Interview: Bobby Rush & Kenny Wayne Shepherd

Interview: Bobby Rush & Kenny Wayne Shepherd

By Simon Green

Bobby Rush and Kenny Wayne Shepherd are two artists that do not require an introduction to those familiar with the blues world. Showing no sign of slowing as he enters his tenth decade, the 91 year-old Rush is a three-time Grammy award winner in the “Best Traditional Blues Album” category for “Porcupine Meat,” “Rawer than Raw” and 2024’s “All My Love For You.” He is also a 16-time Blues Music Awards winner (with 56 career nominations), and has been inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame among other honours.

Five-time Grammy nominee, Shepherd is very much in the forefront of contemporary blues with multiple chart albums to his name. As a young man, Shepherd was inspired by the collaboration between Muddy Waters and the much younger Johnny Winter on the 1977 album ‘Hard Again.’ The guitarist has similarly collaborated with the veteran Rush, 44 years his senior, to produce a superb album ‘New Fashioned Ways.’ I spoke to both via Zoom, Bobby Rush at his home in Jackson, Mississippi and Kenny Wayne Shepherd on tour in Arizona. Speaking from his rocking chair Rush was charm personified while we waited for KWS to join the call (“I’m a good man, now I’m looking at you, c’mon! How you bin’?”). We started by talking about his visits to London.

Rock & Blues Muse
You must have visited a lot over the years? Can you remember the first time?

Bobby Rush
Oh yeh. Oh god, I believe the first time I came over Muddy Waters was on the bill. It was a long time ago!

Rock & Blues Muse
You’ve played with a lot of the greats, Jimmy Reed, Little Walter and so on, as well as Muddy.

Bobby Rush
Just this last weekend they named a street after Little Walter in his hometown. Myself and Buddy Guy went down. We’re the last of the blues guys in that age bracket.

Rock & Blues Muse
How does that make you feel?

Bobby Rush
It makes me feel blessed man to be around this long and be doing what I’m doing and pass the buck onto the young guys who can take it further than we ever could. Thanks to people like you, you know.

Rock & Blues Muse
It’s an absolute privilege to be able to speak to you. It’s a shame they can’t suck out everything that’s in your head and put it into a computer somewhere.

Bobby Rush
Yeh, yeh (laughs). Well, Kenny is a young man compared to me; he’s a man in his late forties and I’m an old man who’s been around a long time, but he loves the blues, he likes Muddy Waters, likes myself. He also loves rocking and rolling but the main thing is that he loves blues players, he respects the blues players that put the blues into focus in his life. You can see it in his playing ability. [At this point KWS comes on screen and joins the conversation] I’m puffing you up, I’m talking about you!

Rock & Blues Muse
We’ve been talking about Bobby’s great heritage, he and Buddy Guy are the last old bluesmen standing. It’s really something.

Kenny Wayne Shepherd
That’s one of the reasons why I was so excited about doing this record, you just don’t get the opportunity everyday to make music with somebody like Bobby who is part of the generation that helped mold this music to what it is. He’s a real connection back to the origins of this genre. There’s a certain authenticity in the music that he makes, in the stories that he tells when he writes a song. If I tried to write a song like ‘G String’ I just don’t think it would resonate the same way it does when someone like Bobby does it (laughs). It enables me to make the music that I love so much in a very authentic kind of way, because I’m doing it with somebody like Bobby who’s the real deal.

Rock & Blues Muse
Kenny, you’ve spoken about inviting Bobby to your Backroads Blues Festival, after you’d seen him on the legendary Rhythm & Blues Cruise, and him joining you on stage, but Bobby, when did Kenny come to your attention?

Bobby Rush
It was him opening in a place in the Mississippi area many years ago. Buddy Miles had told me in the dressing room about this kid that played guitar, so I’d thought I’d listen. I heard him playing and said “is that the young guy you’re talking about?”. I couldn’t believe the sound that was coming from this young kid. That’s when I really listened to him. I thought he might fade out, but he didn’t fade out, he kept on going. I later found that his father knew my auntie, my dad’s sister. It was god sent; there’s this guy from Louisiana, who I loved the way he played. I didn’t think that I could ever play with this guy from my home state. I wanted to approach him but didn’t know how to do it. Anyway, he invited me to the Backroads festival. He didn’t turn up ‘till he soundchecked, when he played a song that sounded so much like a Bobby Rush song, like the way I would do it; I thought wow, this guy’s in my corner man. We started talking and he said he wanted to play with me and I said I wanted to play with him, and here we are.

