In Chicago in the sixties, "the rules had been laid down" for young, white blues bands, Mike Bloomfield told Rolling Stone in 1968. "You had to be as good as Otis Rush." That wasn't easy. A Mississippi native who moved to the Windy City in the late Forties, Rush was a fearsome electric guitarist – with a grittytreble tone and lacerating attack, like a gunslinging cross of Muddy Waters and B.B. King – as well as a knockout songwriter. Along with guitarists like Magic Sam and Buddy Guy, Rush helped create the more modernized, R&B-influenced approach to Chicago blues that came to be known as the West Side Sound. Rush's impact on later generations was enormous: His late-Fifties and early-Sixties singles were go-to covers for Led Zeppelin ("I Can't Quit You Baby"), John Mayall ("All Your Love [I Miss Loving]") and the J. Geils Band ("Homework"), while Stevie Ray Vaughan named his band after Rush's lethal '58 lament "Double Trouble."
Key Tracks: "I Can't Quit You Baby," "Double Trouble," "Homework"