Bonnie Raitt opened for Mississippi Fred McDowell, with whom she became fast friends, and also began nurturing close relationships with the likes of Muddy Waters, Son House and John Lee Hooker. Then there was the time she met the great Howlin’ Wolf, the Delta man-bear with lungs to match: "For size and monumental presence, Wolf was staggering. I was only 19 when I met him at The Scene in New York, so I was speechless, like a little kid. He just put out his hand and it was the size of this [picks up a lunch menu] and I was swooning. Not like a groupie, but just because of the overwhelming power of the guy."
But perhaps a more telling influence, one that’s sustained her throughout her career, was the relatively unknown Sippie Wallace. Raitt covered three of the Texan’s songs on her first two albums, which led to them hooking up at 1972’s Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival. They subsequently toured together, on and off, for the next 15 years. "Sippie’s blues songs were my favourite because they had a little feminist spunk to them," Raitt explains. "They weren’t playing the victim so much. It was like, ‘Yeah you can make me do what you want to do, but you’d better know how’. It was one of those things that kinda matched my personality. I came up in the feminist era, so during my college years everybody went: ‘Hey, can we get off too? That’d be nice’."
Interview - Rob Hughes / The Telegraph
📸 - Lester Cohen
“She doesn’t require anything elaborate or wildly expensive to achieve her warm, sustaining sound. Her main electric guitar, Brownie, is a Fender Strat that pairs an unpainted 1965 body with a neck from an unknown year.
It has long been her faithful onstage companion, and she hasn’t played a show without it since the late night in 1969 when she bought it for a whopping $120. The price was right, and she loved how it sounded.” - Jeff Jacobson,
(Guitar Player Magazine) 🎸 🎶 🎙️
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