Thomas Walker Rush (born February 8, 1941) is an American folk and blues singer, guitarist, and songwriter who helped launch the careers of other singer-songwriters in the 1960s and has continued his own singing career for 60 years.
Rush was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, United States, the son of a teacher at St. Paul’s School, in Concord, New Hampshire. He began performing in 1961 while studying at Harvard University, after having graduated from the Groton School. He majored in English literature. His early recordings include Southern and Appalachian folk or old-time country songs, Woody Guthrie ballads, and acoustic-guitar blues, such as Jesse Fuller’s “San Francisco Bay Blues,” which appeared on both of his first two LPs. He regularly performed at the Club 47 coffeehouse (now called Club Passim) in Cambridge, the Unicorn in Boston, and The Main Point in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. In the 1970s he lived in Deering, New Hampshire. As of 2023, Rush lives in the North Shore region of Massachusetts, not far from his New Hampshire birth place.
Rush is credited by Rolling Stone magazine with ushering in the era of the singer-songwriter. In addition to performing his own compositions, he sang songs by Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, James Taylor, Murray McLauchlan, David Wiffen and William Hawkins, helping them to gain recognition early in their careers.
His 1968 composition “No Regrets” has become a standard, with numerous cover versions having been recorded (Rush did two radically different versions himself). These include The Walker Brothers, who gave Tom Rush Top Ten credit as a songwriter on the UK Singles Chart, Emmylou Harris, who included the song on her 1988 album Bluebird, and Midge Ure whose cover also made the UK Top Ten.
On March 1, 2007 a video of his performance of Steven Walters’ “The Remember Song” was uploaded to YouTube, and, as of April 2017, it has received over 7 million plays. Writing on his website, Rush said,
I’ve been waiting 45 years to be an overnight sensation, and it’s finally happened! A video clip of my performance of “The Remember Song” has ‘gone viral’. I felt terrible at first, thinking I was being accused of being a musical equivalent of Ebola, but my children explained to me that this was a good thing.
One of the earliest music videos produced (1968) for an artist by a record company, Elektra, can be found at his website. It was used to promote his signature song, “No Regrets”, for his The Circle Game album. A number of recent videos from a 2010 concert performed in Old Saybrook, Connecticut can be found online.
Over the years Rush has used a number of guitars on stage, his current[when?] primary one being a handcrafted acoustic made by Don Musser. In February 2012, Rush appeared on stage in Colorado with a new instrument, a cedar-top Dreadnought with an inlay of a snake wrapped around a reclining nude woman. The guitar, crafted by McKenzie & Marr Guitars is a “re-incarnation” of one of Rush’s earliest acoustics, the famous “Naked Lady”.
On December 28, 2012, Rush appeared at Boston’s Symphony Hall to celebrate fifty years in the music business. Rush had first performed there in 1958, and for many years Rush performed there regularly, often in December.
Rush continues to regularly perform and to tour regionally, as of late 2023.
Rush’s latest albums are Voices, released in 2018, and Gardens Old, Flowers New (March 1, 2024). In recent years, he has frequently toured the United States, often accompanied on piano by Berklee graduate Matt Nakoa. (wikipedia)
And here´s his 5th album;
With side one consisting of full-out rock & roll and side two of the country/folk blues he’s best known for, Tom Rush takes the listener on a journey through his life circa 1966. The full out “Who Do You Love” and “You Can’t Judge a Book by the Cover” rock mightily, while the classic “Joshua Gone Barbados” shows Rush hadn’t lost touch with his folk roots. A fine collection of tunes. (by James Chrispell)
Tom Rush’s second album for Elektra Records, Take a Little Walk with Me, appeared in 1966, only a little more than a year after his Elektra debut, Tom Rush (also reissued on CD by Collectors’ Choice Music). In that short time, the entire world of rock and folk music had turned upon its axis.
The Byrds had made folk-rock the hottest trend in pop. Singer-songwriters like Bob Dylan, Richard & Mimi Fariña, and Fred Neil had made the transition from acoustic folk backing to full-fledged electric band arrangements. John Sebastian — in early 1965, a session harmonica player on Tom Rush, a pure acoustic folk album — was now the leader of the Lovin’ Spoonful, bringing good-time jugband-influenced folk-rock to the top of the charts. Debates raged among folk and pop audiences over the merits of folk musicians going electric, who were on one hand reaching a far greater listenership than they ever had as folkies, and on the other enduring scorn from purists who felt they had sold out.
Take a Little Walk with Me was Rush’s decisive entry into the foray, and one that straddled the threshold of both camps. Like Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home, it was split into two LP sides, one electric, one acoustic. Like Dylan, Rush tapped the first tier of New York session players to midwife his transition into rock music. In fact, all of the musicians accompanying Tom on the electric side — including Al Kooper (lead electric guitar, celesta, piano), Bruce Langhorne (guitar), Harvey Brooks (bass), and Bobby Gregg (drums) — had played on 1965 Dylan electric recordings.
It was side one, comprised of a half-dozen electric rock tunes — all but one covers of 1950s rock’n’roll oldies — that excited the most comment among listeners, and remains the half of the record that is most fondly remembered today. Kooper was Rush’s chief lieutenant for the project, organizing the band, planning the record with Tom by listening to about twenty of his ’50s interpretations, and even writing the liner notes. It is also Kooper, by the way, who is the “Roosevelt Gook” credited with piano on side one. For years, rumors circulated that this was a pseudonym for Dylan, particularly as the ludicrous nom de plume was in keeping with a guy who had already used the fake name of Blind Boy Grunt on some Broadside and Folkways recordings.
