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
Went into the famous Dobell's record store in London and found this incredible record. picture of this woman in these rhinestone cat glasses, and it said Sippy Wallace, and I recognized the name from my old classic blues collection records, you know, compilations, and I'd always really liked Sippy's music because she really didn't take any...
She didn't cut anybody any slack in terms of men at the time. She wasn't a victim. She was, you know, you can make me do what you want to do, but you've got to know how. So I had bought the record, fell in love with her, had no idea she was still alive. And at that point, the record was only two or three years old, I think.
And I'd recorded a couple of her songs, three actually, over my first two albums. And when I was invited to come to the Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival in 1972 to perform, I, at that point, had found out that that's where she was living in Detroit and invited her to come out on stage.
She said she would only do gospel because she was recovering from a stroke and had given up the blues and was playing in the church. And... So I started playing Women Be Wise in the little trailer backstage, and she started kind of sashing back and forth, and she said, well, maybe I'll just do one blues.
And the rest is kind of history, because after that, she was the big hit of the festival, our duet of this song, and we went on to record it together in her subsequent album, Sippy, on Atlantic Records. And we toured together for the next 15 years until she passed away at 86.
Man, oh man. That's a wonderful recording. That's really, really great.
Well, I'd say those lyrics, for starters. I mean, both You Got to Know How and Women Be Wise and Mighty Type Woman. All these tunes that she writes are real lessons. I learned a lot about what kind of songs appeal to me by what she chose to write about.
And, yeah, I mean, just in terms of her love of family and her independence from men, I mean, she lost her husband many years previous to when I met her and seemed to have a very full life not being somebody's wife. I'm sure she would have, you know, she missed her husband. He was the love of her life. And she really had no desire to get connected again.
And that was a very strong lesson to me as a young girl. Because I did grow up in a feminist era. And to have a blues woman or someone like Ruth Brown or Aretha Franklin as my role models, as well as Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell, you know, these are women that just stood up for themselves and demanded respect.
Well, this is one of the greatest vocals I've ever heard. It's so simple. And the piano part and the arrangement, this is really early. Even though B.B. started in the late 40s, and he's got a lot of his hits in the 50s, this was a record that when I was 10 or 11 years old, I happened to hear on a radio station. And later... Everybody's got that one record that just turned their head around.
Sometimes there's a Ray Charles tune that did it for me, and then later hearing John Lee Hooker when I was about 14. But B.B. King was a big star in Los Angeles on the black radio, and Rock Me Baby's just a classic tune. Many people have covered it, but I just wanted to bring it to let you know how... unbelievably simple and pure and right to the bone this song can be. And B.B.
's still one of our greatest bluesmen. I love him dearly.
Well, I sure hope so. I don't know how to play single string lead on electric guitar as well as any of the guitar players that are currently out there. I play acoustic solos more, and I play pretty good rhythm guitar, but my lead playing tends to remain on the slide guitar where I know what I'm doing better.
So I just, it probably has more to do with phrasing and what to leave out and just, you know, when you go crazy for somebody's style, it's not, unless you're doing a specific mimicking of what they're doing, which I don't do, I would say my singing, just because of his style, restraint, his restraint and his passion.
I hope I got some influence from him because I just think he's one of the tastiest and most deep singers I've ever heard, as well as one of the greatest blues guitar players in the history of guitar players.
Some days I never get out of bed. I start out with the best of intentions and then shut it instead. Don't think we'll get back how we used to. No use in trying to measure the loss. We better start getting used to it and damn the cost. Go ahead and ask me how I make it through.
Yeah, it took a long time to summon up the nerve, and I think somewhat of maturity and sobriety had something to do with it, what comes with sobriety in terms of being able to have a perspective. And since that coincided with my late 30s, early 40s for me, it's hard to separate the two.
I think that a great song has appealed to me, and I've been in love with the songs of Carousel in Oklahoma and Pajama Game since my dad died. He's been singing them all my life. I just never really thought I would sing them in public. I certainly sung them enough in private just for fun and grew up singing them.
We started this idea out when we used to just practice Christmas carols and would sing different Broadway songs in his pool. We'd be exercising together, and that was a good way to spend some father-daughter alone time together. And next thing I knew, he sort of suggested doing something together, maybe for the Pops.
And before we knew it, we were performing with John Williams for Evening at the Pops a few years ago, and we did these songs that we ended up putting on my dad's album. And I enjoyed it so much and was terrified to sing in front of an orchestra in a town in Boston that I got my start in. And I think the fact that it was a safe ground made it an easy first date. And we went on to do...
Showing 161–180 of 187 · page 9 of 10
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