Otis Rush, singer and guitarist of influential blues, died at 83

Otis Rush, a powerful blues singer and innovative guitarist who has had a profound influence not only on his blues colleagues, but also on rock guitarists such as Eric Clapton and Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page, passed away on Saturday. He was 83 years old.

His wife, Masaki Rush, announced the death on Mr. Rush's website, claiming that it was the complications of a stroke in 2003. She did not specify where he died.

An emotional singer and guitarist of great talent and imagination, Mr. Rush was at the forefront of a small circle of innovators of the late 1950s, including Buddy Guy and Magic Sam, whose music , anchored in the R & B, heralded a new era for Chicago. blues.

While Muddy Waters and Howlin's Wolf, his predecessors on the South Side of the city, have popularized an amplified update of the naked sound of the Mississippi Delta, the modernized variant of Mr. Rush – which is called the West Side because of its prevalence in nightclubs in this part of the city – was both more lyrical and more rhythmically complex.

"The sound was a radical change from the local records that dominated the market at the time," said producer Neil Slaven, contrasting Chicago's West Side sound with his South Side counterpart, noted in the notes. from a 1950s compilation of Mr. Rush. records for the independent Cobra label.

Mr. Rush's production for Cobra featured his ripped, vibrato-charged electric guitar lines and his gritty, gospel-inspired vocals – thrilling groans in the middle of the register and thrilling leaps. Occupying a dominant position beyond Chicago, its adopted hometown, this primitive corpus has been a rich repertoire of material for the 1960s blues-rock bands.

The British group John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, who introduced Mr. Clapton to the lead guitar, included a version of Mr. Rush's 1958 slow-burning blend, "All Your Love (I Miss Loving)," on his album " Blues Breakers ". . Led Zeppelin re-imagined Mr. Rush's title "I Can not Leave You, Baby" in 1956 on his debut album, "Led Zeppelin"; The Rolling Stones updated the same song in 2016 on their album "Blue and Lonesome".

Texas guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan named his group after Mr. Rush's major tour de force, "Double Trouble". Rock virtuoso guitarists, including Johnny Winter and Duane Allman, also cited the influence of Mr. Rush.

Mr. Rush's guitar technique owed much to the single-string discursive sound of jazz players like Kenny Burrell and jazz-inspired bluesmen like T-Bone Walker and B. B. King. But this was also due to the fact that Mr. Rush was playing his left-handed instrument and upside down. Wrapping the little finger of his hand with a pick around the bottom of the rope, his rope allowed him to fold and extend the notes, for a dazzling emotional effect.

"When you play on the left, you pull the vibrato on the floor," Rush told Vintage Guitar magazine in 1998, referring to the tremolo arm or whammy bar of an electric guitar. "It makes things a lot easier in terms of pressure and control.

"Lowering makes more sense to me anyway," he added, "and I can work harder and make it more sustainable."

In his book "Deep Blues" (1981), the critic Robert Palmer enthusiastically wrote about Mr. Rush's musical talent. "His guitar playing has reached peaks that I did not think capable of musician: folded notes and twisted with delicacy and immaculate," he wrote, "they seemed to form real words, phrases that rose in the neck, suspended above the beat, and fell suddenly, standing at the bottom of anxious paroxysms. "

In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine in 1968, guitarist Michael Bloomfield said white blues bands wishing to prove themselves in the 1960s "must be as good as Otis Rush."

In 2015, Rolling Stone ranked Mr. Rush 53rd on his "100 Greatest Guitarists" list.

He was born on April 29, 1935 in Philadelphia, Missouri, one of O's seven children. C. and Julia (Boyd) Rush. Brought up by his meticulous mother, Otis and his siblings were often kept out of school to work in the fields and make ends meet. Otis was rubbing at the harmonica before he started teaching himself the basics of the guitar at the age of 8.

He moved to Chicago in 1949 after visiting one of his sisters and seeing Muddy Waters and Little Walter play in clubs in the southern part of the city. He found work in local steel mills and cattle yards and as a truck driver, and began taking guitar lessons with a local musician, Reggie Boyd.

Mr. Rush appeared for the first time in public in 1953, performing alone and presented as Little Otis. Three years later, he led a trio at Chicago's famous 708 club, where he impressed bluesman Willie Dixon and then worked as a scout for West Side businessman Eli Toscano. Mr. Toscano signed Mr. Rush's name on his new Cobra label in 1956.

A series of commercial and financial setbacks followed. Several record deals collapsed, including the one with Cobra, which went bankrupt in the late 1950s as a result of Mr. Toscano's growing gambling debts.

Mr. Rush's subsequent recordings for famous blues labels such as Chess and Delmark were often unpublished or delayed. The most notable was "Right Place, Wrong Time", an album postponed five years before its release in 1976 on the small Bullfrog label.

Ultimately recognized by fans and critics as a classic, the album might have been better for Mr. Rush if he had benefited from the promotional support of his original, more powerful label, Capitol Records.

Mr. Rush's reputation as a depressed and erratic live performer could exacerbate misfortunes similar to those he could captivate one night, but seem dull and distant the next night. Some of his recordings were also uneven, spoiled by less production and sloppy production – far from his pioneering work for Cobra and Chess.

Weary and disappointed, Mr. Rush retired in the late 1970s. He made a comeback in the 1980s and, although he only sporadically recorded it, he won a Grammy Award for best traditional blues album for "Any Place I'm Going" in 1999. The same year he was inducted into the pantheon of blues. He did not make another studio album but kept spinning until he had a debilitating stroke in 2003.

Mr. Rush and Masaki Rush had two daughters, Lena and Sophia, as well as several grandchildren. He also had two sons and two daughters from a previous marriage. Complete information about the survivors was not immediately available.

Although he is unquestionably one of the spawns of an important lineage of Chicago blues, Mr. Rush denied in an online interview that he played a role in defining the term "West Side sound" to describe his music. .

"The public had this idea, not me," he said. "You know, they had the west side, the south side and the north side. They started to name it Chicago Blues. I do not know: Chicago blues, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York. We do not care? That's blues, you know?