Still tearing it up – Bobby Rush revisits his Louisiana roots before Blues Fest

When this year’s Baton Rouge Blues Festival headliner, Louisiana native Bobby Rush, and his top-notch band commandeer the stage Saturday evening, you can expect to witness a blues performance unlike anything you’ve ever seen. His is an act best described in polite terms by his February citation for the 2013 Mississippi Governor’s Award for Excellence: “For over five decades, Bobby Rush has been thrilling audiences around the world with his bawdy, entertaining, flamboyant, and stellar showmanship.”

In a nutshell: His hyper-aggressive energy, sequined flash-and-glamour, down-home grooves, libidinal gymnastics and eardrum-searing blues licks are the essentials of the near-80-year-old bluesman’s stock in trade, a skill set refined down to its fundamentals for his most recent CD release, Down in Louisiana.

“This album started in the swamps and the juke joints where my music started, and it’s also a brand-new thing,” says the fast-paced, eloquent bluesman. “What I do goes back to the days of black vaudeville and Broadway, and—with my dancers on stage—even back to Africa. 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.”

Rush says that 50 years ago, he put funk together with down-home blues to create his own style. Now, with Down in Louisiana, he’s done the same thing with Cajun, reggae, pop, rock and blues. “And,” he says, “it all sounds only like Bobby Rush!”

Captivating in its simplicity and sublimely well crafted, Down in Louisiana builds on the sound of conventional blues albums with contemporary instrumental textures, multi-layered, atmospheric production techniques and an emphasis on rhythmic funk inflections. Most surprising, though, is the overall tone of the content: mid-tempo and melodically lyrical compositions featuring tender-hearted vocals, an approach that reaches full fruition in the program’s closer, “Swing Low,” a variant on the old gospel number “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” Here, the standard is artfully rendered in a mix of blues and gospel sounds with a doo-wop-inspired chorus.

Born in Homer, La., Rush moved with his family to Chicago when he was 18. Already immersed in the blues, the teenager served a professional apprenticeship with some of the biggest names in electric bluesmanship. Eventually relocating to his current base in Jackson, Miss., Rush began touring with a versatile 12-piece show band. By the late 1990s, he dominated the blues scene, especially in the South. Every year from 1995 through 2000, with the single exception of 1996, Rush was named “Best Live Performer of the Year” by Living Blues Magazine. In 2000, his album Hoochie Man was nominated for a Grammy award.

But in 2001, disaster struck when a tour bus accident near Tallahassee badly injured the veteran bluesman and took the life of one of his dancers. During an extended convalescence, Rush had time to contemplate the downsizing of his bread-and-butter touring gigs in the South to smaller venues charging lower ticket prices. Returning to the show business arena in 2003, Rush embarked on a new musical strategy designed to mix acoustic and small-band blues performances with his already-patented brand of big-band funk and soul. According to Rush, Down in Louisiana, which forms a trilogy with 2004’s Folkfunk and 2007’s Raw, uses stripped-down instrumentation as an adjunct to his larger show band, providing booking agents with an alternative to the higher-priced road show. “This way,” Rush explains, “all kinds of people can afford to hear me—one week I can play the casinos, and the next week I can play the juke joints.”

Spoken like a true blues survivor, and one who will undoubtedly be remembered as a towering figure in blues history.