Bobby Rush, at 89 years old, is not only a living legend, but he is also a marvelous testament to a healthy lifestyle that has him still capable of dancing and jumping in his entertaining live shows. Having made his first record at 31 years old, he once told this writer – “I’m probably the only one you’ll ever meet that sold almost a million records from the trunk of a car.” Surely, he was talking about 45s, and history shows that he has appeared on over 400 individual recordings and 29 studio albums to his name. The “King of the Chitlin’ Circuit” though has had his most successful decade after turning 80, having won two GRAMMY Awards. Those awards certainly seemed to rejuvenate him because his output since that first win for Porcupine Meat in 2016, has now yielded his third album since, All My Love for You, and all of them are much stronger than any he delivered in the two decades prior. His once almost entirely Black audience has broadened to include a sizable Americana audience. As he often says, “Now I have crossed over but I haven’t crossed out.”
Unlike its predecessor, Rawer Than Raw, which was an unaccompanied effort, Rush enlists the support of two accompanying musicians – Dexter Allen (guitar, bass) and Joey Robinson (keyboards, drums). Much the way recent albums from his colleague, Buddy Guy, have been mostly autobiographical, Rush takes the same tact here, at least on a couple of standout tunes. Rush claims that he was trying to find the balance between raw and commercial here in a way that would appeal to both his Black and white audiences. The album opener and single, the infectious “I’m Free,” is one of the best in his career, celebrating his being free in spirit now after detailing humble beginnings carrying water for 15 miles for 50 cents a day to picking cotton in rural Louisiana. In “I’m the One” he sings about coming to Chicago in 1952, hanging with mentors B.B. King and Muddy Waters, eventually charting his own course by reminding us that “I’m the one who put the funk in the blues.”
While most of the other songs attest to that funk, those two clearly stand out. Though he credits himself as the writer of all ten songs, some evoke other artists and or songs – James Brown’s “I Can’t Stand Myself:” in Rush’s “I Can’t Stand It,” Big Joe Turner and Johnny Winter in “TV Mama” and Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Help Me” in the latter half of “I Got a Proposition for You.” Although, on the latter as well as throughout, Rush’s underrated, top-notch harmonica playing is on full display. It’s an unadorned effort, free of effects and unnecessary sonics, just Rush being forthright, engaged, and carrying on with the swagger of one-half his age. It’s as well written, excepting those few derivative departures, and certainly as well performed as any he has ever recorded. Age is simply a number. Bobby Rush is still touring and not about to slow down.
