Country legend and ‘Whiskey River’ writer Johnny Bush dies – Houston Chronicle

Imagine for a moment if Johnny Bush hadn’t enjoyed his own moment of country music stardom in the late 1960s and early 1970s. And imagine if he hadn’t endured an unthinkable crisis in which his voice disappeared, and through an experimental medical procedure enjoyed an unlikely comeback as an elder statesman of Texas-based roots music decades later.

Had none of that happened . . . had he only been known as the writer of the song “Whiskey River,” Bush would be a country-music legend. As sung by Bush’s friend Willie Nelson, the song has provided the first notes, the rousing chorus and a strange celebratory ache for thousands of concerts, as Nelson made it a calling card for years of live performances.

Bush, “the Country Caruso,” who was born and raised in Houston’s Kashmere Gardens neighborhood and spent much of his adult life living and working out of San Antonio, died Friday of pneumonia at age 85. He leaves behind a remarkable body of work and a song that will not just outlive him and his friend Nelson, but the rest of us, too.

Nelson once called “Whiskey River” “ageless. You can’t sing a song every night if it’s not.”

The song is both simple and complex, the mark of a country-music classic. On the surface, it’s a plea for relief as a spurned and heartbroken lover turns to the bottle. But Bush infused it with a gorgeous poetry: “I’m drowning in a whiskey river/bathin’ my memory’s mind in the wetness of its soul/feeing the amber current flowing from my mind/to a warm and empty heart you left so cold.”

Most have been there, and most have worked through it. Which explains in part why the song became such a staple for Nelson, a king of heartache songs. That and a chorus that sounds like a last-call singalong: “Whiskey river take my mind…” Despair as shared, cathartic experience: The song is quintessentially country.

“You don’t set out to write a hit,” Bush told me of the song. “You set out to tell a story.”

Kashmere Gardens beginnings

John Bush Shinn III’s story began in northeast Houston in Kashmere Gardens in a house with no electricity or running water on a street paved with oyster shells.

He remembers wandering the streets at night as a kid hearing the R&B sounds coming from the Bronze Peacock nightclub, sounds that would course through his young mind along with the Western swing favored by his family. Both would play a formidable part in the music he’d make years later.

Bush recalled leaving Kashmere Gardens to see movies at the Queen Theater, which he called “my escape.”

“It was were I found out there were places other than Kashmere Gardens,” he said. “Between the theater and the radio, I knew there was a better life.”

Bush found his way out playing music. He started writing songs as a teen, but found more work around the Houston area as a drummer in some honky-tonk bands. He cut a single, “In My World All Alone,” in 1958, that didn’t go anywhere. “I just assumed everybody in the country heard it,” he said. “I had no idea.”

Early gigs were rough gigs. He recalled a show at a club called the Harbor Lights near the Ship Channel, where a fight over a woman resulted in a kitchen staffer taking off a man’s head with a cleaver.

“Rough gigs,” Bush said. “Rougher times.”

He played in Ray Price’s Cherokee Cowboys, a rite of passage for numerous country music stars such as Nelson, Roger Miller and Johnny Paycheck.

Bush started recording again and hit the country charts twice in 1968 with “The Sound of a Heartache” and “Undo the Right.” “You Gave Me a Mountain” hit the next year. Bush’s voice earned him the “Country Caruso” moniker, and he appeared to have a bright future ahead of him.

RCA invested in Bush, and encouraged him to do some writing, which resulted in “Whiskey River,” which he released in the early 1970s.

“I thought they were crazy,” Bush said. He looked at some of the writers available to the label: Nelson, Harland Howard, Bill Anderson. “And they want me to write?”

But his song was a subtle masterpiece, both innovative in its language but also compliant with the country tradition of songs about bad love.

Nelson first recorded the song in 1973, and it has been a staple for him for nearly 50 years.

WILLIE’S COLLECTION: Here are the 81 best Willie Nelson songs

A voice silenced

Bush was a difficult taskmaster at the time. Steve Earle called him, “the Van Morrison of Texas. He fired pretty much every musician in the state at some point. To the point where he’d forget he’d fired you and then he’d rehire you.”

Bush was living fast in the ‘70s, and the bill would come due.

He says his voice didn’t fade away. Rather it disappeared on April 15, 1972, right when his music and RCA’s money should have two-stepped toward huge success. He recalled a show in Weslaco where “I couldn’t get the high notes. It was choking me off.”

His speaking voice was next to go, the result of a neurological condition that completely shut down his career. Bush tried to work through it, but his voice wasn’t there, and in 1975 his label dropped him.

He struggled for years, trying prescriptions and hypnosis. Instead, he was suffering from spasmodic dysphonia, a rare condition that affected the muscles in his throat and his vocal cords. Vocal exercises helped some, accompanied by Botox injections into the muscles of his throat.

He thought his voice sounded better than even the “Country Caruso” days. He thought it had “a richer quality.”

At this point it was the late ‘90s: Bush’s window for stardom had closed. But he was welcomed back by audiences in Texas that have long memories for yesterday’s greats. Bush looked the part, too. He struck an iconic figure with his black beard split by forks of gray.

He recorded regularly and toured relentlessly, playing old-school dancehall honky tonk with a touch of the old jazz, blues and R&B he’d hear in Kashmere Gardens. He brought his life and music full circle in 2007 with “Kashmere Gardens Mud,” an album with Houston music history coursing through it, including his take on “Jole Blon,” the 1946 hit Harry Choates recorded in Houston.

For those new to his work, Bush’s discography is a little odd, with a long lag between his years as rising upstart and venerable legend. But all of it bears rewards for those who may know him best each time Willie Nelson takes the stage and hits those wobbly first chords with jittery reverberating sense of regret. Thwang . . . thwang . . . thwang . . . pause . . . “Whiskey river take my mind…”

Bush’s legacy runs far deeper. But he also left behind something, a song and a story, shared by millions of people, even if only a few know his name.

andrew.dansby@chron.com