Bobby Rush is still jumping.

The Arkansas Folklife Festival is proud to announce that Bobby Rush will headline the opening night of the 2026 festival — Friday, June 26th — at Riverfront Park in North Little Rock, Arkansas. All performances are free and open to the public, as part of the America 250 national commemoration celebrating the living traditions that make up American folk heritage.

There are few better ways to open a festival about the roots of American music than with the man Rolling Stone magazine crowned the King of the Chitlin’ Circuit.

Who Is Bobby Rush

Born Emmett Ellis, Jr. in rural Homer/Haynesville, Louisiana, Bobby Rush built his first guitar as a boy out of broom wire, nails, bottles, and bricks on the side of his family’s farmhouse. He grew up without electricity or indoor plumbing, picking cotton and tending mules — and finding in the blues an escape from all of it.

“The blues provided an escape from the cotton fields,” Rush has said. “You’d go out on Saturday night to the juke joints, but then on Monday morning you’d go back into the cotton fields to work for your bossman.”

He left farm work behind to tour with the Rabbit Foot Minstrels, performing under the name Bobby Rush — a name he took on out of respect for his father, a minister — through the jukes and clubs of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Mississippi before settling in Chicago in the 1950s. He learned from B.B. King and Muddy Waters. He recorded for Chess, ABC, and Philadelphia International. He toured relentlessly, building a reputation as one of the most electrifying live performers in American music.

A Legend on His Own Terms

Rush has always done things his way. When he pushed to record “Chicken Heads” with a funky, driving beat, he met resistance from every direction. “There was none of my peers cutting that kind of record,” he recalls. “It was too funky.” He cut it anyway, and it became one of the defining records of his career — a track he recently re-recorded alongside Buddy Guy and rising blues star Christone “Kingfish” Ingram.

That independence has defined five decades of work. Rush has won three Grammy Awards and received six nominations, been inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame, and taken home 18 Blues Music Awards. He performed on the Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, appeared in the Martin Scorsese-produced documentary The Road to Memphis, and played himself in Netflix’s Dolemite Is My Name alongside Eddie Murphy. A Broadway musical about his life, Slippin’ Through the Cracks, is currently in development.

He published a critically acclaimed autobiography, I Ain’t Studdin’ You: My American Blues Story, and his most recent album, All My Love For You, was released on his own label Deep Rush Records in collaboration with Thirty Tigers.

He is in his late 80s. During his live show, he still jumps high into the air — arms spread, legs tucked — and lands gracefully, without missing a beat.

“I never thought I would be here this long,” Rush says. “I was 83 years old before I won a Grammy, but it’s better late than never. I’m not just an old guy on my way out.”

Arkansas Roots

The geography of Bobby Rush’s story runs straight through the mid-South. Born in Louisiana, road-tested through the clubs of Arkansas and Mississippi, shaped by the juke joint culture of the Deep South — Rush carries this region in his music the way the blues always has, through place and memory and hard-won truth.

He has become one of the foremost advocates for the blues tradition and its place in American culture. “It’s the root of all music,” he says. “It’s the mother of all music. If you don’t like the blues, you probably don’t like your mama.”

The Arkansas Folklife Festival exists to celebrate exactly this — living traditions, passed down and transformed by artists who have spent their lives inside them. Bobby Rush is the real thing: a direct line from the juke joints and cotton fields of the rural South to the stages of Jazz at Lincoln Center and European festivals, still performing, still recording, still refusing to be still.

Opening night of the Arkansas Folklife Festival couldn’t be in better hands.

Bobby Rush performs on Friday, June 26th, 2026, at Riverfront Park in North Little Rock, Arkansas. All performances are free and open to the public.

‍