I was born on April 29, 1935 on a farm in the south of Philadelphia in Neshoba County. I’m the sixth of seven children and raised by my mother Julia Campbell Boyd who was a hard working woman. My father was never around for me and my family so it was always my mother who worked around the farm and looked after me and my siblings. Even, if I didn’t have my father around I was able to help my mother on the farm in the fields and support my brothers and sisters as well. Tough times like the great depression made it hard for me and my siblings to go to school, instead we’d work in the cotton fields on the farm. If there was anything that helped me go through the struggles that I went through it was my love for music. My mother owned a wind up Victrola record player that I’d just listen to, anytime I’d get. There were times where my mother would take me to town and while we’d walk through town I’d hear the jukeboxes playing at restaurants and bars. As I was listening to the music I kinda felt that the songs would always be similar to one another by the way the rhythm was played out. I really wanted to create music that was a bit different but still had that jazz and blues beat to it.
While my mother and I would stroll through town I’d walk by the music store and take a look at the guitars and “as a kid I just liked the looks of guitars, but I didn’t play” (encyclopedia.com). Eventually I was able to own my very own harmonica and in a few days I was able to teach myself how to play the harmonica, I even went out and sang in a choir at my local church too. The only person in my family who ever owned a guitar was my older brother and when he’d be away from home I’d secretly take his guitar and start practicing how to play it on my own. Eventually I started to create my own technique by playing left-handed with the guitar upside down it sounds pretty crazy but it was a skill that was able to help me play the guitar. Another skill I was able to do was transforming sounds into actually notes and one sound that I remembered the most was my older brother’s whistling. Couple years later I was able to write, create, and play music all on my own.
Later on during my teenage years I would marry a beautiful women named Masaki and still sharecrop cotton and corn on the farm. As for my brothers and sisters most of them had moved away to get out the hardships and struggles in the state of Mississippi. In town people were talking about a guitarist named Vaughn Adams apparently he was a close friend of my mother’s there weren’t a lot musicians in philadelphia just a few here and there. I still had a bit a passion for music but I wasn’t fully motivated to become a musician just yet. That was only until I decided to visit my sister who was living in Chicago. When I finally met up with my sister she took me to a live music performance performed by a man named Muddy Waters. And as I was watching him performed “I flipped out man”(msbluestrail.org) I then said to myself “Damn this is for me”(msbluestrail.org). I finally knew what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. So in 1948 I decided I would move in with my sister in Chicago. For while I worked in the Chicago stockyards and still played my lovely harmonica. After watching live performances from Muddy Waters and Jimmy Rogers I decided to take the next step and play the guitar. I performed under the name Little Otis. I even played alongside with another guitarist by the name of Bob Woodfolk. Since then I finally started to perform live shows at public bars and areas in the city of Chicago. One of my favorites artists to listen to was T-Bone Walker and since he was big at the time I started to get some ideas on what type of music I should perform. For my music I still wanted to keep that Muddy Waters feel but add a little more of a modern twist to it.
Around the year 1956 while performing at 47th street a man stumbled upon my performance and that man was none other than Willie Dixon. Apparently Willie loved my talents and saw potential in me. Willie even stated “ I found Otis Rush down on 47th Street and I knew he was good but Leonard Chess thought he sounded too close to Muddy Waters”(encyclopedia.com). With that being the case I wasn’t able to sign at Chess Records but Willie did however let me sign with Eli Toscano’s studio Cobra Records. Now for the first time I was able to perform in a live studio. As for creating the music I wanted my music to have a modern urban sound that had the influences of jazz, blues and rhythm to it. Fortunately Willie was nice enough to have song already written for me and that song was called “I Can’t Quit You Baby’ and boy was that song a hit, in fact that song was Cobra Records only hit. “I Can’t Quit You Baby’ rose it’s way to the number six spot on Billboard’s R&B chart in 1956. The whole story behind this song was that I was having a distracting relationship at the time. The song was popular that even Led Zeppelin themselves created their own version of it in 1969. Fans seemed to like the phased guitar fills that were in the song. Later on I started to get backup musicians that included guitarists Dave and Louis myers, drummer Odie Payne, and Willie who played the acoustic bass. I even hired a arkansas born native Willie D. Warren who didn’t just play a guitar he played an electric bass guitar. Honestly without Warren we wouldn’t have gotten a lot of attention, for it introduced the electric bass into blues music. This helped create the development of modern electric blues. During my time with Cobra Records between the years of 1956 to 1958 the boys and I performed other great hits like “Double Trouble”, “My Love Will Never Die”, “Three Times A Fool”, “Keep Loving Me Baby”, and the classic “All Your Love(I Miss Loving)”. So my time with Cobra Records was definitely a time I wouldn’t forget.
