Bonnie Raitt

When Bonnie Raitt won her 11th, 12th and 13th Grammys in February 2023, it was a testimony to two things: passion and perseverance. After all, as anyone familiar with the arc of her 50-plus-year career will confirm, those have been key elements of her artistry, and she’s demonstrated both as consistently and inspiringly as she’s demonstrated a mastery of her craft. In the process of pressing forward with such passion and perseverance – just like the blues legends who influenced her always did – she’s walked a path entirely her own with a genre-hopping hodgepodge of R&B, roots, rock, soul and funk while never forgetting those who paved that path a generation before she was born.

A roots-rock icon who recorded her breakthrough album at age 39, Raitt’s passion for music was clear from her early years growing up in Los Angeles and her late teens at Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. As for perseverance, only a handful of other artists have remained even remotely relevant after experiencing her variety of personal and professional ups and downs, let alone thrive like Raitt, who was 73 when she won the 2023 Song of the Year Grammy over four nominees less than half her age – Harry Styles (29), Taylor Swift (33), Lizzo (34) and Adele (34) – and another one more than 30 years her junior, Beyoncé (41).

Raitt’s recorded 18 studio albums and three live LPs, maintained a road-warrior schedule that would exhaust even the most travel-hungry among us, and received 30 Grammy nominations in total despite having said that she’s never sought any amount of commercial success. And staying true to her vision of music as art, not as a commodity, has allowed her to record some of the late 20th and early 21st centuries’ most heartfelt LPs, become a staple on charts worldwide, and draw crowds of all ages like precious few others – particularly septuagenarians.

MUSICAL BEGINNINGS, EARLY INFLUENCES

Bonnie Lynn Raitt was born November 8, 1949 in Burbank, California, the daughter of Marge Goddard (née Haydock), a pianist, and John Raitt, a stage/film actor and singer. A self-described “tomboy” whose family respected the arts, followed Quaker traditions and was deeply committed to social activism, Raitt began her six-stringed journey at age eight when one of her Christmas gifts was a Stella guitar (the same brand played by Robert Johnson, Lead Belly, Charlie Patton, Skip James and other folk-blues icons).

She never took formal guitar or singing lessons as a youngster, and she cites her first major influences as the beatnik-inspired singer-songwriters of the 1950s folk revival. From age eight to until her mid-teens, she spent part of her summers at Camp Regis Applejack in the Adirondack Mountains, where she played songs for other campers, and her interest in the blues and slide guitar exploded when she was 15 after she heard the album Blues at Newport 1963 (Vanguard, 1964).

MOVE TO CAMBRIDGE, DICK WATERMAN, WARNER BROS. SIGNING 

In 1967, after graduating from Oakwood Friends School (a private boarding school in Poughkeepsie, New York), 17-year-old Raitt enrolled at Radcliffe College, majoring in social relations and African studies. Over the next two years, she performed at open-mic nights and other events in Cambridge and Boston and was a regular audience member at the area’s blues clubs. In 1969, she became the lead singer of the Revolutionary Music Collective, a group that performed in Cambridge during the nationwide student strikes of May 1970.

By far the most significant event of Raitt’s Cambridge years musically speaking – the one that essentially launched her career – was when she met promoter/manager Dick Waterman, a Plymouth, Massachusetts, native who was as fundamental to the area’s blues scene as Folklore Productions’ Manny Greenhill was to the folk one. Among the artists he managed were Son House, Junior Wells, Buddy Guy, J.B. Hutto, Sam “Lightnin’” Hopkins and Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup and he identified Raitt as a rare talent the moment he saw her perform in late ‘69, becoming her manager from then until 1985.

Shortly after meeting Waterman, Raitt dropped out of Radcliffe (halfway through her junior year) and in mid-1970 she moved to Philadelphia, where Waterman had his main office; she started opening for his laundry list of blues greats there, in New York and in other cities. In August 1970, Waterman landed 20-year old Raitt the biggest gig any budding blues artist could possibly fathom, a spot opening for The Rolling Stones on their 18-city, September/October European tour.

DEBUT ALBUM, OTHER 1970S ALBUMS, FIRST GRAMMY NOMINATION

In early 1971, Waterman was instrumental in landing Raitt a deal with Warner Bros., which released her eponymous debut album in November that year. The 11-track LP includes just two originals (“Thank You,” “Finest Lovin’ Man”) and saw middling commercial success, but a number of prominent critics praised her interpretations of others artists’ material and her bottleneck-guitar prowess. In 1972, Warner Bros. issued her second studio outing, Give It Up, which included three originals and also saw positive press despite limited sales, followed by 1973’s Takin’ My Time and 1974’s Streetlights, both of which included covers only and were – yet again – strong critically but disappointing commercially.

In 1975, Raitt recorded another collection of covers, the 10-track disc Home Plate. Though sales were bolstered by her appearance on the cover of Rolling Stone under the heading “Bonnie Raitt: Daughter of the Blues,” reviews were more mixed than before. Her first significant commercial success arrived in ‘77 with the mainstream-sounding Sweet Forgiveness, which hit #25 in Billboard’s Pop Albums chart; its lead single, “Runaway” (a cover of Del Shannon’s #1 song from 1961), reached #57.

Despite being lambasted by the majority of critics, the album sparked a bidding war between Warner Bros. and arch rival Columbia and, with Waterman’s help, Raitt renegotiated her contract with Warner Bros. to match Columbia’s juicy offer. Her commercial momentum continued in 1979 with The Glow, which peaked at #30 in Billboard’s Pop Albums chart and resulted in her first Grammy nomination (Best Female Rock Vocal Performance); she lost out to Donna Summer.

