Bonnie Raitt’s debut album was a brilliant work that presaged her powerful career as a blues artist.
She’s been called the best slide guitar player alive today. Folk singer, blues/roots performer, rock and roller, ballad weeper: Bonnie Raitt has seen it all and done it all. She was twenty-one when she released her first record in 1971. It was a rather quiet affair, considering her musical heritage, but Bonnie was going her own way: the way of the blues. In retrospect, her first album showed us everything she was going to be.
Bonnie was born into one of the most eminent musical households in America: her father was the famous Broadway singer/actor John Raitt, who had starred as the original Billy Bigelow in Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Carousel and as Curly in Oklahama!. Her mother, Marjorie Haydock, was an accomplished pianist. J
Bonnie grew up in California in a Quaker household, but graduated from Oakwood Friends School in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1967. She entered Radcliffe College majoring in social relations and African studies. While there she became a serious fan of folk music, and of jug bands, particularly Jim Kweskin. She began a fierce regimen of practicing slide guitar. At the time very few white women performed the blues, and almost no band employed a young white girl as a lead guitar player.
“I was always drawn to the blues. Alberta Hunter at the Cookery was a life-changing experience. I only wanted to get enriched as a performer as I got older, to have an audience which got older, too, and would come to see me when I’m 80. And I didn’t have a legit trained voice. My love was Bob Dylan. But as I got older I realized a good ballad was a good ballad.” ~ Bonnie Raitt
Bonnie Raitt had almost no choice but to forge a solo career. She was talented enough to open for Mississippi Fred McDowell in 1970 and came to the attention of Warner Brothers, who arranged to record her first record, “done live on four tracks because we wanted a more spontaneous and natural feeling in the music (Raitt wrote in the album’s liner note), “a feeling often sacrificed when the musicians know they can overdub their part on a separate track until it’s perfect.”
The opening track ‘Bluebird’ was written by Stephen Stills and released by him as a member of Buffalo Springfield in the mid 1960s. Stills performed it as a dazzling folk-rocker that emphasized his virtuoso guitar playing and his penchant for suite-like construction that proved the foundation of Crosby, Stills and Hash (pun intended). It was a mesmerizing tune in the original arrangement that included banjo, psychedelics and extensive noodling, but Bonnie had a different vision of the track and delivered something startling – something deliberately low-key, with no guitar solo, but with a funky New Orleans beat supplemented with some terrific sax playing.
The most compelling fact about Raitt’s version of ‘Bluebird’ is how she chose to downplay the guitar and the psychedelia- for she had already gained a reputation as a formidable bottleneck slide player by the time she was twenty – and focus on other aspects of the song, other possibilities. The track was an artistic success, though the album turned out to be a commercial failure.
Other key tracks on the album are the two from the underrated female blues artist Sippie Wallace; Bonnie chose to close the album with Sippie’s ‘Women Be Wise’. It’s worth noting that the album is a eclectic mix from widely diverse songwriters. Bonnie even wrote a couple of the tracks herself. She assembled a cracking band, and even managed to attract Junior Wells to provide harmonica backing.
So, what was the impact, the influence, and the legacy behind Bonnie’s first album? Manifold. Bonnie influenced and inspired many young women to become blues artists: I hear direct evidence of her catalogue in the works of Lucinda Williams, Susan Tedeschi (a dead ringer in voice and guitar styling for the younger Bonnie), and many more, but particularly in her impact upon the career of Maria Muldaur and the creation of a lifelong “soul-sister” friendship between the two of them.
Maria Muldaur, in fact, credits her much younger friend Bonnie (Maria was born in 1943, Bonnie in 1949), with inspiring not only the impetus to make a solo record of her own, but also with providing the formula, if it can be called that, to combine blues, jug band, folk, pop, and New Orleans jazz influences into the mix we now call roots music.
“It was really watching you that night and hearing what you did and your command, not only of your instrument (your voice) but of the band and how you wanted it to sound. That you had the pluck to tell them exactly what you wanted to hear – that was just a revelation to me. It was the first thing that gave me the vision that such a thing might be possible…” ~Maria Muldaur
Bonnie’s subsequent albums in the 1970s are worth checking out as well, especially her second album Give It Up, which was dedicated to the people of North Vietnam and which is often referred to as her best work. For me, 1973’s Takin’ My Time, 1975’s Home Plate, and 1977’s Sweet Forgiveness (which contained her great remake of Del Shannon’s ‘Runaway’) are essential listening. Although she moved towards pop for a time, she never forgot her blues roots nor her connections with other blues musicians.
