Education Quote by Otis Rush

Otis Rush frames left-handedness like an accident that turned into a lineage. He starts with a humble dodge - "I didn't know Albert back then" - which works as both disclaimer and flex. He’s refusing the tidy myth that every great guitarist is just copying the last great guitarist. Instead, he claims a parallel evolution: he arrived at that sound because his body and circumstances pushed him there, not because he was chasing Albert King’s shadow.

The left-handed detail isn’t trivia; it’s a marker of outsider technique. In blues, the "wrong" way to hold a guitar can become the right way to make a signature. Rush’s phrasing suggests a time when being left-handed wasn’t a branding choice or a boutique distinction, it was a practical inconvenience that forced innovation: different bends, different vibrato, a slightly different attack. He and Albert as "the only guys" is a small, almost lonely image - two outliers whose physical orientation becomes a sonic one.

Then the punchline lands: "Then left-handed people came from every direction". That’s wry and a little suspicious, like he’s watching the industry turn rarity into trend. The subtext is about what happens when a marginal trait becomes marketable: the scene fills up with latecomers who want the mystique without the struggle. Rush isn’t gatekeeping talent so much as protecting origin stories from being retrofitted into fashionable narratives.