Bobby Rush On ‘I Am The Blues,’ Race And Playing Music Behind A Curtain [EXCLUSIVE VIDEO]

Blues musician Bobby Rush appears in the documentary I Am the Blues, which screened at SXSW earlier this month.

Bobby Rush On Blues

Rush has been recording blues music since the early 1950s, and, more than 60 years later, he’s still recording and touring. At 82, Rush is as passionate about his music as ever and shows no signs of stopping.

“The Blues is what you feel from your heart. Blues is something you don’t learn. [It’s] something that you live, something that you wish for, something that you hope for, and what you are,” Rush told uInterview in an exclusive interview. “Everything around me is the blues and I love it.”

Rush was inspired to get into Blues music by his father, who was a preacher in Louisiana. One day, Rush’s dad sang him a blues song that he used to sing to girls growing up. “Me and my gal went to chinquapin hunting, she fell down and I saw something,” went the song, according to Bush, who was shocked to hear his father singing something other than church songs like “Glory, Glory Hallelujah.”

“So that’s how I got started singing the blues, man,” Rush explained. “Then I built me a guitar upside the wall with the strings off a broom wire, and I had a brick at the top and a ball at the bottom. So one day the brick fell out and hit me in the head and start the bleeding. So I reversed the brick at the bottom – smart now – put the ball at the top. Then my songs start to sound like a guitar. And that’s when my guitar started, man…. That’s Bobby Rush.”

Rush was just 7 when he got a taste of playing the guitar – and the effect it had the girls in the neighborhood. And the rush of it all never wore off, even when he was forced to play his music behind a curtain because of the pervasive racism throughout the country in the 1950s.

“What they want is to hear all the music, but didn’t want to see the guy who’s playing the music. Because they want to hear that blackness, they want to hear that Blues,” Rush explained. “You know, I laugh about it. But the meaning why they did it was one thing. But I had fun behind the curtain because I know couldn’t no one see me, so I had the little girls come behind the curtain so… So there was a lot of things going on behind the curtain. [Laughs] If you know what I mean.”

Since 1951, Rush has recorded 347 songs. To this day, he continues to play more than 100 live shows a year.