Bonnie Raitt
speaker
187 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Bonnie Raitt’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And I'm sure he, as well as the other bluesmen, always got a big kick out of the fact that this little round-faced redhead was playing Robert Johnson songs and Sun House songs. And I just sat there listening to their stories and learned to drink and, you know, try to be a blues woman at 20, which, you know, I managed to do by the time I was 40 and get recognized for it.
You know, I'm sure it was odd from the outside, but for the inside, most of the people that were in love with blues were white middle-class kids that were just going to folk festivals and going around the South with tape recorders.
And, of course, the British interest in the blues and Big Bill Brunzi and Lead Belly, and that led to so many of these records being exposed to groups that became the Rolling Stones and the Animals and the Beatles even. The rhythm and blues music was on the radio at that time. Not delta blues, but rhythm and blues was on the radio right next to the Beatles and all the white groups.
So it wasn't as segregated and it didn't seem as culturally odd to me at the time. I just knew that I'd lucked into something.
Well, his particular, you know, my style's obviously a little different, and of course the key's different, because I sing in a woman's key.
There were some chords that he used, you know, certain positions on the guitar that I wouldn't have been able to figure out until I watched him do it, but the basic way you learn guitar for me, because I didn't take lessons, was just listening and mimicking, and... And his soulfulness and just his abandon, the way he got into it.
And when he played electric guitar, which he did a lot of the time in later years because it cut through more to clubs where kids were noisy. And, you know, that's what led me to the electric guitar was the way that the note would sustain and just sing and the way you could just... It's so funky when you get these...
you know, cheap amps and, you know, it's just, you know, that's the stuff that makes David Lindley and Ry Cooder, Jackson Browne's slide plan so great because they just use these really incredible amplification that duplicates the old, really inexpensive amps. And people want to know how to get that funky sound. Well, get a $25 guitar and the cheapest amp you can find.
When you get home, baby, write me a few of your lines. When you get home, little baby, write me a few of your lines. That'll be consolation, Lord, honey, on my worried mind.
No, I just heard it. It's not that difficult to play. Whenever you're learning a song from somebody else, you don't really have to see it unless you're playing some kind of amazing Jimi Hendrix thing, which I probably wouldn't even be able to tackle. These things that I play are really stuff that I can manage.
It's the finesse of it and the soul that you put into it that makes him different from me probably, and hopefully one day I'll get to be as funky as he is.
singing blues tunes. It just sounded the fruitiest, you know, whitest voice I'd ever heard, which I didn't mind singing Joan Baez songs. But, you know, I really did think that if I just lived that, you know, I went from being pretty much not a rebel rouser as a teenager. I was a really good student. I went away to a Quaker school and went right to college.
And I don't even think I partied at all until I was about 20. And the drinking age in Massachusetts wasn't even until 21. So I started hanging out with these hardcore guys and You know, like any kid sitting at the feet of the masters, you know, I also got to go on tour hanging out with Buddy and Junior's band on the Rolling Stones tour of Europe. So that was some professional hound dogs there.
So, you know, those first few years, it was very difficult to be as light sounding as I was. And so I kind of made up for it by bravado and kind of swaggering around thinking I could be, you know, like Etta James in a minute.
Yeah, that was an interesting position to be in. I'm sorry I cut you off, Terry. Go ahead.
Oh, that was just, yeah, there was one blues festival where it was kind of my job to, because there was a lot of different bluesmen in one backstage area, all of whom had not only different tastes in what to drink, but could handle it differently. For example, Son House, if he had a couple of shots of vodka, he could remember all of his songs, and if he had too much, he couldn't remember them.
So if he didn't have any at all, he usually didn't even want to play. So it was just one of these chemistry experiments that was...
Kind of a funny anecdote for a young college student hanging out with these blues guys because it was kind of my job to help road manage, and I had to be sure not to let somebody just pass a pint bottle to somebody that I knew was just going to get totally toasted, and he didn't play until four hours from now.
You're getting old guys that have been farmers and Pullman Porters for 25 years, and suddenly everybody wants to give them anything they want in whatever quantity. And it did a lot of them in. You have to be really careful. Otherwise, it's not helping anybody to give somebody who has a propensity to alcoholism too much alcohol. And we've all seen that in every lifestyle in rock and roll.
Well, this particular album, which has now been re-released on Alligator Records, it's from an album called, I think it's Sippy Sings the Blues, if they left the name the same. And I picked it up when I was 18. I spent the summer my freshman year in on a college charter flight and traveled around Europe with a couple of girlfriends.
Showing 141–160 of 187 · page 8 of 10
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