‘No Regrets’: Tom Rush ’63’s Path from Leverett to Legendary

Tom Rush ’63 may now be an icon of the folk music scene, but he started out like many Harvard students — an English concentrator worried about job prospects.

“When I graduated, I realized that people weren’t lining up to pay me to read books. People were paying me, not very much, but they were paying me to get onstage and sing songs,” Rush said in an interview with The Harvard Crimson.

While Rush may have once been anxious about his post-Harvard path, he managed to go on to build careers for not only himself, but also other musical greats like Garth Brooks, who names Rush as a significant influence.

Rush’s own 1968 hit, “No Regrets,” has become a standard covered by The Walker Brothers, Olivia Newton-John, Waylon Jennings, U2, and Emmylou Harris, to name a few.

Rush retraced his journey from childhood music lessons to his undergraduate years at Harvard and through his rise as a major player in the folk music scene. Despite his eventual stardom, his early explorations of music were less than fruitful.

“My piano teacher was a woman shaped like a fireplug, whose nickname was the Iron Lady before Margaret Thatcher took over the title. I reduced the Iron Lady to tears on several occasions,” Rush said with a laugh.

Beyond his residences in Thayer Hall and Leverett House while studying at Harvard, Rush found a home in the vibrant Harvard and Cambridge music scenes of the ’60s. As an undergraduate, Rush was particularly involved with Harvard’s WHRB station — an experience which proved to be a valuable inroad to the broader Cambridge folk community.

“There was a certain inherent irony in a bunch of Harvard students sitting around singing about how hard it is on the chain gang,” Rush said. “We felt that we could make up with sincerity what we lacked in authenticity.”

Beyond striking a balance between his Harvard context and the folk scene’s gritty themes, his duties entailed soliciting guest performers for the program — musicians traditionally from the local folk scene, before his radio tenure. But Rush thought beyond tradition, inviting names like Pete Seeger and Odetta to the show.

“I would go to the local coffee houses during the hootenannies, what they now call open mics, to try to line up guests for my show. And I learned that you could get in for free if you had a guitar with you. I then learned you could get in for free if you had a guitar case with you. I’d put a six-pack in a guitar case and head out to the hoot,” Rush said.

Rush’s scheme for free entry to the hootenannies was successful — until he found himself caught at a club called the Golden Vanity.

“The boss there said, ‘Hey, kid, you got in for nothing — get onstage.’ I had to borrow a guitar. And I was eternally nervous, but apparently did well enough that the boss man called me back a couple of weeks later: Somebody had gotten sick, and [he asked], would I come be a substitute folk singer? That turned into a semi-regular thing.”

In addition to his failure-turned-success at the Golden Vanity, Rush could often be found alongside the biggest names of the existing folk scene at legendary jazz-turned-folk hotspot Club 47, formerly located on Mt. Auburn Street.

“Club 47 was unique among the coffee houses in that they not only hosted the kids, myself included, but they also brought in the legends,” he said.

It was in this unique space shared by budding musicians and established legends alike that Rush found his own footing in the folk scene.

“It was one block from Leverett House, so it was just irresistible,” he said. “My bad grades mainly had to do with Club 47.”

Rush then fondly described his experience playing a gig at another signature club of the ’60s in Detroit, where he first encountered the music of Joni Mitchell. He would later be the first to record three Mitchell-written songs on his album “The Circle Game.”

“She came offstage, and I asked her if she had any more new songs, because I was two years overdue for delivering an album to Elektra,” Rush said. “And she basically said, ‘No, I don’t have any more new songs, but give me a minute.’”

Mitchell indeed sent Rush a tape of six newly written songs. Before the last song on the tape, Rush remembered Mitchell apologizing and insisting that it was no good.

“It was ‘The Circle Game.’ I named the album after it,” Rush said.

But the success Rush found in his early albums like “The Circle Game” didn’t end in the ’60s. His first album in five years, “Gardens Old, Flowers New,” was released this year on March 1, a collaboration with Rush’s accompanist Matt Nakoa. The album’s comfortingly nostalgic folk sound blends with refreshingly animated lyricism, an apt soundscape for its springtime release and title.

In addition to his newest album release, Rush has been hosting an online video series, Rockport Sundays, since the pandemic. The series was conceived when he was acutely feeling the loss of performing live after his shows were canceled during Covid-19. He invites a musical guest to chat and perform in a short video segment, not unlike his roots at Harvard’s WHRB.

To students facing the age-old post-grad panic he experienced during these Harvard years, he advised to “find something you really love.”

“My job is to have fun. It doesn’t get much better than that,” Rush said.

—Staff writer Marin E. Gray can be reached at marin.gray@thecrimson.com.