acts include bluegrass queen Alison Kraus and jazz-roots fusionist Bela Fleck – not exactly a place for the decidedly raunchy blues that has garnered Rush the tag “king of the chitlin circuit.” But the transition to a company with bigger resources made sense.

“I just had people spending money that I didn’t have before,” Rush says, “and I got better studios and better musicians that I couldn’t hire before. With Rounder, there was no money issue. Then I could just bring me to the table. When they first came to me, I thought they were gonna ask me to do something else. No, they just wanted Bobby Rush. I didn’t have a problem with that.”

“Porcupine Meat” is perhaps the most polished set in Rush’s long career, which includes more than 30 albums. A big part of it has to do with the quality of the recording itself – the balanced engineering and the warmth of the sound throughout. Rush’s attractively frayed, Delta-dusted baritone is as engaged as ever, surrounded by sympathetic musicians echoing the best of vintage Stax: hard-driving grooves accented with exclamatory horns.

Rush wrote or co-wrote all of the songs on “Porcupine Meat,” most of which are earthy, sometimes hilarious takes on the ups and downs of love. Like the great blues men and women who paved the way for the artist born Emmett Ellis Jr. in Depression-era Louisiana, Rush uses the music to speak frankly about adult matters. Sometimes salty and never saccharine, the language is often metaphorical. Take the title track: a study of a lopsided love affair broken down Rush-style.

“Where I’m coming from with that, I’m not talking about an animal,” Rush says. “I’m talking about being compatible – being in love with someone that don’t love you, someone treating you wrong when they should be treating you right. You don’t wanna leave because it’s too good to throw away, but it’s too dangerous to keep. That’s what you call porcupine meat – damned if you do, damned if you don’t. I came up with every inch of that.”

Rush still has the same work ethic that carried him from Louisiana to Arkansas in 1947, and from Arkansas to Chicago about a decade later. It was in the Windy City, a magnet for Southern migrants during the Great Migration, where the son of a preacher man became Bobby Rush and started working in the blues clubs. Rush taught himself to play harmonica and guitar as he crafted a sound and stage presence that married the flash of citified musicians with the ragged grace of church-raised artists from the country. Even then, his music wasn’t strictly one thing – folksy, sure, but it echoed the urban aspirations of people just like him, working-class folks who still pack nightclubs to see him.
[video=youtube;3rh6Hl8BHPw]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rh6Hl8BHPw[/video]
“I still got to adapt for the folks who were with me for 50, 60 years,” Rush says. “And what they liked when they were 20-something is different. But I approach it in a way that they can understand it then and understand it now. I can’t modify it too much or I’ll lose them. Some of them had on miniskirts when they first started coming to see me; they ain’t wearing them no more.”

Rush’s ribald humor sometimes overshadows the gift of his musicianship, which Martin Scorsese highlighted in the 2003 documentary, “The Blues.” By then, Rush had long since become “king of the chitlin circuit,” averaging about 200 shows a year around the world. They usually feature a full band and two female “shake dancers,” as Rush works the stage, resplendent in snazzy shirts and a long Jheri curl.

“I admit to myself that I’m a grown man and I talk grown talk,” Rush says. “When you see my show, I got grown people with me and it’s a grown show. When I do things for younger people or it’s family-oriented, I know what to do with that, too. There’s a time and place for everything. I know what to do in a nightclub and what the people want when they come see me there, and I know what to do come Sunday morning.”

A Grammy win can potentially guarantee a bigger asking price for his gigs. And Rush says he has no intentions of slowing down. After more than three decades in Chicago, he escaped the “snow and cold” for Mississippi, where he also spent several of his formative years as a musician. Those decades of honing his craft on the outskirts of town, of staying true to a culture so many would rather erase, coalesce on “Porcupine Meat,” an artistic triumph after 60 years. The circle is complete.

“I’m so happy about this CD because it gave me the opportunity to record in Louisiana,” Rush says. “I never cut a record there, in the place where I was born. How good can a man feel to come back to his home state, work with homegrown musicians, do a record and win a Grammy? How good can a man feel? It don’t get no better than that.”
 
1/9/2018 by Associated Press Billboard
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Denise LaSalle photographed in 1981.

Singer and songwriter Denise LaSalle, whose hit “Trapped by a Thing Called Love” topped the R&B charts in 1971, has died. She was 78.

Musician and producer Lawrence “Boo” Mitchell, owner of Royal Studios in Memphis, Tennessee, and a close family friend of LaSalle’s, said Tuesday that the singer died in Jackson, Tennessee. Another family friend, Howard Rambsy, said she died Monday night at a hospital, surrounded by family.

Media outlets report LaSalle suffered from health issues in recent months that resulted in the amputation of her right leg after she suffered a fall.

Along with “Trapped by a Thing Called Love,” she is also well known for the song “Now Run and Tell That.” She had a string of successful singles in the 1970s and the early 1980s.

“She had a very unique voice,” said Mitchell, whose father, Willie Mitchell, recorded LaSalle at Hi Records.

LaSalle, a Mississippi native, founded the National Association for the Preservation of the Blues to bring more attention to the “soul/blues” style in 1986.

She was a 2011 inductee in the Blues Hall of Fame in Memphis. Her citation for that year notes her “bold and bawdy stage act.”

She was born Ora Denise Allen on a plantation in Sidon, Mississippi, plantation, and lived for a time in Belzoni as a child, the citation says. She took LaSalle as her stage name after she moved to Chicago in her teens and started singing R&B.

