Bonnie Raitt
BONNIE RAITT RESIDES among the redwoods. She had always dreamed of living in Northern California like one of her heroes, Joan Baez, did, up in Big Sur. So years ago, once she had wrapped the tour for Nick of Time — her 1989 commercial breakthrough on Capitol Records that won her three Grammy Awards, including album of the year — she took a break and rented a furnished place in Marin County, outside San Francisco. She typically splits her time between here and Los Angeles. But for the past two years, the environment up north suited her especially well. “If I wasn’t going to get to play,” Raitt, 72, says today, verdant foliage encroaching on the window behind her, “at least I could hike and walk by the ocean and be near this incredible mecca of counterculture.”
It makes sense finding Raitt here. Marrying music and activism “is why I agreed to do this for a living,” she says. When she went to college at Radcliffe in the late 1960s, playing guitar was a hobby. “I was going to major in African studies and go work with the American Foreign Service and undo colonialism — yeah!” she says with a fierce little grunt. Amid the student strike of 1970, she fronted a ragtag band called the Revolutionary Music Collective. “‘The best things in life are free/When you take them from the bourgeoisie!’ — that was my hero line,” recalls Raitt with a laugh.
The gig was short, but the career Raitt would enjoy within a couple of years did become pretty revolutionary. Through her mentor, promoter Dick Waterman, she met and learned from the country-blues artists who were her idols — Son House, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Muddy Waters, Sippie Wallace — and became the rare woman of her era not only fronting a band but more than holding her own on guitar while doing so. Her slide guitar prowess, along with her casually confident stage presence and soulful alto, earned the respect (and friendship) of the men who were her closest contemporaries, like Jackson Browne and James Taylor.
Looking back now, Raitt is, characteristically, not terribly impressed with herself. “I mean, I was OK — I wasn’t that great,” she says with a shrug. “I was inexpensive, nonthreatening and interesting.” But she does admit that “it was an unusual thing to have a white woman — any woman — playing country-blues. I know having the chops of playing blues guitar got my foot in the door. I think I bypassed having to prove myself.”
Raitt achieved critical acclaim early on, and Warner Bros.
Records signed her at just 21. But until Nick of Time — and, in the few years following it, her run of hit singles including “Something To Talk About” and “I Can’t Make You Love Me” that introduced her to a new generation of fans, the now elder millennials — commercial success wasn’t her calling card. By her own admission, she has always made her living on the road. Yet Raitt has unwaveringly stuck to her own artistic North Star and to the impulse that led her to music in the first place: using her voice to amplify causes like electing progressive political candidates, sustainable energy and environmental protection — she sets aside a share of her touring profits for them like “the sixth band member” — without ever letting them overshadow the music itself.
And incredibly, this year’s Icon has done that by and large as an interpreter, not a writer, of the songs on her albums — a fact that still can shock even a longtime fan. They all tend to sound like Raitt originals because she never simply sings a lyric; she inhabits it. “She was able to glean so much from these songwriters,” says Lucinda Williams, adding that she is often asked to play “Bonnie Raitt songs” that Raitt didn’t actually write. “She had good taste. When I first started out, it maybe held me back a little bit that I wanted to do so many kinds of music — rock and blues and country. But she did it, too, and she made it work. She was a great role model.”
One of those songs, from Raitt’s 1974 album, Streetlights, was by her longtime friend, the great singer-songwriter John Prine, who died from COVID-19 complications in 2020. Many artists have covered “Angel From Montgomery,” but it’s Raitt’s version that became definitive. It’s unsentimental yet deeply poignant, a plainspoken expression of longing for something more: “If dreams were lightning/And thunder were desire/ This old house would have burned down a long time ago.”
She sang it for her idol Wallace, who told her of the many blueswomen who came before her, “stuck in marriages that were dead ends or being abused but had no agency to leave. Who couldn’t get free.” As a young feminist, she sang it for her