Down the Dirt Road with Bonnie Raitt

In "The Life and Times of Bonnie Raitt in Eight Songs," the icon looks back over her life and career—triumphs, potholes and all

Back in January, I posted a five-minute snippet of an hour-long interview I conducted with Bonnie Raitt in February 2022 for the June 2022 issue of Stereophile magazine. Since the arc of Bonnie’s life is common knowledge, I chose to go not with a personal but, rather, a musical narrative: a 50-plus-year memoir in eight songs, from 1971’s “Big Road Blues,” by one of the Mississippi Delta’s Johnsons—Tommy, not Robert—to the new album’s “Waitin’ For You to Blow,” the unsparing self-examination of an individual (namely, most of us) in ever-present danger of backsliding into self-destructive habits.

When we spoke, Bonnie was getting ready to release her 20^th album, Just Like That, with which she would add two Grammys to the 11 she’d already taken home, including 1990’s Album of the Year: Nick of Time, perhaps Raitt’s career centerpiece. Our 4,000-plus-word Stereophile interview had a lot of unseemly fat, so here’s a version that takes a prudent middle path. I expanded those teeny five minutes to a half-hour’s worth of talk, while slicing hunks from that overstuffed original (which you can find online, if you’re a completist). So here is a lean & mean Raitt, with all the good stuff left in, including a few useful footnotes.

The songs I chose span Raitt’s entire career (thus far), from 1971 to 2022. The songs: “Big Road Blues” (Bonnie Raitt, 1971); “Let Me In” (Takin’ My Time, 1973); “About to Make Me Leave Home” and “Three Time Loser” (Sweet Forgiveness, 1977); “Nick of Time” (Nick of Time, 1990); “I Can’t Make You Love Me” (Road Tested, 1995); “Ain’t Gonna Let You Go” (Slipstream, 2012), and “Waitin’ For You to Blow” (Just Like That, 2022).

So settle in and listen to one of rock & roll’s all-time greats reflect on a 50-plus-year career that is by no means over: as I write this, Bonnie is making last-minute preparations for a tour that’ll take her through November 2024. The road is Bonnie Raitt’s middle name.

1. 1:44 (“I made my first album with Willie and the Bees”) Pianist/bandleader Willie Murphy, who produced Bonnie Raitt, was a Minneapolis-area legend for decades, fronting his crack band The Bees. Murphy’s 1969 collaboration with another Minnesotan, “Spider” John Koerner, was, declared the early rock magazine Crawdaddy!, “one of the most unique and underrated albums of the folk boom, perhaps the only psychedelic ragtime blues album ever made.” The so-called city (read “white”) blues trio of “Spider” John, Dave “Snaker” Ray, and Tony “Little Sun” Glover—who, unlike their buddy Bobby Zimmerman, chose to make the Twin Cities their permanent stamping ground—made two classic albums in 1963 and ‘64, Blues, Rags & Hollers and Lots More Blues, Rags & Hollers, cornerstones of every mid- to late-’60s blues revivalist’s collection.

2. 4:37 (“Junior Wells went fishing every day”) Harmonica player Junior Wells, who contributes to four songs on Bonnie Raitt, that first album, was one of the great postwar Chicago blues musicians, along with Wells’s first employer, Muddy Waters, and Howlin’ Wolf, Otis Rush, Sonny Boy Williamson, legends and mentors to bluesniks like Raitt. Wells and another Chicago blues veteran, tenor saxophonist A.C. Reed, showed up at Enchanted Island in their Cadillacs, which sat in the driveway in state.

   

   A 21-year-old Bonnie (second from right, arm upraised) and the gang in front of their converted garage of a recording studio at a disused remedial reading camp on Enchanted Island, Lake Minnetonka, deep in the Minnesota woods. The job at hand: cutting that first, 1971 album.

3. 12:13 (“Did you know Son House?”) Along with Charley Patton and Robert Johnson, Eddie “Son” House (1902-1988) was one of the greatest of the Mississippi Delta blues musicians, a magnificent singer and powerful if limited bottleneck guitarist. House made a handful of 78s for Paramount Records in 1930 and was recorded in 1941 and ‘42 by the Library of Congress folklorist Alan Lomax and Fisk University musicologist John W. Work. Shortly thereafter, Son House abandoned the deep South for Rochester, New York, where blues researcher Dick Waterman found him in 1964. After lessons from bluesologist and future Canned Heat member Al Wilson in how to play like his younger self, House enjoyed a second career at folk festivals, blues clubs, and college campuses.

