ONE OF THE STRONGEST SHOWS IN RECENT MONTHS HAS BEEN BOOKED INTO the Cellar Door starting Monday. John Prine and Bonnie Raitt open for one week, and if you don’t have reservations by now, you probably won’t get any.
A lot has been written in recent months about Prine, so it’s time to dwell on Bonnie Raitt.
Born in Burbank, California, Bonnie moved east with her family before she was a year old—so her father, musical comedy star John Raitt, could take a role on Broadway in Pajama Game.
Because of her father’s occupation, the family was constantly on the go. In 1957, they ended up back in California. “I always hated L.A.,” Bonnie recently recalled.
Her interest in music was nurtured at age ten, when she heard an Odetta record. She started learning to play guitar and by age twelve was playing country blues.
Bonnie was influenced by legendary bluesmen like “Mississippi” John Hurt, Robert Johnson, and Son House and contemporary bluesmen like John Hammond, John Koerner, and Willie Murphy, who produced the first of her two albums for Warner Bros.
“It was really far out when I finally got to play with these people after having listened to them for so long,” she said.
After high school, Bonnie went to college in Cambridge, Mass., where a folk music scene was blossoming. She started to play in local clubs when she realized “there were some really bad second acts playing. I thought to myself—what the hell, I can do this.”
Her popularity grew and she found herself playing at the Main Point in Philadelphia, the Gaslite in New York, the Philadelphia Folk Festival, and various colleges.
“I never really did like folk music,” she said. “I dig soul music. But it can be frustrating not to be able to sing the kind of music you like—like the Temptations.
Bonnie’s vocals are a mixture of country blues and soul and her bottleneck guitar and piano playing seem to naturally blend in with the material she chooses.
Her second album, Give It Up, features songs like Barbara George’s “I Know,” Jackson Browne’s “Under the Falling Sky,” “If You Gotta Make a Fool of Somebody,” and the title cut, “Give It Up or Let Me Go.”