Bonnie Raitt - at OGWT 1976 + mini profile . . . . . 38 years sober!

Photo by Deborah Feingold

Bonnie Raitt: I have such a wide range of tastes, from Madeleine Peyroux to Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, the most gut-bucket country blues, Appalachian music and Celtic music. World music has always just broken my heart wide open. I love African music and guitar playing; I love South Africa and I loved Graceland. I was so happy to see so much of the incredible gift that African music can give the rest of the world, brought out by Paul Simon’s amazing success.

World music has always appealed to me, especially in my early 20s: reggae was really taking over the college scene in Cambridge with Toots and Bob Marley. I loved Oliver Mtukudzi’s music from Zimbabwe.

I’m so grateful for my 38 years of sobriety – knock on wood, one day at a time – which is probably why I’m still here just in terms of perspective, emotionally and spiritually. But also getting enough sleep and getting some exercise: I do yoga and weights with a girlfriend on FaceTime three times a week, no matter where I am. And as the world situation is so stressful and so upsetting, I don’t know what I would do if it wasn’t for being able to get out into nature and hike and be with the fellowship of my people that feel like I do about the world.

Rachel Keenan / The Guardian Interview 2025

Seems there are folks who post whole concerts of Flickennabokk! this from Alan Bershaw

"Journey back nearly half a century, with Bonnie Raitt and her band performing live at the BBC Television Center in Shepherd’s Bush, West London on March 23, 1976.  

This originally aired on the BBC’s Old Grey Whistle Test program and was later rebroadcast several times, including here in the states by VH1 Classics.   VHS sourced copies are easily found all over the web and this show has been bootlegged to death, but this BetaCam SP copy of the BBC’s 2” master looks and sounds superior to any bootleg DVD or web version I've ever seen before.

This set is often cited as being “a live album that should exist,” and I’d have to agree, as it conveys a long gone moment in time so well, with Bonnie and these musicians in fantastic form.  The personnel and content as follows:

Bonnie Raitt - vocals, guitar 

Will McFarlane - guitar

Alan Hand - piano 

Freebo - bass

Dennis Whitted - drums

-introduction by Bob Harris

01 Love Me Like A Man 

02 Too Long At The Fair 

03 I'm Blowin' Away 

04 You've Got To Know How

05 Write Me A Few Of Your Lines/Kokomo Blues 

06 Sugar Mama 

07 What Do You Want The Boy to Do? 

08 Angel From Montgomery"

Bonnie Raitt stringing her guitar, 1973

“I had not been familiar with the country blues before,” Raitt recalls. “I’d heard the Rolling Stones and Slim Harpo and Howlin’ Wolf and even some of The Beatles’ R&B covers, but the first time I heard Mississippi John Hurt and Reverend Gary Davis and John Lee Hooker was on that record. I was 14 and every artist on there — from Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry to John Hammond Jr. — absolutely knocked me out.

“I already loved Odetta and folk music and gospel music as well, but it wasn’t until I heard that record that I was aware of the country blues. Then it became really hard to decide whether to get the new Bob Dylan or Beatles or Stones record with my allowance, or one of those country blues records. It was a good incentive to get a side job.”

“Fred McDowell taught me that you don’t have to be an older black person who lived through poverty in the South in order to play the blues,” Raitt explains. “From John Hammond to Koerner, Ray and Glover to Paul Butterfield — and all the British blues artists, even the Stones — there’s something about soul music and blues music that really cut to me. And Fred McDowell instantly appealed to something in my heart.

“I loved his sense of humour, and what I most got out of him was the passion that he played. He used to just throw his head back and lift his knee up, take that slide guitar all the way up the neck. And I would just watch transfixed, because at that point, I had only heard records. Then when I met Fred and got to see him live, I was just blown away by the power of one guy and a guitar to just hit so many emotions. I think I just fell in love with the blues as deeply as I ever was going to get with Mississippi Fred McDowell.”

Photo by Albertson, Jeff

Bonnie Raitt: People used to say you had to have - be poor and miserable to have the blues, but, you know, life is a full banquet, you know? I mean, Muddy Waters was one of the most joyous people I know. I'm sure he had got mad and had his heart broken and was poor at one point, certainly, but he didn't sing the blues with any less fervor or meaning. And I'm not going through a breakup right now, but everything I sing I Can't Make You Love Me it cuts me as deep as if I was.

So I don't think - I mean, I understand the point and I get, and I actually get asked a lot about what are you going to do when you get straight and successful, what're you going to do? But the blues are, for me, the truth and the - in the arc of a day or in a full life, you know, you're going to be miserable or forlorn or horny or bereft or angry or frustrated, no matter what level of income you're at or who you're with, you know.

So, I find that surprisingly, even though I'm better off than I was, and more stable so to speak, some of the hours of the day, I still can summon up those feelings of absolute rage and charge and loneliness and all the things that infuse the songs I do. But absolute feeling them - I feel them as real as if I'm going through them. 

NPR Interview

Bonnie Raitt: "I got a record when I was fourteen called Blues At Newport 1963, which was on the Vanguard label - the Mecca for folk music fans," she reveals. "It was a treasured Christmas present. And I had never heard country blues before. So I sat in my room in Los Angeles and taught myself to play; I never took guitar lessons. And to this day I use the wrong finger. But John Hammond was the first time I heard slide guitar. I soaked the label off a cold medication bottle and put the bottle on my finger. I knew about barring and open chord, and I just used this pill bottle. I learned by ear. It wasn't until about six years later that I saw someone playing bottle-neck guitar, and by then it was too late to change my style." 

"It was pretty amazing from the minute I met Son House," she coos. "I was writing letters to my friends in California. I mean, I already felt pretty lucky being my father's daughter, and I knew Doris Day and all these Hollywood people. It was just a completely different world to have this young, white, middle-class kid from California hanging out with these gods of music like Muddy Waters. It's a fairytale, and it's the greatest gift of my life. It's not just hanging out with them musically, but they're my friends." 

- Jerry Erwing interview 

Photo by Michael Putland

Bonnie Raitt: "I'm just one more kid who learned how to play the blues from being a fan, my gameplan 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.

One constant that will never go away is the audience connection. I've experienced that when I've been in the audience. All of us love being there with the people we love. As a performer, I've been doing this for 50 years. 

I've never sold many records. I'm an artist who is standing where I am today because of the live loyalty and excitement and the magic that happened through repeat performances for those audiences. You cannot duplicate it over the internet or even on a record. 

Photo from The Patriot Ledger