The second time I saw Tom Rush perform live he appeared in Minneapolis for a show at the Cedar Theater. A few days before the show I contacted Tom by email and asked him for an interview, which he kindly granted. I was ecstatic to see him live after many years and just about equally happy to chat with him for Power Line, although I don’t think I managed to ask him any questions he hadn’t been asked before.
Over the past 10 years I’ve seen Tom perform several times at the Dakota. Most recently, I saw him this past Tuesday evening. I snapped the photo below from our table in front of the stage — Tom is playing Joni Mitchell’s “Circle Game.” In 1967 Joni had come to the club Tom was playing in Detroit hoping to catch his attention with the first few songs she had written. He loved her work and she followed up with a few more on tape by mail.
Tom recorded “The Circle Game” as soon as Joni sent him the tape just after she wrote it. He recalled that she apologized for the song while he thought enough of it to title his classic album for it. After he played the song on Tuesday, he explained that he had to call Joni to ask her how to play the chord he’s playing in the photo above.
Tom made his name in the sixties folk revival. He is a peer of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Eric Andersen, and Judy Collins. I’ve loved his music for a long, long time. About to turn 85 next month, he’s still writing, recording, and touring. The 2007 Harvard Magazine profile of Rush by Daniel Gewertz provides an informative overview of his career. I’d like to share my enthusiasm for him here one more time.
Performing at the Club 47 coffeehouse, Tom emerged from the vibrant Cambridge folk scene around Harvard, from which he received his degree in 1964. Skipping over At the Unicorn (1962, whole thing here), I want to begin with the two albums Tom recorded on Prestige. Both were released in 1963, during the year he took off from college. Below is Tom’s cover of the traditional murder ballad “Duncan and Brady” from Mind Rambling (subsequently Got a Mind To Ramble). He had an ear for great songs he could make his own.
Tom followed up Got a Mind To Ramble with Blues, Songs, and Ballads. “Original Talking Blues” is Tom’s cover of the original “Talking Blues” by Chris Bouchillon (1926). The album is full of excellent tracks that are not available individually on YouTube.
On the evidence of the two Prestige albums, Elektra signed Tom to a three-record deal. “Panama Limited” is by the blues artist Bukka White. Tom covered it on his self-titled debut on Elektra (1965). This is a tour de force in performance.
Tom’s second album on Elektra was Take a Little Walk With Me (1966), a classic in its own right. Like Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home the year earlier, it is half rock (side 1), half folk (side 2). The rock side featured Bo Diddley’s “Who Do You Love?,” Tom’s encore this past Tuesday. On this track Al Kooper makes his presence felt on lead guitar.
The folk side is full of gems. My favorite is Eric Von Schmidt’s “Joshua Gone Barbados.” As I could say over and over, Tom had an ear for great songs he could make his own.
Elektra released the various artists compilation What’s Shakin’ that year as well. Tom’s cover of Fats Domino’s “I’m In Love Again” must have been an outtake from the Take a Little Walk With Me sessions. Let’s put it back in.
Tom’s work on Elektra culminated in The Circle Game in 1968. By my lights The Circle Game is one of the great pop albums. On it Tom introduced the songs of Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, and Jackson Browne, though he closed with his own “Rockport Sunday” and “No Regrets” before the slight reprise of Mitchell’s “Tin Angel.” Tom played both in his set at the Dakota last week. He referred to “No Regrets” as “his hit” — he expressed gratitude to the 1975 hit cover by the Walker Brothers that paid for his first two kids’ college tuition.
Jackson Browne’s “Shadow Dream Song” opens side 2 of the album. It’s a young man’s song; Browne wrote it when he was a teenager. The song communicates yearning and regret in flowing rhymes. It fit in perfectly with the album’s concept, the life cycle of a romantic relationship from meeting to parting and starting over again. Almost sixty years later it still sounds great to me.
The success of The Circle Game led to Tom’s albums on Columbia. His self-titled debut on Columbia included the Sleepy John Estes number “Drop Down Mama.” He first recorded it with acoustic guitar for Blues, Songs and Ballads. I think he has performed it every time I’ve seen him.
Murray McLauchlan’s “Child’s Song” also frequently turns up on Tom’s setlist. When he played it at the Dakota last year, he simply commented, “What a song.” He might have plucked the thought from my mind (and I don’t think I was alone).
Although I think of him as a cult favorite, Tom’s live performance of “Remember Song” by Steven Walters is now approaching 8,000,000 views on YouTube. One of Tom’s gifts is finding and occasionally writing songs with which his audience identifies. It’s a novelty song that has made it onto his setlist, but it’s not what I come to him for.