4. 12:17 (“I met Dick Waterman my freshman year in college”) Waterman was one of the most ardent of the young blues enthusiasts who fanned out across early- and mid-’60s America in search of legendary, hopefully still-living bluesmen, whose music the youths knew only from so-called “race records” (as records for the Black listening public were called from the 1920s through the ‘40s) on labels such as OKeh, Vocalion, Paramount, and Victor Talking Machine. Waterman and his friends succeeded beyond their dreams, locating House, Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James, Booker White, and others, and introducing them to rapt young audiences. Raitt’s mentor and boyfriend, Waterman went on to manage her for years.

5. 13.51 (“I didn’t realize that Earl played on every song”) The great drummer Earl Palmer was a member of New Orleans’s “Studio Band,” rock & roll’s first great recording-session ensemble, which backed up Fats Domino, Little Richard, and dozens of other pioneering rock & roll hitmakers. Palmer moved to Los Angeles in 1957 and blew away the competition (with the exception of his friend Hal Blaine, an equally gifted drummer). The biography Backbeat: Earl Palmer’s Story (Da Capo Press, 2000), is by this writer. Palmer’s remarks on the preparations for Bonnie’s Takin’ My Time session are worth quoting. “Lowell George,” said Earl, “was a fat short guy, had this big old rustic beautiful house above a nudist colony in the Malibu Hills. Them broads didn’t hide or nothing. I guess they were used to being watched!”

6. 14:06 (“It’s a remake of a great Motown Song”) The song that Bonnie refers to, Martha and the Vandellas’ “You’ve Been in Love Too Long” (1965), is the only song on the Takin’ My Time album that Earl Palmer didn’t play drums on. Jim Keltner, one of the top members of the drumming generation that followed Earl’s, plays the song’s wickedly funky drum part.

7. 14:45 (“It was a great big record in my childhood”) “Let Me In,” with its infectious “wee-ooo” refrain, was a #2 Billboard Hot 100 hit for the Philadelphia R&B group The Sensations.

8. 14:50 (“Especially with Taj on standup bass”) “Taj,” of course, is Taj Mahal, the great multi-genre multi-instrumentalist, who recorded his first album in 1968 and is going strong 55 years and 50 albums later.

9. 15:40 (“Those two slide guitar songs”) Although I only mention one, “About to Make Me Leave Home,” I’m referring to the two songs on Sweet Forgiveness album (1977) on which Raitt plays electric slide guitar; the other is “Three Time Loser.” Will McFarlane, a Raitt bandmember of the day, plays the slide solo on a third track on Sweet Forgiveness, “Takin’ My Time” (not to be confused with the album of the same name).

10. 18:13 (“You didn’t go down the route that Rory Block did”) Like Raitt a master slide guitarist, Rory Block is another product of the 1960s blues revival, an exceptional singer/player largely in the Mississippi Delta tradition, still touring and recording.

11. 23:23 (“I’m the daughter of a singer”) John Raitt (1917-2005), Bonnie’s father, was the leading man in Oklahoma, Carousel, The Pajama Game, and other Broadway hits of the 1940s and ‘50s. As his New York Times obituary put it, Raitt “came to epitomize a new distinctively modern breed of Broadway leading man—rugged cowboys and blue-collar workers.” A youthful convert to Quakerism, Raitt was a conscientious objector during World War II.

12. 24:04 (“How did you hook up with Mike Finnigan”) Finnigan, who died in August 2021, played the Hammond B3 organ and sang backup on the Raitt albums Slipstream (2012) and Dig in Deep (2016) and on one track of Just Like That. Among the big body of work that Finnigan left behind are his B3 parts on “Rainy Day, Dream Away” and “Still Raining, Still Dreaming” on Jimi Hendrix’s 1968 album Electric Ladyland.

13. 25:56 (“Except for the Joe Henry tracks”) Henry, one of roots-oriented music’s most highly regarded producers and a prolific solo artist as well, produced four songs on 2012’s Slipstream, which won Raitt a 2013 Best Americana Album Grammy. As sole producer, Henry has won three Grammys, for the R&B legend Solomon Burke’s late-career album Don’t Give Up on Me (2002), the equally legendary folksinger Ramblin’ Jack Elliott’s South Coast (1995), and the Carolina Chocolate Drops' 2010 celebration of Black string-band music, Genuine Negro Jig. As a singer/songwriter, Henry has released more than 15 albums.

Above: Ms. Raitt, 2022

Below: Same individual, 1972. Do not miss the late-adolescent giggle fit at the end.