Back in the early ’80s, when hardcore drove me from punk rock for the first time, a savvy Seattle DJ took to playing a live cut called “Jazzman” from Tom Rush’s Late Night Radio. The singer had a warm, expressive, soothingly sad voice, and his song fit my mood then and now.
Rush, it turned out, was a New Hampshire-bred singer who first emerged in Cambridge, Massachusetts, during the folk revival of the early 1960s. His early LPs (notably his third, 1963′s Blues, Songs And Ballads) betrayed many lessons learned from Mississippi John Hurt, for even then Rush had that kind, worldly wise voice (a kind of New England Don Williams, if you will; or Gordon Lightfoot, if you won’t), and the man could flat-out pick.
In hindsight, much of what emerged in the early ’60s folk boom was little better than white college kids appropriating the music of rural black men with little regard for the songs’ context, nor the practical realities of the songwriters’ lives. Early on, Rush was capable of making those songs — and songs composed in that vein — resonate with his own distinct style, best represented here by Bukka White’s “Panama Limited” and Eric Von Schmidt’s “Joshua Gone Barbados”.
But as Rush’s career wore on, his relationship to the music seems to have changed. By 1972′s “Kids These Days”, the singer had acquired a hipster’s faux patois, and today one wonders exactly who he was pretending to be, and why.
Rush also had an ear for young songwriters, including Joni Mitchell (“Urge For Going”), David Wiffen (“Lost My Drivin’ Wheel”), and Jackson Browne (“Jamaica, Say You Will”), and, as his own career receded, he became active as a folk impresario.
No Regrets is the fourth Rush compilation since 1970 (not counting an expanded Blues… CD) — which says much for his popularity — but is evidently the first assembled by the artist. It’s a daunting chore to summarize three decades of music in seventeen tracks; even so, Rush has made curious choices, dwelling on a particularly weak mid-’70s period (the horn-swelling “Ladies Love Outlaws”) when his music came painfully close to approximating that of Jimmy Buffett.
He released better material later, but it’s tough to tell from No Regrets. “Jazzman”, for example, didn’t make the cut. Neither did most of the early songs I came to love so long ago. Which, if nothing else, serves as a reminder that artists and critics inherently see careers from different perspectives. The advice from this corner is to buy Blues, Songs And Ballads and work it out from there.
