Otis Rush: Double Trouble

Play "Double Trouble" for someone who's never heard the name Otis Rush, and watch their face change. That minor-key ache. That guitar answering the voice like a second singer picking a fight. Somewhere around the second chorus, they'll ask who this is — and you'll have to explain that you're probably the first person who ever told them.

Eric Clapton names him as one of his three foundational influences. Peter Green built early Fleetwood Mac on top of his riffs. Led Zeppelin's first album leans on a song he made famous. Stevie Ray Vaughan named his own band after one of his titles. And for most of his working life, Otis Rush couldn't catch a break to save it.

A debut single that should have made him a star. A masterpiece so good Capitol Records shelved it for five years, convinced it was "too bluesy" to sell. A decade spent all but invisible in his own country while Europe packed the halls. A Grammy that finally arrived in 1999 — forty-three years after he'd earned it.

Double Trouble tells the full story, decade by decade, record by record: the Cobra sessions that built a genre, the hiatus that nearly ended a career, the stubborn refusal to compromise that cost him fame and made the music worth stealing in the first place. It's a story about genius meeting terrible timing, again and again, and somehow never losing its nerve.

You don't need to know a single blues record to start this book. By the end, you'll want to put one on.

Know the story. Hear the blues differently.