Winter Circle Talk features an evening of storytelling and song with folk legend Tom Rush ’59

Legendary folk troubadour Tom Rush ’59 returned to the Circle on Tuesday, January 14, for a poignant yet often lighthearted winter Circle Talk in the Campbell Performing Arts Center. 

This evening of music and storytelling began with a student quartet—featuring Sage Greaves ’26 (vocals), Jack Eaton ’26 (guitar), Sara Agrawal ’25 (bass), and William Laws ’25 (drums)—performing a cover of James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain,” appropriate since Mr. Taylor has cited Mr. Rush as an early hero and main influence.

“Those guys are good, huh?” Mr. Rush asked as he took the stage and shouldered his guitar. “Tough act to follow.”

Yet follow he did, with more than an hour of songs representing his prolific catalog and artists with which he’s collaborated with and covered. In between numbers, Mr. Rush told stories that spanned his career, dating back to when he was a college student at Harvard, spending nearly as much time at the Boston-area coffee houses and blues clubs as he did in class.

“I got to Cambridge after having gotten through Groton, and there was this really incredible folk scene going on—all kinds of kids playing bluegrass and Delta blues and Chicago blues and Irish-Scottish ballads,” Mr. Rush recalled. “It occurred to me at the time that it was a little ironic having a bunch of Harvard kids sitting around singing about how rough it was in the coal mines. 

“We figured we could make up in sincerity what we lacked in authenticity.” 

One of the most popular spots was Club 47—now Club Passim—right in Harvard Square. 

“That was a dangerous place,” Mr. Rush explained, “because it was about one block from my dorm, and it was just irresistible. There were a lot of coffee houses around at the time but, to me, Club 47 was the flagship, because they not only hosted kids—myself included—but they brought in legends. You could sit in this little room and listen to Flatt and Scruggs, and Bill Monroe, and the Carter family, and on and on and on.”

What especially caught the ear of young Tom Rush, however, were the blues men.

“I adored the old blues guys,” he said, “partly because I was an English major, and what they did to syntax . . . was heartwarming.”

Introducing his “Remember Song,” Mr. Rush briefly shone a light on the reality of being a performance artist in the age of streaming.

“I’m going to do my hit,” he said while tuning his guitar. “This is my YouTube hit, because YouTube is how you have hits now. This one has seven and a half million plays . . . and not a dime in it.”

Moving on to perhaps his biggest “real” hit, “No Regrets”—the singer-songwriter credited its royalties with putting his first two children through college—Mr. Rush explained how songs can evolve and catch previously unknown fire when other artists cover them.

“This is one tune of mine that’s been recorded by a lot of other artists,” he said. “It’s about the end of a long relationship . . . which I actually hadn’t had.

“It’s funny the way these things work: One artist records it, and then other artists hear it and they record it,” Mr. Rush continued. “There was a band in England called the Walker Brothers that had a huge hit with it, and off that hit there were a couple more. There was a heavy metal version that was so ponderous the guy could only get two verses into an eight-minute cut. There was a hip-hop version that I did not recognize when a friend played it for me. And there’s this band in Ireland—U-something—that also recorded it.”

Closing out his Circle Talk performance, Mr. Rush welcomed the student musicians from his opening act back to the stage for a traditional song by the Rev. John L. Griffin—better known as “Sin Killer” Griffin—about the Galveston Flood of 1900, when a hurricane storm surge wiped out the town of Galveston, Texas, killing an estimated 8,000 people. 

And so, as wildfires continued to ravage Los Angeles County, the Groton community ended the evening by joining in song to lament another natural disaster 125 years prior: