When did you develop confidence in playing?
Bonnie Raitt: During my first gig with Taj Mahal one afternoon. I took out my National and started playing some Fred McDowell stuff, and Taj, who didn't know me, looked over and said, "Hey all right." He came over, took out his guitar, and we started playing a wordless duet, him playing Willie Brown to my Charley Patton, you know, just throwing blues licks off each other, not saying anything.
Finally he reached out his hand and said, "Hello, my name is Taj Mahal." John Hammond has been a great help to me. I had a crush on him for years. Being a girl helped. These musicians came in, heard me sounding — or trying to — just like them, and they'd be flattered, and helpful. If I'd been a young guy doing a show just like John Hammond's, he might have felt a bit threatened. I wasn't playing as good as them, but they were real tickled that I was into their style.
How did you develop your own style out of the traditional blues?
My style is probably the result of a problem. My voice, actually soprano, is around five keys up from where Robert Johnson or Son House would do a song, say in Spanish open G tuning. I can't tune the strings up or down to get that open octave; I have to capo up three or five frets to get the same tuning, which is the only way to make the guitar part sound good.
You lose the octaves — with no cutaway you can't get your hand up there, and you've got only around three frets left to play slide. My National has a new, hybrid neck with fourteen frets, and that's one of the reasons I went to electric, for the longer neck. Just adding my voice to a Fred McDowell guitar part would bring about a unique style, though.
Patricia Brody / 1977 Interview
Photo: David Gahr
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