Grew up picking cotton and got little schooling. “We didn’t have no electricity in our home,” says Rush. Life is so short that I take the good as the overlap of the bad.”īorn Emmet Ellis Jr in Homer, Louisiana, to sharecropping parents, segregation overshadowed a dirt poor upbringing. All those hills and valleys I’ve climbed, well, someone always came through and lifted me out. “My thing has always been to not give up, to keep on pushing – as Curtis Mayfield sang. Musicians helped him on the hard road to success but James Brown, both when Rush was a junior and later a veteran, left him out of pocket when he offered largesse. “I didn’t want anyone to read the book and feel sorry for me,” says Rush of a life that has seen him get shot, jailed, badly injured when his tour bus crashed and, most punishingly, lose three of his children to sickle cell anaemia.
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Add to this a new manager with a vision of how to take Rush forward and he entered his 80s doing better business than ever. Rush describes his show (or “revue”) as “Black vaudeville” – song, dance, storytelling, often bawdy humour – and these elements provided the key to his breakthrough: The Road to Memphis, the 2003 documentary that was easily the strongest effort in Martin Scorsese’s The Blues series, and followed Rush as he worked, his personality and performances winning over new listeners. “I encourage people to wear a smile, not a frown.” “People love my show cos I emphasise good times,” he says. Instead, his growing audience is due purely to his skill as an entertainer. Unlike John Lee Hooker and Johnny Cash, who were both successfully repositioned in their twilight years, Rush never enjoyed early fame.
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Considering he started performing aged 13 and released his first record in 1964, what’s most remarkable is a work ethic that has seen him win wider acclaim and audiences in recent years – picking up Grammys in 20, appearing in the Eddie Murphy movie Dolemite Is My Name and joining Queens of the Stone Age on stage – than ever before. Rush’s 2021 autobiography I Aint Studdin’ Ya details this and many other scrapes in an epic American life.
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