The Orion Financial Free Concert Series welcomes local, national, and international acts to the historic Overton Park Shell where legendary talent has left a timeless legacy.
About the Artists:
During his renowned stage show Bobby Rush frequently jumps high into the air, arms spread and legs tucked, only to land gracefully and return without a hitch to his dazzling routine. It’s a move you might expect at a contemporary R&B show, but it’s downright shocking when you realize that Rush is in his late 80s.
“I never thought I would be here this long,” says Rush. “I was 83 years old before I won a Grammy, but it’s better late than never. I laugh about it, but I’m so blessed and I surely never thought I’d be making a living doing what I’m doing. I’m not just an old guy on my way out.”
Hardly. Rush’s busy schedule includes headlining European festivals with his band and solo programs at venues including Jazz at Lincoln Center, and he just recorded an album of brand new material, All My Love For You, coming out via his own label Deep Rush Records in collaboration with Nashville-based Thirty Tigers. Over the last several years he’s won a second Grammy, re-recorded his 1971 hit Chicken Heads together with his old friend Buddy Guy and young blues star Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, and written a critically acclaimed autobiography, I Ain’t Studdin’ You: My American Blues Story.
That story began in rural Homer/Haynesville, Louisiana, where Rush—born Emmett Ellis, Jr.—grew up on his family’s farm picking cotton, tending to mules and chickens, and living in a home without electricity nor indoor plumbing. He built his first guitar on the side of the family’s house out of broom wire, nails, bottles and bricks.
The blues, Rush recalls, provided “an escape from the cotton fields. You’d go out on Saturday night to the juke joints, but then on Monday morning you’d go back into the cotton fields to work for your bossman.”
He left behind farm work to perform on the road with the Rabbit Foot Minstrels, and as “Bobby Rush”—a name he took on out of respect to his father, a minister—he toured the jukes and clubs of Louisiana, Arkansas and Mississippi before settling in Chicago in the 1950s. Through singles on labels including Chess, ABC and Philadelphia International and relentless touring Rush established an unparalleled reputation as an entertainer, which later led to him being crowned by Rolling Stone magazine as King of the Chitlin’ Circuit, the network of African American clubs that arose during the segregation era.
Based in Jackson, Mississippi since the early ‘80s, Rush began “crossing over” to new audiences several decades ago, featured in the Martin Scorsese-produced documentary The Road to Memphis, appearing alongside Terrence Howard, Snoop Dogg and Mavis Staples in the documentary Take Me to the River, and performing on the Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon along with Dan Aykroyd. And the eternally youthful Rush was even able to play himself in the 1970s in Netflix's 2019 hit biopic Dolemite is My Name in a scene with Eddie Murphy. And the recognition keeps coming. In addition to his two Grammy wins (and six nominations), he’s in the Blues Hall of Fame, has won 16 Blues Music Awards (among 56 nominations), and there’s currently a musical in development called Slippin’ Through The Cracks with sights on Broadway, recently co-written by Rush and playwright Stephen Lloyd Helper, who co-wrote the 7x Tony-nominated musical Smokey Joe’s Café celebrating the songs of Lieber and Stoller.
Rush, meanwhile, still remains steadfastly committed to the African American audiences who sustained him for decades, and on his new album he looks back from his current vantage point as a seasoned artist celebrated by an ever-growing fan base.
“I put together all these songs when I was down with the COVID, thinking about where I was going to go from here. You’ll find everything about me inside these songs—folk funk, traditional blues, ballads, love, a comedy and a shit-talking. I don’t know if it hurts me, but my head just won’t let me be still.”
“The first song is, ‘I’m free, look at me. I’ve got the shackles off my feet and the chains off my mind.’ As a blues singer, as a Black man, there were a lot of places I could not go, a lot of things I could not do. But now I’m a free man, I can do some things I never did before and talk about some things I couldn’t talk about.”
In the romping autobiographical ‘I’m the One’ Rush celebrates his long history, including learned from B.B. King and Muddy Waters after arriving in Chicago in 1952. But he was always one to carve is own path, and relays here the challenges in his ultimately successful efforts to “bring the funk into the blues.”
“Back in the day it was hard for me to convince people about recording ‘Chicken Heads’ with that kind of beat—there was none of my peers cutting that kind of record. It was too funky.”
