Otis Rush - Topic

Otis Rush Jr. was an American blues singer, guitarist and songwriter who's been long revered as one of the creators of modern Chicago blues and though he was respected and praised, the success he sought eluded him while others profited from what he created and his career never reached the heights that he deserved.
As a performer, Otis was unique. He had an intense and powerful tenor voice that grabbed your attention and he had big hands so he could make unusual chord inversions on the guitar which he said he got from Charles Brown, the jazz blues piano player, an acknowledged influence. Also, he played his guitar upside down and backwards. Albert King, who Otis borrowed licks from, Jimi Hendrix and Eddy "The Chief" Clearwater played the same way though Otis' sound was other worldly. He had the low strings adjusted very low, and the G, B and high E strings adjusted for slightly higher action so that he could curl his left pinky under the low strings and pull them down, sometimes two and three at a time. Music writer Lester Bangs wrote in one of his last articles that it was the sound of “being mugged by an iceberg”.
Otis ran his amps in such a way that he could sustain his notes.