Bluesman Otis Rush died yesterday at age 84. Rest in peace.
Otis Rush, 1934-2018
Bluesman Otis Rush died yesterday at age 84. Rest in peace.
Otis Rush, 1934-2018
We're trying to build a monument to show that we were here
It won't be visible through the air
And there won't be any shade to cool the monument to prove that we were here. - Gene Parsons, 1973
RIP to a great master of the genre.
I don't like country music, but I don't mean to denigrate those who do. And for the people who like country music, denigrate means 'put down.'- Bob Newhart
Very few of the electric blues greats left now.
'All Your Love', 'I Can't Quit You Baby', 'So Many Roads', 'Double Trouble'- enough said.
Ya know, I wonder, if I Had known about guitarists like Otis Rush and Albert King when I first started playing, if I'd have thought to flip a right handed guitar over and played it "upside down", the way those guys did. By the time I knew about lefty guitarists who had the guitar strung the wrong way around (ie with the low E closest to the floor), I'd already been playing for a couple years, and playing on right handed guitars, held and strung the way they're "supposed to be".
I think Buddy is the last man standing. Saw him last night in Chapel Hill. I think Buddy still has some gas left in the tank too. Great show.
Bill
She'll be standing on the bar soon
With a fish head and a harpoon
and a fake beard plastered on her brow.
Yeah, I'm trying to think of any "major" of the old blues gods other than Buddy. I'm sure there's still some sidemen around but the old gods are pretty much all going, going, gone.
I don't like country music, but I don't mean to denigrate those who do. And for the people who like country music, denigrate means 'put down.'- Bob Newhart
Remember him at the Chicago Blues Festival circa 1993. Amazing. Sad to see another gone.
I knew about Jimi, but he usually didn't play "upside down". His right handed guitars were typically restrung so that when he flipped them around, the high E was the closest to the floor, so his guitars were strung the way a left handed guitar was "supposed to be" strung. If you check out any of the video or film footage from his time in the limelight, you can see that's the case.
I was about 11 when I first started playing, and at the time the idea that you could play a guitar strung "upside down" hadn't occurred to me. I didn't know that's how Albert King, Otis Rush, Elizabeth Cotten, Coco Montoya, Doyle Bramhall II, Glenn Burtnick, etc played the instrument (and anyway, I think Albert was the only one of those people I had heard of at the time). I was left handed, but my first guitar was a right handed instrument, and my mother said "It doesn't matter", so I learned to play right handed style. I quickly learned that Mark Knopfler, Steve Morse, and Rik Emmett all are also left handed, so I felt like I was in good company in that regard.
Circa 1999-2000, after hearing a couple of Coco Montoya's records and seeing Doyle Bramhall II play with Roger Waters, I got it in my head to try reversing the strings on one of my Strats. Chords and riffs were a lot easier than I expected, but playing leads confounded the hell out of me. I imagine if I had worked at it, I could have gotten it together, but I just felt it was too much effort at the time. It also seemed like I got a twangier tone of the wound strings, I guess because they were longer than they would have normally been.
BTW, I recall reading in one of his last big interviews where Stevie Ray Vaughan talked about how he was considering stringing one of his Strats upside down, because he wanted to get closer to that Albert King sound.
For what it's worth, I think it was Al Kooper I read tell of watching Jimi pick up a random guitar in the studio, strap it on as a right handed instrument, and still playing death defying stuff. So apparently, Jimi was fully ambidextrous, so far as the guitar playing went.
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