Most of the album finds Rush with new takes on the foibles of romance, addressing the sort of morality tales that he often acts out on stage with the help of his voluptuous dancers. Many of his songs over the years, such as “What’s Good For the Goose (Is Good For the Gander Too),” have drawn from the well of African American folklore, as does the first single off his new album, which revisits a classic that was recently covered by a young star of Southern Soul.
“King George had a record out called “Keep On Rollin,” and that really comes from a record I did 28 years ago called “One Monkey Don’t Stop No Show,” which was about woman who said she was going to leave me. So I now have a single, “One Monkey Can Stop a Show”—I’m going to treat her better so she sticks around.”
Rush advocates body positivity in celebrating his “TV Mama” ‘with the big wide screen,’ and in “I’ll Do Anything For You” proclaims that he’ll serve as his lover’s chauffer and masseuse, sleep out in the rain, and even rescue her from the jungle.
“I joke and talk about sex in a way that people can understand. I’m all for lifting it up, because if it wasn’t for sex, none of us would be here. That’s what the world is built around, making love and making money. I’m in the position now that I can tell the story better than most people, and plus I’ve got nothing to lose now.”
Rush has become one of the most prominent advocates for the blues tradition, and says “it’s the root of all music, it’s the mother of all music. If you don’t like the blues, you probably don’t like your mama.”
And he has no plans to slow down.
“I’m still in decent health and my mind is pretty keen, and the most blessed thing is that I still have people around me who love what I do. And even if you don’t like me, you’re still going to say, “I don’t like Bobby Rush, but, damn, he’s good.’
------
Let there be no mistake: Rodd Bland was born into the blues. That’s what happens when you’re the son of immortal singer Bobby “Blue” Bland. How could Rodd not have followed in his father’s outsized footsteps? But Rodd doesn’t sing the blues. Instead, he positions himself behind a drum kit, supplying rock-solid grooves for so many different bands in his hometown of Memphis, including Brimstone Jones, Will Tucker, and the Blues Players Club, that it’s a challenge just to keep track of them all. Riding his father’s massive coattails simply wasn’t an option; he’s too busy making his own musical statements and building his thriving career.
That said, Rodd isn’t about to sidestep paying loving tribute to the man most responsible for his success—and it’s a surefire bet that he wouldn’t want to. His new six-song tribute EP Live on Beale Street: Tribute to Bobby “Blue” Bland on Nola Blue makes that abundantly clear. Its contents were laid down live in 2019 at one of Rodd’s primary venues on Beale, B.B. King’s Blues Club, utilizing a very special group of musicians that Rodd leads, the Members Only Band. The aggregation was named after Bobby’s 1985 hit, the criteria for hiring each band member devastatingly obvious.
“My full criteria for the musicians is that in some way, shape, or fashion, you had to have played with my dad,” explains Rodd. He called on Hammond B-3 specialist Chris Stephenson, guitarist Harold Smith, and bassist Jackie Clark to join him in the rhythm section at the very special concert. The tight three-piece horn section consisted of trumpeters Marc Franklin and Scott Thompson and tenor saxist Kirk Smothers.
If you’re expecting a non-stop program of Bobby’s greatest hits, you’d be dead wrong. Rodd went deep catalog for the occasion, inviting three talented singers to wrap their melismatic pipes around a program of lesser-known gems from Bland’s massive songbook. Organist Stephenson exquisitely handles the vocals on the swaggering opener “Up And Down World,” from Bobby’s 1973 set His California Album, and an insistent “Sittin’ On A Poor Man’s Throne,” one of the highlights of Bobby’s ’77 set Reflections in Blue.
Ashton Riker steps up to the microphone for a steamy redo of the chestnut “St. James Infirmary,” a 1961 staple of Bland’s Duke Records catalog. Jerome Chism digs into the sleek “I Wouldn’t Treat A Dog (The Way You Treat Me)” (one of the hits on Bobby’s ’74 album Dreamer), the luxuriant blues “Soon As The Weather Breaks” from Bland’s 1979 set I Feel Good, I Feel Fine, and the funk-driven Malaco-era anthem “Get Your Money Where You Spend Your Time.”
“I always, always listened to a lot of the Duke and the ABC recordings. I gravitate towards all things Duke and ABC,” Rodd says. “I guess because of the stripped-down simplicity, nothing really compares to that stuff. As my dad would say, ‘I was hollerin’ back then, son! I was real young. I could holler all night!’”
