Her first impression of Bonnie Raitt came after the funeral
of Skip James. Local writer Mary Niepold
watched as Bonnie Raitt was sitting in the dining room of widow Lorenza James in
West Philadelphia. She was sitting on the side next his upright piano, and she
strummed the blues on an old guitar. Softly.
All alone. Delta bluesman James had been
buried that after noon.
In 1974, the Temple University Music Festival in Ambler
welcomed Bonnie Raitt back to town; but she wasn’t alone and she was still playing
the blues she learned from bluesmen like James, the late Mississippi Fred McDowell
and Sippie Wallace. She played them
softly, sometimes audaciously. And on this visit to Philadelphia (in which she
has performed many times in the last three years), she had nearly four thousand
people moving to every beat and earthy nuance of her music. Having already played in the Main Point, the Shubert,
the Walnut and the Academy of Music, Raitt had no trouble reaching large
houses. She’s as intimate with thousands
as she is with hundreds. Talking, smiling and cracking jokes between numbers,
she holds you engagingly. Not once
during the hour or so performance, did she lose her composure.
“She prefers an intimate atmosphere,” according to her
bass player, Freebo (formerly with Philadelphia’s Edison Electric Band), “but
you can’t just play small houses and have them lined up around the block. You
have to reach the large houses.”
There were a few problems. Her 20-year-old electric
Gibson needed tuning between every number. She laughed about it, and perched on
a black stool, complaining about her need for an assistant “to do my tuning.” The lighting was burning her out, too. “My freckles are melting.” The biggest problem (of which the audience likely
had no awareness) was the new group that gave its first performance. With only three days rehearsal, it showed in
the opening numbers, but on the whole the group came across well. The two new
members, after several years with Van Morrison, were John Platanaia on guitar
and Jeff Labes on piano. Each had their
moments. Each played skillfully. The rhythm section of Raitt, Freebo on bass
(and harmony and kazoo) and Dennis Whitted on drums was as tight, as driving,
as it always was. But the real star was Raitt
and blues isn’t the only thing she’s a star in.
Time has only refined Ms. Raitt’s ability to go up and down
emotions like scales on a piano. She can slide in and out of a ballad and make
it as pure as a solo guitar. A gut-grabbing plea for love can become as painful
in its remembrance as it was the first time you felt it. A rhythm and blues
number rocks the chairs, one and all. Bonnie
Raitt always comes off as a woman, a little bit wistful, a little bit brazen
and all the time soulful. She’s also a
consummate musician.
Above article from Mary Niebold, “Bonnie is Intimate Wherever She Goes,” The Philadelphia (PA) Inquirer, Aug 10, 1974.
Bonnie Raitt came up in the southern California atmosphere
of Broadway show tunes and surfing music.
She always liked the best soul, folk and blues. “I started playing guitar at ten or twelve,
picked up folk and by the time I was 14 I was playing blues guitar.” She rushed
East for college to be part of the folk scene in Cambridge, Massachusetts “Of course
when I got there, it had closed. Rock music had descended. “In 1968, I went to Europe. I thought I’d
heard every blues record. In England they had some unreleased material.” That’s where Miss Raitt first heard the music
of Sippie Wallace.
“I recorded two of her songs on my first album. I got to meet
her finally in 1972 at the Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival. I do her songs
mostly because I like them the best and she is alive. She is one of the few who
could benefit from me doing her songs. She celebrated her 77th birthday recently.
She is an elder black woman who lives in Detroit, but she was one of the classical
blues singers of the twenties. Her lyrics are raunchy in a kind of refreshing
double entendre, not bawdy—a lot more touching and a Randy Newman kind of
off-the-wall lyrics.
Her political and social views grew from her involvement
as a Quaker. “It was a social
orientation, hands around the world, pacifist, the American Friends Service
Committee. I went to Quaker camp the last two years of high school and became a
leftist , liberal progressive. Now it seems the radicalism of the ’60s has become
the common sense of the ’70s.
“Right now I’m involved with helping Tom Hayden run for
Senate in California. It is nice to run up and down the state doing benefits
and including local musicians.” She does
about 50 benefit concerts a year, accepting expenses, no performance fee. “I do them for women’s community health centers,
legal assistance projects, listener-sponsored radio stations. They pass out information
in the lobby. I think it’s important.”
Above article from Mary Campbell, “Singer
Bonnie Raitt Has Roots in Blues,” The (Bakersfield, CA) Times, Jan 25, 1976.
