The Socially Acceptable Bohemian
Tom Rush's charmed life in folk music
by Daniel Gewertz
Tickets are a stiff $40 apiece, but the Sit ’n’ Bull Pub in Maynard, Massachusetts, is full. Folksinger Tom Rush ’63 stands center stage, halfway between a barroom dartboard and a string of iridescent red plastic peppers. The Sit ’n’ Bull looks like a classic roadhouse, certainly a long aesthetic distance from his celebrated, sold-out Boston Symphony Hall concerts of the 1980s.
Photograph courtesy of Tom Rush
Tom Rush in 1967
But Rush is equally comfortable in any setting he chooses. He begins his solo show with a song he first recorded 45 years ago, in 1962, while still an undergraduate: “San Francisco Bay Blues.” Rush then delights the audience with a tale about interviewing the writer of the song, Jesse “The Lone Cat” Fuller, a world-class eccentric folk-bluesman, back in the days of Rush’s WHRB folk-music radio show at Harvard. The story comes replete with a fond imitation and a full description of Fuller’s “fotdella,” a self-invented foot-percussion instrument shaped like a stove.
Storytelling has always been essential to the art and charm of Tom Rush. When a California journalist recently questioned the veracity of some of the tales Rush tells in concert, he e-mailed the fellow to protest. “My stories are not just true—they’re better than true…having been polished (not unlike diamonds) in the tumbler of time.”
Though he never made the Top 40 pop-album charts, Rush has often been called the man who ushered in the 1970s singer-songwriter folk-pop movement in America. He’s also the best-known folksinger ever to graduate from Harvard College, and, yes, he is well aware of the incongruity of that achievement. “Cambridge preppies in the ’60s really should not have been singing songs about picking cotton and how tough it was working in the coal mines,” Rush said recently over lunch at a Cambridge restaurant. “Yet we were sincerely in love with the music. The sons and grandsons of the old blues guys were trying to get as far away from the blues as possible, to get as far away from the echoes of slavery and poverty. Young white college kids, like me, were the ones basically keeping the blues afloat.
“The Cambridge-Boston folk scene in the early ’60s was an amateur scene in the best sense of the word,” Rush added. “The ambition was only to make enough money to buy a six-pack for the party after the show. No one was looking for a career.”
Well, not quite no one. By the time Rush was 21, he was already known in Boston folk circles as “the guy with the album.” “It was strange,” he recalled. “At the time, nobody else had an album out. Nobody. And then I did.”
How did it happen? “A fellow had come up to me at a coffeehouse,” Rush said. “He had a tape recorder and a microphone and he just asked me if I wanted to make a live record. I said all right. That was At the Unicorn. About 600 copies were pressed. It wasn’t a very good record, but somehow, it made me legitimate.”
Today, original copies of that primitively recorded album sell for up to $500 apiece on eBay. And although Rush has made many better albums in the ensuing 45 years, he still sells downloads of the Unicorn Coffeehouse record on his busy website, www.tomrush.com. “Having a record in 1962 was, apparently, a good career move,” Rush said, “though I hadn’t thought of that in advance.”
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