Rodd assembled the first edition of the Members Only Band in early 2017 at the behest of Gina Hughes of the Galaxie Agency. “She said, ‘Hey, IBCs are coming up. I’d really like it if you would be my showcase and do a tribute to your dad,’” says Rodd. “So we do a six-song set, and it felt really cool. It was great. I got some of the guys that had played with my dad in his touring band.”
A follow-up tribute concert at B.B. King’s club later that year during Blues Music Awards week coincided with a statue of King being erected near Beale Street. “Rather than just do a statue unveiling, I was like, ‘We need to do something,’” he says. “So we made a full night at the B.B. King Club—Rodd Bland and the Members Only Band, presented by the Galaxie Agency. And we had various guest vocalists, such as the late Michael Ledbetter, and Monster Mike Welch. Janiva Magness was there, and Sugaray Rayford. So again, it was a great time.” Rodd kept the annual Members Only Band tradition going strong at B.B.’s club in 2018 and again the next year, when the performances on his debut EP were recorded.
Bobby didn’t force his son into the blues business. “He didn’t push drums or push music on me,” says Rodd. “I just naturally gravitated towards it.” And he began at an incredibly young age. “I started doing shows with him when I was five,” he says. Rodd had been at it even before he had an actual kit to practice on and had to improvise with whatever he could find lying around his folks’ residence.
“I started—as he called it, ‘destroying pots and pans’—when I was two-and-a-half years old,” he says. “I used to pull all that stuff out, and I was having a field day. I would set it up as a drum set, and I would disturb my dad, obviously, from his nap that he needed at the time. And then there were times I would take the dining room furniture, the chairs—I would set a chair up for me as my throne, And then I would take a couple other chairs, and in my imagination, that was a couple of toms. The wooden arms were like the ride or crash.
“I had a hell of an imagination back then,” he continues. “It drove him nuts. My dad was very attentive when he wasn’t on the road. Even when he was on the road, he was not inaccessible to do it for me. That’s like always been the big stigma for being an entertainer’s kid. But I used to get a speech, as he called it: ‘Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey—come on, man! Hey, hey, I’ve got to replace that, you know?’” Rodd also had a crucial ally within the extended family. “My grandmother—Granny, I called her—his mother, always said, ‘Leave him alone! One day, you’re gonna need him!’” Clearly, Granny possessed visionary powers.
As he got older, the Memphis native assumed his rightful place in his father’s mighty orchestra. “It depends on the way you use the word ‘officially joined.’ I was in automatically,” he explains. “I would do shows with my dad, not as a novelty thing, but whenever I wasn’t in school, I had my drums on the road. I had my uniform.” Rodd was initially cast as half of a twodrummer onstage setup that moved and breathed as one. Great drummers were always integral to Bobby’s roaring orchestra, and the young timekeeper soaked up the rhythmic innovations of three of the best to ever pilot Bland’s orchestra: Jab’o Starks, Harold “Peanie” Portier, and Tony Coleman.
“The three wise men, as I call them,” says Rodd. Although they never got to actually play together, the influence of Jab’o, whose locomotive beat fueled Bobby’s ‘61 smash “Turn On Your Love Light,” was deep and profound. “I love him, love him, love him, love him,” says Rodd, who received some invaluable advice from Starks not long before he passed away in 2018. “He said, ‘Son, as long as when Bobby calls it and you play it and you make sure he’s got what he needs underneath him, you ain’t got to worry about what I did, how I did it,’” he told Rodd. “That was my pat on the head, like, ‘It’s okay.’ And I know it’s out of love.”
Portier’s influence on Rodd was more hands-on. “Peanie was the guy that really put his hands on me as a kid, showing me how to play, training me up,” he says. “At three or four years old, I don’t know what double stroke roll is. But he always would see me with sticks, and he sat me down near the front of the bus, and he held his sticks and looked at me, and I tried to hold my sticks like him.
“That brings us to my illustrious big brother, or the only thing I’ll ever have that resembles a brother, Tony T.C. Coleman,” says Rodd. “The guys that I credit the most, responsible for what I do and how I do it when it comes to playing drums, especially blues and Bobby Bland-style blues and B.B. King-style blues, are Jab’o, Peanie, Tony Coleman, and if we have B.B. King-style blues, obviously the late Calep Emphrey, Jr. and Tony Coleman.”
The time eventually came when Bobby’s regular drummer George Weaver was nowhere to be found and Rodd had to do the job all by his lonesome. “I really stepped up, I like to say, in ‘95, ‘96. There was one night where George didn’t make the bus. We were going to Kansas City. We were playing, I think it was called the Starlight Festival. The Count Basie Orchestra was there. My mom was like, ‘What are you gonna do? George is not here! Joe, what y’all gonna do?’”