Tom has recorded three or four versions of his own “River Song,” most recently on What I Know. It was his first studio album in more than 30 years and one of the most played folk albums of 2009. The song is a bit of a reworking of Jesse Colin Young’s “Lullaby” from Tom’s first album on Columbia. With “River Song” he not only recaptured some of the old magic, he even worked in an unobtrusive allusion to Pascal. This version from The Very Best Of (1999) on Columbia includes harmony parts by Shawn Colvin and Marc Cohn.
I caught up with Tom for a telephone interview in 2011 on a day when he was scheduled to make an appearance with Country Joe McDonald at the Auer Performance Hall in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He could not have been more generous with his time or more gracious in responding to my questions.
I found that even on the telephone Tom still has a striking baritone voice that radiates honesty and warmth. I mentioned how much he sounded like himself as far back as his first recordings on Prestige. “They used to tell me I sounded old. Now I sound young,” he said.
I asked him if he thought he’d still be performing for a living 50 years after he took it up. “No,” he laughed. “When I started doing this it was the path of least resistance. I graduated with a degree in English literature that had no career path attached. People were willing to pay me to sing and play guitar. I couldn’t figure out why.” He added: “I’m still trying to figure it out.” And he threw in this memory for good measure: “My mom always asked when I was going to get a real job.”
I asked him if he had a favorite English professor at Harvard. He said that he took every course that had anything to do with traditional folk music and (as he suggests in the Harvard Magazine profile) that Albert Lord was his favorite teacher. Lord was of course the professor of Slavic and comparative literature whose scholarship helped uncover the tradition of oral poetry and oral composition out of which The Iliad and The Odyssey emerged.
Lord’s classic The Singer of Tales was published in 1960, while Tom was an undergraduate. You can see why a guy who took folk music seriously, as Rush did, would have been drawn to Lord. “Lord explained how Homer managed a seemingly impossible feat,” Rush said. “The poems weren’t memorized; they were composed.” Lord himself was sufficiently impressed by Rush’s approach to folk music that he invited him back to Harvard to lecture in his class after Rush graduated.
I first saw Tom perform at Boston’s Symphony Hall in 1970 at a weekend show during which the electricity went out. Did he remember the show? He said he can’t believe how frequently he is asked about it. He remembers it well. He reminded me that the power had gone out about 20 minutes into his show and that Symphony Hall management thought he’d provided money’s worth to his audience. Rush disagreed; he felt compelled to rent the hall himself and invite the audience to return on Sunday evening for a full show. (Drat! I had to go back to school.) He confessed that the financial pain seems to have something to do with his memory of the show.
“The Remember Song” to the contrary notwithstanding, I happen to remember the last song he played that night to send us on our way. In the dark and without amplification he sent us home with John Sebastian’s “She’s a Lady.”
Tom’s appearance with Country Joe in Fort Wayne addressed the subject of “activism then and now.” Coincidentally, it raised a question I had saved for last. I asked hopefully: Do you usually keep politics out of your show? “I do,” he said. “In general, politics and poetry don’t mix.” He added: “In terms of doing a show, my job is to entertain people and give them a break.” Thank you, Mr. Rush.
Below is Tom’s cover of the old Dobie Gray hit “Drift Away” off that album. The song was written by the late Mentor Williams, older brother of songwriter Paul Williams (“Rainy Days and Mondays”). As it expresses the impact of a song like this song itself on us, I love it. I don’t think it’s an easy song to play on guitar either.
Tom’s most recent album is Gardens Old, Flowers New (2024). From the album, Tom played “Siena’s Song” and “Won’t Be Back At All” (below) in his set this past Tuesday. This is a different kind of goodbye song. Tom’s frequent touring partner Matt Nakoa produced the album and accompanied him on the piano on this track.
Tom has a sense of humor after my own heart. It comes through on the album’s concluding track — “I Quit.” It’s yet another sort of goodbye song. This one might make you laugh. If I could write a song in the same spirit, I think it would be titled “Tell Me Something New.”
Let’s take our leave of Tom with his rousing live recording of “Wasn’t That a Mighty Storm” from New Year (1982). It’s a folk song — he included it under the title “Galveston Flood” as the final track of Take a Little Walk With Me — about the hurricane that ravaged Galveston in 1900. I think of it occasionally in a political context, such as the 2024 presidential election.