LaSalle later sang blues as a recording artist for Mississippi-based Malaco Records.
 
Matt Murphy (December 29, 1929 - June 15, 2018)

By Esha Ray Jun 17, 2018 NY Daily News
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Matt "Guitar" Murphy, seen in 1963, had a long career playing with the greats of blues.

Matt "Guitar" Murphy, a renowned blues guitarist who played with The Blues Brothers and jammed with musical heavyweights Muddy Waters, Etta James and Chuck Berry, died Friday. He was 88.

Murphy's nephew Floyd Murphy Jr. confirmed his death in a Facebook post. It was unclear how he died.

A bluesman throughout his life, Murphy rose to fame when he joined The Blues Brothers, a band founded by comedians Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi in 1978 as part of a musical sketch on "Saturday Night Live."

Murphy went on to appear in the 1980 film "The Blues Brothers" and its 1998 sequel "Blues Brothers 2000" as the husband of a cafe owner played by Aretha Franklin.

The famed musician continued performing with The Blues Brothers until the early 2000s when he suffered from a stroke, according to Deadline.

"He was a strong man that lived a long long fruitfull (sic) life that poured his heart out in every guitar solo he took," Murphy Jr., who played with his uncle, wrote on Friday. "The master is upstairs now."

Aykroyd called Murphy "immensely talented" in his own Facebook post Saturday.

"The Blues Brothers would not have been what they were without Matt's playing power, stage magnetism and knowledge of music," he wrote.

Murphy was born in Sunflower, Miss., in December 1929, and moved to Memphis as a toddler. As a teen, he became well-known in the Memphis blues scene with his brother Floyd.

Eventually he moved to Chicago to work alongside musicians like blues singer Chester (Howlin' Wolf) Burnett and harmonica player James Cotton, Deadline reported.

In 1982, Murphy started his own band. He was touring up until recently, according to Deadline.

Fellow musicians and actors took to Twitter Saturday to mourn his death.

"He was the real deal. Incredible musician. Always called me "big stick". We will all miss you Matt. RIP," wrote Keith Carlock, a drummer who played with The Blues Brothers in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

"RIP Matt 'Guitar' Murphy, one of those play-all-night guys that rock 'n' roll is made of," wrote actor Michael McKean.
 
By Jon Blistein September 29, 2018 Rolling Stone
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Otis Rush, one of the pioneering guitarists of the Chicago blues scene, died Saturday from complications from a stroke he suffered in 2003. He was 84.

Rush’s wife, Masaki Rush, confirmed her husband’s death on his website. A note read, “Known as a key architect of the Chicago ‘West Side Sound’ Rush exemplified the modernized minor key urban blues style with his slashing, amplified jazz-influenced guitar playing, high-strained passionate vocals and backing by a full horn section. Rush’s first recording in 1956 on Cobra Records ‘I Can’t Quit You Baby’ reached Number on the Billboard R&B Charts and catapulted him to international acclaim. He went on to record a catalog of music that contains many songs that are now considered blues classics.”

Rush became a staple of the Chicago scene in the late Fifties and early Sixties, partnering first with Cobra Records, which was also home to artists like Magic Sam and Buddy Guy. Their take on the blues would prove to be a revelation for a generation of artists to follow, while Rush would become a totem for countless rock guitarists (he was placed at Number 53 on Rolling Stone‘s list of the 100 Greatest Guitarists). Notably, Rush’s signature style – long, dramatically bent notes – was in part a product of his unique playing approach: A left-handed guitarist who played his guitar upside-down, placing the low E string at the bottom and the high E string on top.

In 1968, Mike Bloomfield summed up Rush’s influence, telling Rolling Stone that in Chicago, “the rules had been laid down” for young, white blues bands: “You had to be as good as Otis Rush.”

Rush was born in Philadelphia, Mississippi in 1935 and began teaching himself the guitar at age eight. He moved to Chicago in 1949 and was inspired to pursue music full time after seeing Muddy Waters live. In 1956, Rush released his first, and most successful single on Cobra, “I Can’t Quit You Baby.” Along with its chart success, Led Zeppelin famously covered the cut on their 1969 debut.

During his Cobra years, Rush recorded with a revolving cast of musicians that included Ike Turner, Big Walter Horton, Little Walter and Little Brother Montgomery. His output also featured classic cuts such as “My Love Will Never Die,” “All Your Love (I Miss Loving)” (later covered by John Mayall) and “Double Trouble” (Stevie Ray Vaughn later named his band after that track).
After Cobra went bankrupt, Rush released a pair of singles on Chess before moving to Duke Records in the early-Sixties. But it wasn’t until 1969 that Rush released what was essentially his first album, Mourning In the Morning, which he recorded at the legendary FAME Studios with the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section.

Rush continued to tour and record during the Sixties and Seventies, though seemed perpetually dogged by label issues. For instance, Capitol Records refused to release his acclaimed LP Right Place, Wrong Time, and it wasn’t until 1976 – five years after it was recorded – that Bullfrog Records finally put it out.

In 1994, Rush released Ain’t Enough Comin’ In, which at the time marked his first record in 16 years. Two years later, his album, Any Place I’m Goin’ won him the Grammy for Best Traditional Blues Album. Though that LP would be his last full-length studio effort, Rush contributed to various tribute albums and remained a regular live performer until health issues forced him off the road.
 

Lightnin' Hopkins / It's A Sin To Be Rich, It's A Low-Down Shame To Be Poor
 
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Blind Willie Johnson / Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground

They built a time capsule of music and sent it into outer space. This is one of the songs they included.
 
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