Otis Rush, born south of Philadelphia in Neshoba County in 1935, rose from the poverty of a Mississippi sharecropper’s life to international fame as one of the most passionate singers and brilliant guitarists in the blues world. Shaped by the hardships and troubles of his early life in Mississippi, he grew up in a family raised by his mother, Julia Campbell Boyd, on farms in Neshoba and Kemper counties during the Great Depression in a segregated society, where the children often missed school to work in the cotton fields. At home, he heard blues records on a wind-up Victrola and on jukeboxes in Philadelphia, began playing harmonica, sang in a church choir, and secretly taught himself guitar on his brother Leroy Boyd’s instrument, developing an unorthodox left-handed style with the guitar upside down. As a young teen, already married and sharecropping cotton and corn on a five-acre plot, he heard guitarist Vaughan Adams, but became inspired to pursue music professionally only after a visit to his sister in Chicago, where she took him to a Muddy Waters performance. After moving to Chicago in the 1950s, he learned Waters’s music but soon forged a more modern, original approach as a singer, guitarist, bandleader, and songwriter who set new standards in Chicago blues. In 1956, his first record, “I Can’t Quit You Baby,” produced by Willie Dixon on the Cobra label, became a national rhythm and blues hit, and the depth and intensity of that performance set the tone for the heartrending blues he became known for. He continued performing in Chicago and around the world, built devoted followings in Europe and Japan, shared stages with Eric Clapton, Carlos Santana, Buddy Guy, and Stevie Ray Vaughan, influenced countless blues and rock musicians, was elected to the Blues Hall of Fame in 1984, and won a Grammy award in 1998 for his CD Any Place I’m Going.