![]() ![]() Even the semi-autobiographical hard-times story “Tight Money,” which floats in on the call of Rush’s haunted harmonica, has a magnetic pull toward the dance floor. Every song is propelled by an appealing groove. Down in Louisiana is spare on Rush’s usual personnel, - Brown on keys, drummer Pete Mendillo, guitarist Lou Rodriguez and longtime Rush bassist Terry Richardson - but doesn’t scrimp on funk. ![]() ![]() It’s the first time I made an album like that and it felt really good.” Rush plans to tour behind the disc, his debut on Thirty Tigers, with a similar-sized group. “Then Paul created the arrangements around what I’d done. The album ignited 18 months ago when Rush and producer Paul Brown, who’s played keyboards in Rush’s touring band, got together at Brown’s Nashville-based Ocean Soul Studios to build songs from the bones up.“Everything started with just me and my guitar,” Rush explains. “It’s a spiritual thing, entwined with the deepest black roots, and with Down in Louisiana I’m taking those roots in a new direction so all kinds of audiences can experience my music and what it’s about.”Compared to the big-band arrangements of the 13 albums Rush made while signed to Malaco Records, the Mississippi-based pre-eminent soul-blues label of the ’80s and ’90s, Down In Louisiana is a stripped down affair. ![]() And Rush is proud to bear the torch for that tradition, and more.“What I do goes back to the days of black vaudeville and Broadway, and - with my dancers on stage - even back to Africa,” Rush says. King, Nat “King” Cole and Ray Charles emerged from this milieu. A range of historic entertainers that includes Bessie Smith, Cab Calloway, B.B. With more than 100 albums on his résumé, he’s the reigning king of the Chitlin’ Circuit, the network of clubs, theaters, halls and juke joints that first sprang up in the 1920s to cater to black audiences in the bad old days of segregation. Those talents have earned him multiple Blues Music Awards including Soul Blues Album of the Year, Acoustic Album of the Year, and, almost perennially, Soul Blues Male Artist of the Year.As Down in Louisiana attests, he’s also one of the music’s finest storytellers, whether he’s evoking the thrill of finding love in “Down in Louisiana” - a song whose rhythmic accordion and churning beat evoke his Bayou State youth - or romping through one of his patented double-entendre funk rave-ups like “You’re Just Like a Dresser.”Songs like the latter - with the tag line “You’re just like a dresser/Somebody’s always ramblin’ in your drawers” - and a stage show built around big-bottomed female dancers, ribald humor and hip-shaking grooves have made Rush today’s most popular blues attraction among African-American audiences. He’s a prolific songwriter and one of the most vital live performers in the blues, able to execute daredevil splits on stage with the finesse of a young James Brown while singing and playing harmonica and guitar. Now, with Down in Louisiana, I’ve done the same thing with Cajun, reggae, pop, rock and blues, and it all sounds only like Bobby Rush.”At 77, Rush still has an energy level that fits his name. “Fifty years ago I put funk together with down-home blues to create my own style. But five decades later Down in Louisiana’s blend of deep roots, eclectic arrangements and raw modern production is clearly the stuff of towering artistry.“This album started in the swamps and the juke joints, where my music started, and it’s also a brand new thing,” says the Grammy-nominated adopted son of Jackson, Mississippi. Its 11 songs revel in the grit, grind and soul that’s been the blues innovator’s trademark since the 1960s, when he stood shoulder to shoulder on the stages of Chicago with Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Little Walter and other giants.Of course, it’s hard to recognize a future giant when he’s standing among his mentors. Bobby Rush’s new Down in Louisiana, out Februon Deep Rush Productions through Thirty Tigers, is the work of a funky fire-breathing legend. ![]()
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