“We went into the studio and just rocked our asses off, having one hell of a time and getting paid for it to boot,” wrote Kooper in his autobiography, Backstage Passes & Backstage Bastards. “Take a Little Walk with Me was one of the most enjoyable recording experiences I’ve ever had.” That sense of looseness and joy comes through on Rush’s covers of Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Clyde McPhatter, and Buddy Holly. Tom adapted an uncharasteristically low and playful growl for Diddley’s “Who Do You Love,” graced by early fuzz guitar distortion. He put a tasteful overlay of pop production on Holly’s “Love’s Made a Fool of You,” which, with its celesta and backup harmonies, might have made a reasonable choice as a single, though the Bobby Fuller Four had their own Top Forty hit with the song around the time the album was released. There was also a credible blues-rocker from the pen of Rush himself, “On the Road Again.” It must have come as quite a shock to those Rush fans weaned on his acoustic folk shows in such Cambridge haunts as Club 47. Or was it?
“Folk is an umbrella that covers an awful lot of disparate audiences,” notes Rush. “It goes all the way from Celtic to Delta blues to Cajun…audiences that wouldn’t be caught dead in the same room with each other. Most of the performers around the Cambridge scene were specialists. There was a guy that did mainly Woody Guthrie tunes, and another guy would do Delta blues, and somebody would do Appalachian ballads, and then there were the bluegrass guys. They basically were interested in traditional music.
“There were a few exceptions, and I think I might have been one of them. ‘Cause I would slip in a Bo Diddley tune. I was more of a generalist. I graded the songlist, and I’d take a tune from here and a tune from there, and mix ’em up. So my audience wasn’t really coming to me for purity. They were coming to me for, I think, good songs done in an enthusiastic way. And diversity.” Which may have enabled Tom Rush to cross the bridge from folk to rock with less fuss than most, as “when I extended the diversity another notch, it didn’t upset them too much. My audience didn’t seem to be particularly pissed off [about him going electric], in general. Or at least, I wasn’t hearing about [it] if they were.
“My formative years, musically, were the late ’50s. The late ’50s were just marvelous. It was all that wonderfully energetic, rebellious shit on the radio. Chuck Berry and Elvis, the Everly Brothers, Fats Domino, Little Richard. There were a lot of very different sounds. It wasn’t like they were all cut from the same cloth. But they all had the same energy. And it was great. I’ve always had a fondness for that music, and basically, I was running out of folk tunes to do. I couldn’t find any more that really excited me. There’s a limited number of traditional songs. You can’t write a traditional [song]; it has to already be there.
“I felt that I had sort of fished that pond out. So I was looking for something else to do, and I said, well, I’ll go back and touch base with my roots. It was kind of halfway in between the original event of the late 1950s and the official [rock’n’roll] revival, which happened somewhat later on. So there’s some debate about whether I was prophetic or retarded, ’cause I was kind of halfway in between. But basically, I was just looking for good songs that I had fun playing, and that’s where I found ’em.”
On side two, Rush went back to the acoustic folk-blues format, covering the classics “Statesboro Blues” and “Sugar Babe,” as well as a couple of songs by fellow Cambridge folkie Eric Von Schmidt. Even these, however, had a more contemporary feel than the blues-folk songs he had put on 1965’s Tom Rush, due largely to the excellent, distinctively fluid guitar work of Bruce Langhorne, one of the top folk-rock session players of the mid-1960s. “Bruce is good enough that he could, the first time through, play the song like he’d been doing it his whole life,” Rush points out with pride, though Tom acquitted himself well with his own slide guitar on “Galveston Flood.” Bill Lee, another ubiquitous folk session sideman who was already familiar with the singer via work on Tom Rush , filled out the sound on the acoustic cuts with string bass.
The one ingredient Take a Little Walk with Me was missing to compete with the top layer of folk-rock singer-songwriters, if only in retrospect, was the near-total absence of Rush originals, or even any covers of contemporary songs by other composers. That would be rectified with his next record, The Circle Game, Rush’s best-known album, which featured songs by himself and emerging talents like Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, and Jackson Browne. Take a Little Walk with Me, however, was a vital stepping stone to Rush’s passage into the rock era. (by Richie Unterberger)
Personnel:
Harvey Brooks (bass on 01. – 06.)
Roosevelt Gook (piano on 01. – 06.)
Bobby Gregg (drums on 01. – 06.)
Al Kooper (guitar, celeste on 01. – 06.)
Bruce Langhorne (guitar)
Bill Lee (bass 07. – 11.)
Tom Rush (vocals, guitar)
Tracklist:
01. You Can’t Tell (Judge) A Book By The Cover (Dixon) 3.45
02. Who Do You Love (McDaniels) 2.54
03. Love’s Made A Fool Of You (Montgomery/Holly) 2.15
04.Too Much Monkey Business (Berry) 2.20
05. Money Honey (Stone) 2.51
06. On The Road Again (Rush) 3.34
07. Joshua Gone Barbados (v.Schmidt) 4.13
08. Statesboro Blues (McTell) 2.30
09. Turn Your Money Green (v.Schmidt) 3.50
10. Sugar Babe (Lipscomb) 1.58
11. Galveston Flood (Traditional) 5:17
The official website:
ManyFantasticColors 