If the blues hadn't come along, Bonnie Raitt might well have ended up as another flower-power folkie like Judy Collins, rather than the gutsy purveyor of the styles of Fred McDowell and Mississippi John Hurt.
Raitt, the slide-guitar-playing daughter of Broadway star John Raitt, was a fan of Collins and Joan Baez until somebody gave her an album of blues at Newport when she was 13 or 14 years old. It literally changed her life.
"It had Brownie and Sonny, John Lee Hooker, Dave Van Ronk," Raitt said in a suprisingly bright voice. Blues players ought to talk like closing time in a bar, but Raitt has just a touch of rasp in her voice, and her sentences trail off into soft obilivion.
"We were in the middle of the so-called folk revival and the blues were getting a lot of attention ... people like Son House, John Hurt, Fred McDowell ... it just struck me like a gong."
After listening to the album and others like it, she began playing blues instead of folk. She no longer wanted to be Judy Collins.
At 18 or 19, she ran into Son House and Arthur Crudup and others and received further education in the heritage that is the blues.
"A lot of people think I didn't learn about the blues until I met them (in my late teens)," Raitt says. "But I listened to the albums. I still have that (Newport) record, as a matter of fact."
by Michael Kilgore 1980
Don’s Tunes
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