Rock & Blues Muse
You must have gelled as people right away as well as being musically sympathetic?

Kenny Wayne Shepherd
I’ve said this many times in the interviews we’ve done, chemistry is something you can’t manufacture, you can’t fake it, it either exists or it doesn’t. It’s like they do in sports, with football teams all the time; they say we’ll put this guy with this guy, put all these talented people together and we’re going to win and it just doesn’t happen because, while they’re talented, the chemistry isn’t there. The same thing happens in music. I noticed it immediately from the moment he got on stage with us; we had a connection going on and it was connecting with the audience, they were responding to it. I just started thinking about it, so as soon as we walked backstage after the show I said, man we’ve got to make a record together, and he said, I was thinking the same thing. That was it and we started making plans. I’m glad man, my dad keeps saying that it’s the blues album of the year, I’ll let him say it!

Rock & Blues Muse
It’s a great album. Did you employ any special recording techniques, presumably old analogue equipment was used?

Kenny Wayne Shepherd
Everything was one hundred percent old school; all the equipment we used was vintage. We were in Royal Studios and it’s like a time warp in there, you’re literally going back decades in time when you walk in there. Everything was in place including the talent to get that authentic sound. The approach though was not to try and manufacture anything; we just wanted to record this music the way it was meant to be recorded. It was on the spot with no tricks, no auto tune; we’re not editing, piecing things together. Everything you hear him singing is exactly the way he sang it; everything he played is exactly the way he played it. I went in and did some guitar overdubs on some solos but the solos from beginning to end were exactly what I played, we weren’t cutting and pasting all these things together. We made this record true to its authentic form. The other thing is, everything started stripped down, just me and him. The two of us in the room together, me with an acoustic and him with an acoustic or just a harp and a microphone. All the songs started that way, and it evolved as it went along and the music told us what it wanted. Some songs are totally stripped down and some songs have a whole band with a horn section. It takes you on an historic instrumental journey, I think, of the different sounds of blues music from the early days, up to electric blues and swing and stuff like that.

Bobby Rush
Let me add to that, even down to my harmonica playing, I played through the same microphone I sung through. We had the mic set up and that was it. No gimmicks or nothing.

Rock & Blues Muse
The harmonica playing on the album is excellent.

Bobby Rush
I don’t want to praise myself, but other harp players know I can play! If I want to play some Little Walter, I can imitate him, but I’m Bobby Rush and I’m older that Walter was when he passed from this life. I loved him and how he played but I play like I play. One of the things I like about Kenny is that he listened to who he loved but he took what he learnt from other people and made it for himself, he didn’t copy. I’m not just saying that because I made a record with him. That’s what I liked about him from the beginning.

Rock & Blues Muse
You came into the studio with no songs; Kenny mentioned last year that he had tried to plan some things with you Bobby, but hadn’t got anything back. Was that a deliberate ploy to keep things fresh?

Bobby Rush
What was in my head was, if I don’t know what I’m going to do then the public will enjoy it. That’s the thing that came out on stage; we didn’t rehearse but trust me, something will come out onstage that’ll be great. I believe in that, because if you let the music take you where you need to go the public will enjoy it and realise it’s coming from your heart.

Kenny Wayne Shepherd
It was the first time I had gone in to make a record with absolutely no idea of any of the songs we were going to record. I wasn’t worried about it because I knew the talent he has and I believe in the talent I have, plus I believe we were both doing our fair share of praying that this thing would come together the way that it was meant to be. If you have that intention then you can’t go wrong. We just let the process guide us. I think it was the best way ever that we could approach this record because we made the album in a one hundred percent organic way. We couldn’t map the songs out, we couldn’t rehearse them, everything happened on the spot spontaneously and grew very naturally as we went. That’s how it’s supposed to be, and I think that you’ll hear it in the production of this record. If you compare it to other albums, you’ll hear the difference. There’s a lot of pre-production that goes into records and they didn’t do that back in the day. We were trying to make an album that harkens back to the origins of blues music but in today’s world, and I think we did that successfully. We only did things musically if they made the song better. Some people can get carried away and I’m sure I’m guilty of it with certain songs; let’s try this and that sound and the next thing you know is that you’ve got 48 tracks to mix down. We only added what helped elevate the experience of the song, and sometimes nothing was necessary, it was perfect just the way it was.

Rock & Blues Muse
How long were you the studio for, was it for a short, concentrated period or strung out over a longer time?

Bobby Rush
It was so much fun for me that it seemed like it was done in one day but I think it was over three or four days.

