Tom Rush – The Very Best Of Tom Rush: No Regrets

Back in the early ’80s, when hardcore drove me from punk rock for the first time, a savvy Seattle DJ took to playing a live cut called “Jazzman” from Tom Rush’s Late Night Radio. His was a warm, expressive, soothingly sad voice, and the song fit my mood then and now.

Rush, it turned out, was a New Hampshire-bred singer who first emerged in Cambridge, Massachusetts, during the folk revival of the early 1960s. His early LPs (notably his third, 1963’s Blues, Songs And Ballads) betrayed many lessons learned from Mississippi John Hurt, for even then Rush had that kind, worldly wise voice (a kind of New England Don Williams, if you will; or Gordon Lightfoot, if you won’t), and the man could flat-out pick.

No Regrets is the fourth Rush compilation since 1970 (not counting an expanded Blues… CD), but evidently the first assembled by the artist. It’s a daunting chore to summarize three decades of music in seventeen tracks, but even so, Rush has made curious choices, revealing a particularly weak mid-’70s period (the horn-swelling “Ladies Love Outlaws”) during which his music came painfully close to approximating that of Jimmy Buffett.

In hindsight, much of what emerged in the early ’60s folk boom was little more than white college kids appropriating the music of rural black men with utter disregard for the songs’ context and the practical realities of the songwriters’ lives. Early on, Rush was capable of making those songs — and songs composed in that vein — resonate with his own distinct style, best represented here by Bukka White’s “Panama Limited” and Eric von Schmidt’s “Joshua Gone Barbados”.

But as Rush’s career wore on, his relationship to the music seems to have changed. By 1972’s “Kids These Days”, the singer had acquired a hipster’s faux patois, and today one wonders exactly who he was pretending to be, and why.

Rush also had an ear for young songwriters, including Joni Mitchell (“Urge For Doing”), David Wiffen (“Lost My Drivin’ Wheel”), and Jackson Browne (“Jamaica, Say You Will”), and, as his own career receded, he became active as a folk impresario.

No Regrets does an imperfect job of summarizing those parts of Rush’s career that interest and captivate this listener. (“Jazzman”, for instance, doesn’t appear, nor do most of the early songs I came to love so long ago.) Which, if nothing else, serves as a reminder that artists and critics inherently see careers from different perspectives. The advice from this corner is to buy Blues, Songs And Ballads and work it out from there.