Blues legend Bobby Rush, 91, doubles up on Minnesota gigs with younger stars

At 91, Bobby Rush undoubtedly has a thing or two to teach the younger bluesmen he’s performing with in Minnesota on two different tours this year.

The way Rush tells it, though, he’s the one doing the learning.

“I’m an old man, but I’m smart enough to know I don’t know everything,” the legendary blues singer said.

“These young guys bring new ideas to this old man.”

The “young guys” in question are middle-aged blues rockers the North Mississippi Allstars and Kenny Wayne Shepherd.

He’s performing two shows with the Allstars at the Dakota in Minneapolis on Thursday and Friday. Then he’s coming back in August to play both a Minneapolis and Rochester gig with Shepherd, tied to a new collaborative album they made for release later this month.

Clearly, this busy schedule answers the question whether or not Rush can and wants to keep doing the work that has been his career for seven decades as a triple-threat singer, guitarist and harp blower.

In that time, he performed with the likes of Muddy Waters and Jimmy Reed, racked up a string of funk- and soul-infused solo hits (the biggest was 1971’s “Chicken Heads”) and won three Grammy Awards — the latest of which came just last year for best traditional blues album (“All My Love for You”).

“I’m feeling good, and feeling energized,” Rush said in a phone interview last month from his home in Jackson, Miss.

“I can’t put it into words how overjoyed I am to be working with these young men.”

First up are the North Mississippi Allstars, the raw-powered rural-blues band led by brothers Luther and Cody Dickinson, sons of legendary Memphis producer and sideman Jim Dickinson.

Rush never formally worked with the elder Dickinson — who recorded with Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones and helmed records by Big Star and the Replacements — but he said “we got along great and were cut from the same cloth.” As for Jim’s sons, one of whom toured with the Black Crowes in the 2000s (Luther), Rush said, “They’re really gifted players who know their stuff.”

“They’re versatile enough and respect me enough to just tell me to do whatever I want to do when I play with them,” he said.

Rush loves to play the Dakota, where he has performed numerous times over the past decade and apparently has built up quite a hankering for the venue’s reputable food menu.

“Don’t tell them this,” he said with a laugh, “but I always go down there a couple hours early pretending I need to sound-check just so I can eat more of that delicious food.”

(We’re guessing the Dakota’s staff won’t mind reading this.)

Come August, Rush will hit bigger venues with Shepherd and his band, including Minneapolis’ Pantages Theatre on Aug. 17 and Rochester’s Mayo Civic Center on Aug. 19. Those shows will center on their new album, “Young Fashioned Ways,” which drops March 21.

As Rush explained it, the record was “just a happy accident” that happened when he and Shepherd met up at Royal Studios in Memphis, where all of Al Green’s landmark records were made along with LPs by Chuck Berry and Ike and Tina Turner.

“We were only going to record two songs together,” he said, “but we just kept recording we were having so much fun.”

The album is made up of new songs, reworkings of some of Rush’s own standards, including “40 Acres (How Long)” and “G String,” plus a remake of the Waters tune that inspired the album title, “Young Ways.”

It’s a fitting title since both Rush and Shepherd commented on how the record is a testament to how blues music transcends generations and other demographic differences between them.

“From the start working with Kenny, I was never thinking, ‘Oh, here I am working with this white kid,’” Rush said.

“There were no rehearsals. We would just start playing something — just us, one-on-one on acoustic guitar — and the music communicated for us. Kenny knew what I was going for, and a lot of times he understood the song better than me."

In a statement, Shepherd said of working with Rush, “We start playing together and all of a sudden, age has nothing to do with us.

“We were speaking the same language and there was a level of acceptance about truly joining together on the same page with the blues, coming from the same place, spiritually, musically and of course, geographically.”

Rush has geographic ties to both sets of his younger 2025 collaborators. He was born in northern Louisiana, also Shepherd’s home turf. He grew up across the river from the Allstars’ native North Mississippi in Pine Bluff, Ark.

After living in Chicago for four decades — intentionally to escape the overt Jim Crow-era racism he grew up in — Rush returned to his roots in the mid-1980s and moved to Jackson, Miss. The decision to relocate followed a revelation in his ancestry: He learned his mother was the daughter of a white man from a prominent, rich family that once owned slaves.

“A lot of people were surprised I wanted to go back, but I wanted to better understand where I came from and embrace it,” he said. “I had a whole side of my family I didn’t know with no Black people in it.”

Not only did he meet those family members, he said, he became close with them: “Those are still my people.”

Both his family’s story and his current pairings with younger blues artists underscore what Rush said is blues music’s ultimate legacy.

“We all want the same things, Black or white, old or young,” he said. “Blues music spans generations because we’re all singing about the same things: We want to look good, feel good, make a good living, encounter good-looking girls.”

Good to hear those essential life pursuits can last into in your 90s.

When: 7 p.m. Thu. & Fri.

Where: The Dakota, 1010 Nicollet Mall, Mpls.

Tickets: $50-$65, dakotacooks.com.

Minneapolis: Aug. 17, Pantages Theatre, $72 & up, ticketmaster.com.

Rochester: Aug. 19, Mayo Civic Center, $45-$102, ticketmaster.com.