Sadly Toscano past away and Cobra Records was shut down for good. Not only that, Warren decided to leave the band too. Luckily Willie help me sign with Chess studios in 1960. During my career with Chess I only recorded a few songs but my most popular one with them was “So Many Roads So Many Trains”. The only problem was that I was having tons of setbacks and I wasn’t getting any commercial success from Chess as I did with Cobra. Around the mid 60’s soon after my career with Chess ended I decided to sign with another studio Duke Records. Signing with Duke resulted me releasing my one hit single “Homework”. And since then I started to perform at typical out of town shows with artists T-Bone Walker and Little Richard. My career as a musician soon started to rise up as I appeared in “Vanguard’s Chicago: The Blues Today!” an album in 1966 that’s was directed towards young folk and rock audiences. In that same year I got myself involved in the American Folk Blues Festival where I’d play concerts all across Europe. This festival allowed me to become exposed to musicians that were from England and America. I truly felt that my career couldn’t get better than this. Sadly though I found out that my songs were being rewritten and imitated by bands from Paul Butterfield to Led Zeppelin. And what’s worse is that audiences loved their versions then they did of mine. This cause my career to sink badly and I then began to struggle to make a living in small Chicago clubs. As for my band members they just seemed like they didn’t want to play music anymore. I couldn’t even produce an album equal to the same quality as my earlier albums did. In 1971 my album “Mourning In The Morning” was released and even though the album had great moments it sadly suffered from overproduction and poor chosen material. At this point I really thought my career as musician would finally come to an end.
A few years later in 1975 the boys and I went on to perform in Japan. We arrived at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport and as we were walking at the airport we saw something that completely lifted up our spirits. We were greeted by thousands of fans that covered the entire runway with flowers. “I never saw so many flowers before in my life,” (encyclopedia.com) these fans went above and beyond “They had our baggage covered in flowers, the car we were in was full of flowers, at the gate people were standing around me with flowers” (encyclopedia.com). It was good to know that I had fans who not only liked me for my music but also liked me as a person. Sadly though the success of my japanese tour only then resulted in setbacks and financial problems. In the early 80’s I decided to quit playing music because people weren’t interested in the blues anymore so I figured there’s no point of playing anymore. I stopped playing music for about two years until the blues experienced a revival during the decade. I found a new audience in young musicians even musicians like Texas guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan who actually named his band Double Trouble after my 1958 Cobra Recording.
It just goes to show you on how my type of style of music inspired so many other musicians to play their music. I’d figure I grab my guitar and return to the one job I loved doing, playing music. Couple years later in 1984 I was elected to the Blues Hall of Fame then in 1999 I won a Grammy for Best Traditional Blues Album. I was even honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from The Jazz Foundation of America on April 20, 2018. From doing a left handed upside guitar technique to transforming sounds to notes, these two skills were the start of creating the blues in a whole different way. And as I look back I truly feel like I left a big impact on blues music especially in today’s modern age of music. My creative style of rhythm and language is what I believe that inspired so many musicians to perform music in their own special ways. And it’s good to know I wasn’t the only one who thought blues could be change in a whole different way.