Otis Rush

Otis Rush — American blues guitarist and singer whose left-handed, upside-down string attack helped define West Side Chicago blues and taught rock guitarists how longing could bend — died in Chicago, Illinois, on September 29, 2018. He was eighty-four. Born April 29, 1934, in Philadelphia, Mississippi, he moved north as a teenager, found the city's clubs, and cut Cobra Records sides in the late 1950s that still sound like open wounds set to a slow burn. "I Can't Quit You Baby," "All Your Love (I Miss Loving)," and "Double Trouble" gave later bands a vocabulary of sustained notes and minor-key ache; Clapton, Page, and a generation of British and American players studied the vibrato as if it were scripture. Rush played with a cowboy hat and a tenor cry that never begged for pity. A 2003 stroke ended his stage life; he spent the remaining years as a quiet Chicago elder while the records kept touring without him. Chicago was home when complications from that stroke finally closed the book. He died there, leaving a sound that still makes amplifiers sound lonely on purpose. Mississippi cotton country taught the blues' first grammar; West Side rooms taught electricity. He strung guitars "wrong" and made the wrongness into a signature. He died in Chicago on September 29, 2018. Somewhere a slow bend is still hanging in the air after the band has stopped. Rush's gift was vocalized guitar — making steel strings speak like a human throat. Notice Nearby keeps the death date so September 29 remembers the Mississippi-born Chicago master who taught the blues to stretch.