Also in 1979, she appeared on the album No Nukes with Bruce Springsteen, The Doobie Brothers and Carly Simon, among others. She returned to New England frequently throughout the ‘70s, playing the Orpheum Theatre, Music Hall, The Shaboo Inn, Music Inn, Tanglewood, Boston Common and universities and colleges including Bowdoin in Brunswick, Maine (in the fall of ‘76).

EARLY 1980S ALBUMS, HARD TIMES, CAPITOL SIGNING, NICK OF TIME

Raitt recorded another modest commercial hit in 1982, Green Light, which went to #38 in the Pop Albums chart and brought her a second Grammy nomination (Best Female Rock Vocal Performance); this time, she lost out to Pat Benatar. In 1983, after she’d finished recording all the tracks for her ninth album, Tongue and Groove, Warner Bros. dropped her from its roster and put the tapes on ice, leaving Raitt without a contract. As a result, she spent the next two-odd years playing clubs and other small venues, among them Hot Tin Roof, Hampton Beach Club Casino and Toad’s Place.

In 1985, the year that Raitt debuted at the Newport Folk Festival, Warner Bros. decided to release Tongue and Groove as Nine Lives, but it stalled at #115 in the Pop Albums chart upon release in 1986 and was her worst-selling album since her 1971 debut. Adding insult to injury, her third Grammy nomination (Best Female Rock Vocal Performance) didn’t materialize, with Tina Turner winning the award. Through 1986 and much of 1987, with little hope of a new record deal and self-medicating in a big way with booze and other drugs, Raitt kept herself busy by appearing at small to mid-sized venues and various charity benefits, among them Farm Aid.

The light at the end of the proverbial tunnel arrived in late 1988, by which time Raitt had been clean and sober for over a year, when she signed with Capitol, brought on board by the label’s Vice Chairman and CEO Joe Smith, a Chelsea, Massachusetts native. Interestingly, Smith was president of Warner Bros. during Raitt’s first four years there – not when the label dropped her – and he became as pivotal to her later success as Dick Waterman had been to her earlier one. The immediate result was the album that made Raitt a global household name, Nick of Time, which Capitol issued in March 1989; it sold north of five million copies in the United States alone, won three Grammys (including Album of the Year) and soared to #1 in the Billboard 200. She won a fourth Grammy that year for her duet with John Lee Hooker on his LP The Healer.

1990S ALBUMS, 2000S ALBUMS, GRAMMY AWARDS

Raitt was a chart-topping, globe-trotting force of nature de force throughout the 1990s, recording four enormously successful albums for Capitol: Luck of the Draw (1991, Billboard 200 #2), which won three Grammys; Longing in Their Hearts (1994, Billboard 200 #1), which won the Best Pop Album Grammy; Road Tested (1995, Billboard 200 #44), which was her first live LP; and Fundamental (1998, Billboard 200 #17). In 1996 she won a Grammy for her instrumental “SRV Shuffle,” released on A Tribute to Stevie Ray Vaughn.

Since 2002, Raitt’s cut three commercially successful and critically acclaimed LPs for Capitol – Silver Lining (2002, Billboard 200 #13), Souls Alike (2005, Billboard 200 #19) and Bonnie Raitt and Friends (2006) – and in 2004 she appeared on Toots and the Maytals’ LP True Love and Ray Charles’ final album, Genius Loves Company, along with B.B. King, Van Morrison and others. In 2009, she and Taj Mahal toured together on the “Bon Taj Roulet” R&B-style revue.

Raitt established her own label in 2012, Redwing Records, and recorded Slipstream, which reached #6 in the Billboard 200 and led to her 10th Grammy (Best Americana Album). In 2016, Redwing released Dig in Deep, which hit #11in the Billboard 200 and included five original tunes (the most since 1998’s Fundamental). In August 2017, she played at Fenway Park on a double bill with James Taylor, who told The Boston Globe that Raitt was his “sister by another mother” because the two are “definitely in the same musical genome.”

JUST LIKE THAT…., RECENT GRAMMYS/ACCOLADES, “STAY TRUE TO YOUR ART”

In January 2022, Raitt received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grammys and in April that year she released her 18th studio LP, Just Like That…, which made it to #1 in two Billboard charts (Top Blues Albums and Folk Albums). In February 2023, she won three Grammys for songs on the LP: Song of the Year (“Just Like That”), Best American Roots Song (“Just Like That”) and Best Americana Performance (“Made Up Mind”). After noting in her acceptance speech that “Just Like That” was inspired by singer-songwriter John Prine, who died in 2020, Raitt said, “I don’t write a lot of songs but I’m so proud that you appreciate this one.”

In addition to 13 Grammys, Raitt has received a host of other awards and accolades over the decades, including an honorary doctorate from Berklee College of Music in 1992 and a Harvard Arts Medal for “achievement in the arts by a Harvard or Radcliffe alumnus” in 1997. She was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2000 and in 2002 she received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In 2012, the Americana Music Association gave her its Lifetime Achievement Award and in December 2024 she was presented with a Kennedy Center Honor for lifetime achievement.

Speaking to The Guardian in 2022, Raitt talked about the passion and perseverance that have been foundational to her career, highlighting the “art-over-commerce” approach that’s defined her professional life. “I’m just one more kid who learned how to play the blues from being a fan,” she said. “My game plan was just to follow my blues and jazz exemplars. Stay true to your art, do the best shows you can, keep going, don’t worry about commercial success, and when you’re 70 years old people will still want to come and see you.”

(by D.S. Monahan)