Kenny Wayne Shepherd
I think in all it was five days. We did everything we needed to do then. The one thing we did add later was after I took all the stuff back and was doing some work on it, getting ready to start mixing, I kept thinking we could add a horn section on two songs, so we added them after the fact; those were the only things added after the sessions.

Rock & Blues Muse
What made you choose four of Bobby’s old songs to rework for the album?

Bobby Rush
Let me tell you why I picked those. I was crazy about those songs because I thought they had great potential but with ‘Uncle Esau’ for instance I couldn’t get the guitar line I wanted. I couldn’t find a guitar player. I thought that Kenny could play the guitar line I had in mind when I wrote the song. I didn’t have to say nothing about it. He just played it, one time take, note perfect, no rehearsing, nothing.

Kenny Wayne Shepherd
I like that we did those songs. I didn’t know that they were songs that had been on previous records so I didn’t go back to listen to the original versions. If you compare these versions to the originals they’re different, and I think that’s great, it breathes another kind of life into those songs. He changed the lyrics on some of them, on ‘G String’ for instance, so he was approaching them in some ways as if they were new songs, changing the lyrics to fit the different musical approach we had.

Rock & Blues Muse
When you wrote the new songs in the studio did they come together easily?

Kenny Wayne Shepherd
It came easy for me because Bobby showed up with a bag with paper three inches thick of lyrics he had written. I would just start playing a groove or something; one time, I said we need a Magic Sam type of vibe and he dug into his lyrics, grabbed a piece of paper and started singing it to me; I said, that’s it! He said, man you ain’t got nothing, you can’t play nothing that I don’t have a song written for! That’s how those songs came together. It was as simple as that.

Bobby Rush
I was open with him because I had a love for his playing, respect for his ability to do what was right for both of us, and that’s the way I approached it. It wasn’t Bobby Rush did this and Kenny Wayne Shepherd did that, it was a collaboration, that’s the way we approached it, to show the world that two people can come together and make a statement with their music, with their love as two men saying to the world, this is what you’ve got to do.

Rock & Blues Muse
You are very similar in that you are both very productive: Bobby has made several great albums in recent years and Kenny always has multiple projects on the go.

Bobby Rush
There aren’t many guys that can say this: Kenny started when he was a young man, as I did; how many people start playing when they’re fifteen tears old? Kenny’s got a lot of history in recording, a lot of time. A lot of guys don’t have that. Some guys who are 50 years old would have to live to a hundred to do the same as we’ve done.

Rock & Blues Muse
You are taking the album out on the road, starting in April…

Kenny Wayne Shepherd
Someone said we’ve got forty-nine shows, starting in the US from April through to June, then we go to Europe and come back here for July.

Rock & Blues Muse
Is Bobby coming with you to Europe as well?

Kenny Wayne Shepherd
Yeh! Let everyone know man because we’re coming, better be ready! We’re doing some festivals so we have to have two shows ready to go. Here in the States, or if we do a theatre show over there, then he and I are going to open up the show with our own set, playing songs from this record with a stripped down version of the band. We’ll then take a short intermission, and the Kenny Wayne Shepherd band will come out and do our stuff, as we’re still supporting Dirt On My Diamonds Vol 2; then we’ll bring Bobby out again for a big finale. We won’t have time for all of that for the festival shows; we’ll have to do what we did for the Backroads Festival where Bobby came and joined us for part of the set. You’ll get a different experience depending on which venue you see us.

Rock & Blues Muse
It sounds like the whole process around making the album has gone like a dream?

Kenny: it has been for me, that’s for sure! Bobby: and for me too!

Rock & Blues Muse
You must be thinking about a follow up album?

Kenny Wayne Shepherd
We’ve definitely been talking about it so we’re going to wait and see what happens, but I’m all in for it because we’ve hardly scratched the surface of what we could do together, so we’ll see what happens.

Rock & Blues Muse
Bobby’s got his three inches of lyrics…

Kenny Wayne Shepherd

I know! (laughs) He’s ready.

Bobby Rush
If the fans want us to do something more together, they’ll tell us what to do. This tour will tell us what we need to do.

Rock & Blues Muse
Are you going to film some of these shows? Perhaps make a live album as well?

Kenny Wayne Shepherd
That’s a good question, I imagine we will film at some point, but I don’t know which ones. That would be nice to have. As a matter of fact I’m going to make some phone calls about that the minute we get off this call. A live album would be good. I already record every show, every night. We carry all the equipment we need. It would be real easy to put out a live album for this tour but if we could get a video crew along that would be even better.

“Hey Baby”

 

Bobby Rush 

Kenny Wayne Shepherd