Lyrics by Otis Rush
We have compiled all the lyrics of Otis Rush's songs we could find so that those who, like you, are looking for songs by Otis Rush, find them all in one place.
- Double Trouble
- All Your Love
- I Can't Quit You Baby
- Lonely Man
- So Many Roads
- Violent Love
- You Know My Love
Otis Rush Jr. (April 29, 1934 – September 29, 2018) was an American blues singer, guitarist and songwriter who's been long revered as one of the creators of modern Chicago blues and though he was respected and praised, the success he sought eluded him while others profited from what he created and his career never reached the heights that he deserved. As a performer, Otis was unique. (Everyone called him Otis, or Mr. Rush.) He had an intense and powerful tenor voice that grabbed your attention and he had big hands so he could make unusual chord inversions on the guitar which he said he got from Charles Brown, the jazz blues piano player, an acknowledged influence. Also, he played his guitar upside down and backwards. Albert King, who Otis borrowed licks from, Jimi Hendrix and Eddy "The Chief" Clearwater played the same way though Otis' sound was other worldly. He had the low strings adjusted very low, and the G, B and high E strings adjusted for slightly higher action so that he could curl his left pinky under the low strings and pull them down, sometimes two and three at a time. Music writer Lester Bangs wrote in one of his last articles that it was the sound of “being mugged by an iceberg”. Otis ran his amps in such a way that he could sustain his notes. He liked to wring out every sustainable note from his guitars. The term "slow burn" is an accurate description of the way he approached his dark and mournful slow blues. Amplifier technology changed drastically during the decades following his beginnings where, in the 1950s, players usually used what was on the venue's bandstand. During the early years of the electric blues ascent, many of the older performers used Masco P.A. head amps, older Ampegs or beat up Fender amps that were badly in need of new tubes or other repairs. Through the '80s and '90s, he preferred Mesa Boogie Amps. One of his favorites was the Mark 2B channeled into a variety of speaker cabinets. While Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, his predecessors on Chicago's South Side, popularized an amplified update of the bare bones, down home sound of the Mississippi Delta where the sound of the band was the focus, Otis listened to piano and horn players which gave him his unique phrasing. He also loved T-bone Walker. He said T-bone Walker was one of the best guitar players because he was a great rhythm guitarist as well as a great soloist. Otis always felt that if you couldn’t play rhythm guitar very well and you were just a soloist, you weren’t a complete guitar player. He and his modern variations, along with Magic Sam 's and Buddy Guy's, were more lyrical and more rhythmically complex and are credited with bringing the guitar out front in what came to be known as the West Side sound because it was prevalent in nightclubs on that side of town, influencing a generation of blues and rock musicians including Carlos Santana, Michael Bloomfield, John Mayall, Peter Green, Eric Clapton and Stevie Ray Vaughan, who named his band after Otis' 1958 hit "Double Trouble." Citing Otis as one of the deepest of deep blues men, Muddy Waters commented to critic and author, Robert Palmer in his book, Deep Blues, “He’s so good, man.”
To discover the patterns in Otis Rush's songs, you just have to read their lyrics carefully, paying attention not just to what they say, but how they are constructed.
Analyzing the lyrics of Otis Rush's songs can be a lot of fun and if you enjoy composing, it can help you find formulas to create your own compositions.
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Sometimes Otis Rush's songs help us express what we think or feel. Is that the case for you?
