There’s a moment in King of the Chitlin’ Circuit when Bobby Rush, the documentary’s subject, explains what playing the blues throughout the loose network of Southern clubs known as the chitlin circuit really was like: “Let me set it straight to you,” he says, “the chitlin circuit comes from [when] they were paying Black men and people like us chitlins. That was our pay!” Leaving no doubt about where he’s coming from, Rush’s face conveys the deep bitterness that, decades later, he still feels. In the same breath, he then relates how he saved most of his “pay” of chili and chitlins and resold it, turning even that insult into cold cash. Only after being asked if he played drunk does he crack a smile. “No. I play like I’m drunk, but I don’t be drinking.”
That’s but one of the insights to be gleaned from the new documentary about the 92-year-old blues harpist, guitarist, singer, and songwriter, screening at 6:15 p.m. on Friday, November 6th at the Halloran Centre as part of the Indie Memphis Film Festival. Rush himself will be present.
Other glimpses into his life echo chapters Rush wrote in his 2021 autobiography, I Ain’t Studdin’ Ya, such as his father’s twin role as a farmer and a preacher, and his mother’s mixed Cherokee and white ancestry. Yet little details he adds in the film make his parents even more vivid. He stowed his first guitar, he says during one scene, in the walls of their house to hide it from his father. And, he relates succinctly, “My mom was white when she had to be, she was Black when she needed to be.”
Those are but two examples of the film capturing Rush in his element, arguably better than his book does, by allowing him to speak at length about his own experiences. As one colleague notes in the film, “The man is a good storyteller, and he has humor, and he’s funny!” This film, much to the credit of director Al Warren, lets him show off that talent at length.
This is an important corrective to the only other feature-length documentary bearing Rush’s name, 2015’s I Am the Blues, which also ostensibly celebrated Rush’s title as “King of the Chitlin’ Circuit,” but lingered more on other Mississippi blues musicians than on Rush himself. That is not an issue with the new documentary, which was produced by Mississippi Public Broadcasting.
Instead, the film has the viewer riding shotgun while Rush literally crisscrosses the globe, from Mississippi back roads to Switzerland and beyond, all the while, as with any epic road trip, regaling his fellow travelers with stories. Those stories and Rush’s interior life are the real point of the film, more than any tidy timeline that maps out his experiences. Instead, Warren favors a stream of sometimes rapid-fire images and sound bites that surround the viewer without the traditional voiceovers or linear expositions of most documentaries.
Questions posed by media interviewers, sometimes amusingly glib, are seemingly overheard out of nowhere, which he dutifully answers with more stories, while more intimate passages, sometimes filmed in extreme close-ups, are marked by psychedelic lighting effects and haunting ambient music that lend a dreamlike quality to those scenes. It’s a bold gambit for Warren to take, but it pays off in the stark revelations Rush offers about his life, in some cases for the first time. As lights swirl around his face and the music grows ethereal, we seem to enter into his own subjectivity, making the tragedies of his life, including seeing all of his immediate family members pass away one by one, that much more gripping.
Another compelling directorial choice is having Rush sit in a screening room, with echoes of Sunset Boulevard’s Norma Desmond, reviewing old photos and footage of himself. But the tone is not wistful, as befitting a music lifer who’s still releasing albums, like the new deluxe edition of his Grammy-winning Porcupine Meat. Rush remains sharp as a tack throughout, committed to what’s next more than any nostalgia. He remains positive and engaging even when looking backward, his devotion to being a complete entertainer keeping him resolutely focused on the future, on reinventing himself. “I’m a comedian, singer, songwriter, harp player, guitar player, but I got a long way to go,” he says in the film. “No woman, no man, no one can down me. Only person that could destroy me is myself.”
