Jan. 15, 2002 – There was a time, not all that long ago, when the best-known authors of folk music were some folks named Anonymous and Traditional. In the 1960s, Tom Rush — who'll be doing a solo show Friday night at the Westin Resort ballroom — was in the forefront of changing all that.
Rolling Stone magazine would credit Rush, through his 1965 album "The Circle Game," with "ushering in the singer/songwriter era."
What he did was record new songs by new songwriters — the likes of Joni Mitchell, James Taylor and Jackson Browne. "I and my contemporaries had been focusing on traditional folk material," he told an interviewer. "I was desperately looking for material to make an album and along came Joni, Jackson and James, who had wonderful new songs that sort of had a folksy sensibility to them but were written with a much more literary, lyrical style and a much more sophisticated musical style. But they had a familiar feel to them, so I grabbed them up. I wasn't looking to usher in anything — I was just looking for some songs."
Mitchell, Browne and Taylor, of course, went on to become stars in their own right. But the point is that the success of the album served to spur the writing of more new folk music. And in many cases who wrote a song became as relevant as who recorded it.
Marking his 40th year in the music business, Tom Rush today is nowhere near to settling in as a historical footnote. His recordings — of his own songs and others' — continue to sell.
"It's kind of flattering that everything I've ever recorded is back in print, or will be," he said in an interview Monday. "There's a reissue coming out of England that will complete the set."
The discography section of the Tom Rush web site lists more than 20 albums, the earliest from the 1960s; the most recent, "The Very Best of Tom Rush: No Regrets," in 1999.
Rush said he wasn't sure what-all he would play for his concerts on St. John and St. Thomas. "It's kind of an interactive thing" with the audience of the moment, he said.
But he said he would include "River Song," his one new composition on the otherwise retrospective "Very Best" album. It's one he wrote in 1998, a couple of years after having moved from New Hampshire to Moose, Wyoming, gone through a divorce, and taken up residence in a log house by the Snake River at the foot of the Teton Mountains.
Plus, he added, he'll be trying out "a few new tunes," including two inspired by his 2 1/2-year-old daughter, Siena.
Other crowd pleasers in his repertoire include his own compositions "The Dreamer," first recorded in 1981, and "No Regrets," from his 1974 album "Ladies Love Outlaws"; Mitchell's "The Circle Game" and "Urge for Going"; and the ballad of the "Panama Limited" by Booker "Bukka" White.
Rush was born and reared in New Hampshire and educated in Massachusetts at Groton School and Harvard. But he has a chameleon singing voice — sensually smokey on one song, gratingly Dylanesque on the next, and the stuff of Rebel yells when the lyrics call for some southern discomfort. Yet his speaking voice, much in evidence during his shows in personal anecdotes, one-liners and songs he narrates, rather than sings, is none of these. It's the voice of a consummate storyteller whose appeal is in what he says, not what he sounds like …
Gypsies dream of being kings, kings of being free.
The sailor longs to till the land, the farmer sets to sea.
Dreams are ships that sailed away; we are only cargo. (from "The Dreamer")
Rush is coming to the Virgin Islands with his wife, Renee, and their daughter, Siena, and they're making a vacation out of it, staying on for a while after the concerts are over.
Not quite a year ago, he was on St. Thomas for the first time — for his own 60th Birthday Bash, a weeklong gathering of friends, fans and fellow musicians staged at the Wyndham Sugar Bay Beach Resort. He'll be back up north on Feb. 8 for his 61st — but Renee's birthday is on Saturday, when he'll be performing in Tillett Gardens. (So expect him to be "laying on the love songs," he said in an e-mail message to fans last month.)
And then, "sometime in the next couple of months," Rush said, he'll be going into a studio in Philadelphia with some producers he met with there last week to "try out some songs and see how we get along and how we like the product."
In addition to his own music-making, Rush continues another venture he began in the '80s — producing shows across the country under the banner "Club 47" that bring together well-known folk artists and up-and-coming new talent. The shows are named for the coffeehouse in Cambridge, Mass., where he got his start performing as a college student in the '60s — as did Bob Dylan and Joan Baez.
He put together eight shows in 2001, five of them with David Bromberg as a headliner. Among the "up-and-comers" who have gone on to fame and fortune, he said, are Alison Krause, Mark O'Connor, Shawn Colvin and Nanci Griffith.
After his own success at the original Club 47, where he had two albums out by the time he graduated from Harvard (with a degree in English literature), Rush toured with his five-member band in the '70s then retreated for a while to his New Hampshire farm. He returned to the concert scene in 1981, performing not in the intimate setting of a coffeeshop or club but in the cavernous expanse of Boston's prestigious Symphony Hall. The concert was a sellout, 10 days in advance.
In the '80s he put a lot of energy into developing his own company, Maple Hill Productions, that produced the Club 47 shows and oversaw his own record label production and sales. After a decade, though, he told an interviewer, "I decided that I'd rather be a guitar player than an executive. Actually … I knew that all along. I just had to go through the business stuff to get to the point where I could go back to being the artist."
To go see the show
Tom Rush will perform at 8 p.m. Friday in the Westin Resort ballroom, in a St. John School of the Arts concert. The show had originally been schedueld for the school itself but it was changed to accommodate a larger audience. Tickets are $20 general admission and $15 for students with I.D. They're being sold at Connections. On a space-available basis, they also will be sold at the door. Reservations are not taken by telephone. For more information, call 779-4322 or 776-6777.
Rush also will appear Saturday night in Tillett Gardens on St. Thomas. For details about that show, see the St. Thomas Source Things to do: section.
