Creativity Quote by Otis Rush

There is a whole career’s worth of hustle packed into that shrug of a sentence. “Oh” disarms first: a casual throat-clear that lowers expectations, as if what follows isn’t worth polishing. Then “working occasionally” slips in a quiet qualifier, the kind musicians use when the truth is messier than the myth. Rush isn’t narrating a triumphal arrival; he’s mapping a life lived between gigs, day jobs, and the unreliable economics of the blues. The phrase keeps pride intact while sidestepping the industry’s harsher math: talent doesn’t guarantee stability, and New York doesn’t guarantee discovery.

“In and out of New York” is doing double duty. On paper it’s geography, but culturally it’s a comment on the mid-century circuit: Chicago, New York, the road, the clubs that paid late or not at all, the sessions that didn’t lead anywhere. For a Black blues guitarist from the South who helped electrify Chicago blues, New York is both opportunity and distance - a place you pass through, audition for, survive, rarely “arrive” in. The line pushes back against the tidy biopic arc where an artist “moves to New York” and becomes real.

The intent feels protective: keep it modest, keep it moving. Rush’s voice here mirrors the blues itself - economical, unsentimental, built around what you can say without begging for sympathy. The subtext is a working musician’s realism: you don’t belong to the city; you negotiate with it, one occasional job at a time.