Official Artist Website

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3x GRAMMY winning legend, Blues Hall of Famer, six-time Grammy nominee, and 18-time Blues Music Award winner, with cameo in the Netflix original Dolemite Is My Name starring Eddie Murphy, and a recent Autobiography. His story began in rural Homer/Haynesville, Louisiana, where Rush—born Emmett Ellis, Jr.—grew up on his family’s farm picking cotton, tending to mules and chickens, and living in a home without electricity nor indoor plumbing. He built his first guitar on the side of the family’s house out of broom wire, nails, bottles and bricks. The blues, Rush recalls, provided “an escape from the cotton fields. You’d go out on Saturday night to the juke joints, but then on Monday morning you’d go back into the cotton fields. Rush has become one of the most prominent advocates for the blues tradition, and says “it’s the root of all music, it’s the mother of all music. If you don’t like the blues, you probably don’t like your mama.”

Rush’s busy schedule includes headlining European festivals with his band and solo programs at venues including Jazz at Lincoln Center, and he just recorded an album of brand new material, All My Love For You, coming out via his own label Deep Rush Records in collaboration with Nashville-based Thirty Tigers. Over the last several years he’s won a second Grammy, re-recorded his 1971 hit Chicken Heads together with his old friend Buddy Guy and young blues star Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, and written a critically acclaimed autobiography, I Ain’t Studdin’ You: My American Blues Story. 

In the romping autobiographical ‘I’m the One’ Rush celebrates his long history, including learned from B.B. King and Muddy Waters after arriving in Chicago in 1952. But he was always one to carve is own path, and relays here the challenges in his ultimately successful efforts to “bring the funk into the blues.”