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November-December 2007
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< previous | 1 | 2 | 3 This little tale of his beginnings as a musician in Cambridge contains so much that reflects Rush’s perennial charm, onstage and off: the self-deprecating tone, the offhand grace, and his lifelong gratitude for and dependence on accident, timing, and luck. The story of “lucky Tom” might be an example of the oral tradition Rush values so highly in folk music: a tradition he studied, in fact, at Harvard College. Born in 1941, Rush grew up in and around St. Paul’s Preparatory School in Concord, New Hampshire, where his father taught mathematics. Later, he attended the Groton School. Both his father and grandfather were Harvard alumni, and his dad convinced him to attend Harvard. “I blew a lot of opportunities at Harvard,” he admitted. “I wasn’t sure why I was there. Despite the fact that I had grown up at one preparatory school and gone to another, I showed up at Harvard totally unprepared for academic life. I was baffled by assignments that expected me to write my own thoughts.” By 1961, the folk-music coffeehouse had become his real classroom. “I went around to the [local] hootenanny nights, at first to recruit talent for my WHRB radio show,” Rush recalled. “I discovered you could get in free if you had a guitar. Then I discovered that you could get in free if you just had a guitar case—so I’d put a six-pack in my case. One night, at The Golden Vanity, the main act canceled, so I was immediately hired to do a whole show! I only had beer in my guitar case that night, so I had to borrow a guitar.” Rush’s class work didn’t progress as serendipitously. “I didn’t really have a goal,” he explained. “Then I took a year off, traveled around, played gigs, visited friends. Once I came back to Harvard, I was more focused. I finally had a goal.” His shaggy white mustache began curling around a small, wry smile. “My goal was to get a diploma.” In fact, Rush was learning as much as he could about world folklore and the oral tradition of narrative poetry, the basis of the folk music he adored. A class on Homer with his favorite teacher, Albert Lord, professor of Slavic and comparative literature, proved especially memorable. “Going into folk music as a profession right after getting a Harvard diploma took a lot of nerve in 1964,” says Betsy Siggins, who managed New England’s essential folk-music venue, Harvard Square’s Club 47, in the mid 1960s. (She has returned to her first love in recent years as the executive director of Club 47’s descendant, Club Passim.) “Tom was lucky enough to come from an elite background,” she says, “and in his case that allowed him to be comfortable in every community he entered.” The luck continued throughout the decade: Paul Rothchild became a close friend. The future record producer for The Doors, Janis Joplin, and Bonnie Raitt ’72, Rothchild produced two albums for Rush at New York’s Prestige Records, and then helped him get signed by the larger Elektra label. Rush’s looks helped, too. His masculine face, long, lanky body, and natural grace made him “our first folk sex symbol in Cambridge,” noted fellow folk artist Geoff Muldaur. “The girls loved him.” In 2001, on the occasion of Rush’s sixtieth birthday, his old friend Bonnie Raitt wrote: “Tom’s deeply soulful voice, great guitar playing, and of course, devastating handsomeness, held me in his siren call from the first note.” 1 | 2 | 3 | continued >  
 
 
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