Band director Joe Hardin had a quick response. “He said, ‘We ain’t gonna do nothing. We’ve got a drummer!’ “My mom said, ‘Who?’ “And both him and my dad pointed at me. And that was the first time I flew the plane by myself, and drove the band.”
His father’s onstage magnetism left quite an impression on young Rodd. “There’s been endless amounts of lessons to be learned from just being onstage with him,” he says. “He made his living, as he always said, singing to women about women, and for women. And he said, ‘Fellows, if you listen, I might be able to teach you a thing or two.’ So that’s how that went.” Rodd contributed drums and percussion to his father’s 1998 Malaco Records release “Live” on Beale Street, a sweet document of Bland’s majestic band during its later years that was recorded at the New Daisy Theater (there was a DVD version too).
As if having “Blue” for a dad wasn’t enough of an inexorable blues connection, Rodd’s godfather was a reasonably well-known entity among the genre’s fans too: B.B. King. “Or in his words, my other dad,” says Rodd. “I always referred to him as Uncle, and he shut that down one day: ‘Hey, Unc!’
“‘Unc? Uncle? Come over here and say hi to your other father! You’re like my son— you’ve got two dads!’” Rodd even subbed for Coleman in 2010 in King’s orchestra. When his “other father” passed away in May of 2015, Rodd was chosen to hand-carry his hallowed guitar Lucille in the jam-packed funeral procession along Beale Street. Bobby had passed away two years earlier.
Rodd kept right on playing after losing his two dads, expanding his stylistic scope to keep a rock-steady beat within a variety of contrasting musical formats. He’s played on albums by Roxanne Lemmon (an eponymous CD in 2009), Ian Siegal and the Youngest Sons’ The Skinny (2011), Will Tucker’s Worth the Gamble (2015), The Reverend Shawn Amos Breaks it Down in 2018 (Rodd also toured globally as a member of Amos’ band), and Nola Blue’s 2018 release Going Back Home by Benny Turner and Cash McCall, where he played behind the veteran bluesmen on their ribald revival of “The Dirty Dozens.”
Bland also took part in the filming of Take Me to the River, the genre-bending 2014 documentary that brought together several generations of Southern soul, blues, and rap performers in a successful attempt to locate common musical ground. Rodd displayed his versatility in the acclaimed film by not only backing his dad in live performance, but rapper Yo Gotti as well.
As the pandemic finally winds down and Beale Street—Rodd’s principal stomping grounds—comes alive once more with its neon-spattered marquees intact and tourists returning in droves to stroll its historic sidewalks, Live on Beale Street: Tribute to Bobby “Blue” Bland vividly testifies about the past, the present, and the future too. “This EP is really an appetizer. This is the opening match or opening card. This is the opening act,” he says.
“A lot of those are songs that I had played maybe once or twice,” he says of this CD’s delightful contents. “There are some songs that I didn’t like what I did then, and I wanted another fresh approach by playing them again. There’s no replacing him or his voice. That’s just stupid to even think that. And I’m not trying to reimagine the songs. But I’m not going to make a hip-hop version of “I’ll Take Care Of You.” I’m not going to play a Drop-D tuning rock version of ‘Yolanda.’ I’m going to approach things as genuine as possible, but with my way of doing it and bring back ways that we used to do things.” Blue would be mighty proud.
---
🎶:
https://overtonparkshell.org/eventpage/bobbyrush25
🤝 SPONSORS 🤝
Mempho Presents
DECK PARTIES AVAILABLE
Want to experience the vibes and views like a VIP?
Pick your favorite show, and throw a deck party!
🎉:
https://overtonparkshell.org/sponsorship-opportunities
Know Before You Go:
Food Trucks: TBA
Blue Sky Couriers will kick off the evening with an extra special delivery.
The Memphis Grizzlies and FedEx Forum follow suit with a t-shirt toss! Make sure to stop by their booth to secure a pair of preseason tickets 🏀
Picnic baskets, coolers, beverages, blankets, and lawn chairs are always welcome. We also offer food and beverage for sale in the Autozone Food and Beverage Concourse. Dogs on a leash are welcome in designated areas. Overton Park Shell is a nonsmoking facility.
You may also like the following events from Overton Park Shell:
Also check out other
Music events in Memphis,
Entertainment events in Memphis,
Concerts in Memphis.
|
