Bonnie Raitt
Appearances
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
Well, this is one of the greatest vocals I've ever heard. It's so simple. And the piano part and the arrangement, this is really early. Even though B.B. started in the late 40s, and he's got a lot of his hits in the 50s, this was a record that when I was 10 or 11 years old, I happened to hear on a radio station. And later... Everybody's got that one record that just turned their head around.
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
Sometimes there's a Ray Charles tune that did it for me, and then later hearing John Lee Hooker when I was about 14. But B.B. King was a big star in Los Angeles on the black radio, and Rock Me Baby's just a classic tune. Many people have covered it, but I just wanted to bring it to let you know how... unbelievably simple and pure and right to the bone this song can be. And B.B.
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
's still one of our greatest bluesmen. I love him dearly.
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
Well, I sure hope so. I don't know how to play single string lead on electric guitar as well as any of the guitar players that are currently out there. I play acoustic solos more, and I play pretty good rhythm guitar, but my lead playing tends to remain on the slide guitar where I know what I'm doing better.
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
So I just, it probably has more to do with phrasing and what to leave out and just, you know, when you go crazy for somebody's style, it's not, unless you're doing a specific mimicking of what they're doing, which I don't do, I would say my singing, just because of his style, restraint, his restraint and his passion.
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
I hope I got some influence from him because I just think he's one of the tastiest and most deep singers I've ever heard, as well as one of the greatest blues guitar players in the history of guitar players.
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
Well, I did because I've been performing that song, write me a few of your lines, as well as his Kokomo blues, probably since the first time I met Fred.
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
Some days I never get out of bed. I start out with the best of intentions and then shut it instead. Don't think we'll get back how we used to. No use in trying to measure the loss. We better start getting used to it and damn the cost. Go ahead and ask me how I make it through.
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
I was about 19 in 1969, and he was part of the great blues rediscovery in the 60s of all these traditional Delta bluesmen who a lot of times, like Fred, had spent the last 20 years being farmers and then suddenly were discovered by either British or white college kids coming over that just fell in love. And I... got his record on our Hooley Records and learned the song.
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
Yeah, it took a long time to summon up the nerve, and I think somewhat of maturity and sobriety had something to do with it, what comes with sobriety in terms of being able to have a perspective. And since that coincided with my late 30s, early 40s for me, it's hard to separate the two.
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
I think that a great song has appealed to me, and I've been in love with the songs of Carousel in Oklahoma and Pajama Game since my dad died. He's been singing them all my life. I just never really thought I would sing them in public. I certainly sung them enough in private just for fun and grew up singing them.
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
We started this idea out when we used to just practice Christmas carols and would sing different Broadway songs in his pool. We'd be exercising together, and that was a good way to spend some father-daughter alone time together. And next thing I knew, he sort of suggested doing something together, maybe for the Pops.
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
And before we knew it, we were performing with John Williams for Evening at the Pops a few years ago, and we did these songs that we ended up putting on my dad's album. And I enjoyed it so much and was terrified to sing in front of an orchestra in a town in Boston that I got my start in. And I think the fact that it was a safe ground made it an easy first date. And we went on to do...
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
And then I was honored enough to meet him and travel around with him. And I actually opened a lot of shows for him early on when I was still cutting my teeth and right before I got my first record deal. So he's really my favorite and my closest friend, and I miss him a lot.
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
David Letterman together and and he's been coming out over the many years and singing Oklahoma at the end of my shows but I must say I was shivering in my boots the first time I sang they say that falling in love is wonderful in front of my audience but they you know stood up and cheered and that gave me the confidence to put it on a record okay well from the album John Raitt Broadway legend let's hear Bonnie Raitt and her father singing hey there from the pajama game
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
With the stars in your eyes Love never made a fool of you You used to be too wise Hey there Though she won't throw a crime to you You think someday she'll come to you Better forget her Forget her Her with her nose in the air.
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
And I wanted people to know that when they hear my version on the live album, for example, that this is where we got it, the great Mississippi Fred McDowell. Oh, let's hear it, recorded in 1964.
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
Yeah, I'd have to say that of all the tunes I've recorded, this one moves me the most, and it's the one that gets mentioned to me when I'm out and about, you know, sky caps or people that are taking my reservation on the phone, you know, they just have spoken to me about how much that song means, and I just have to thank Mike Reed and Alan Shamblin for feeling as deeply as they did to come up with this, because I definitely think this is one that's going to stand the test of time.
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
Turn down Turn down these voices inside my head Lay down with me and tell me no lies Just hold me close me cause I can't make you love me if you don't you can't make your heart feel something it won't here in In these final hours, I will lay down my heart and feel the power. You won't. No, you won't. I can make you love me.
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
Actually, I started out with the father of Delta Blues making an appearance in Cambridge at the house of a man who helped rediscover him, Dick Waterman, who came to be a very important part of my life and a lot of lives of blues people.
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
Sun House was staying with Dick Waterman in Cambridge where I was going to college, and I heard through the Harvard radio station that he was going to be there, and this other blues fanatic friend of mine said, would you like to meet him? So it started with that, and then I met Dick Waterman that day.
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
went on to get to hang out with Skip James and big boy Arthur Crudup and Fred McDowell and Mance Lipscomb and then Buddy Guy Jr. Wells were all people that Dick booked. And he had worked with Mississippi John Hurt, who unfortunately had passed away before I got a chance to meet him. But that was my entry into meeting all these great blues people. And part of the reason I took a
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
semester off in my sophomore year was because I knew that these guys were up in age and that I wasn't going to have this opportunity to kind of get to know them and learn at their feet and be of service or just hang out and soak this up. And that was when Fred and I just made this bond.
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
And I'm sure he, as well as the other bluesmen, always got a big kick out of the fact that this little round-faced redhead was playing Robert Johnson songs and Sun House songs. And I just sat there listening to their stories and learned to drink and, you know, try to be a blues woman at 20, which, you know, I managed to do by the time I was 40 and get recognized for it.
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
You know, I'm sure it was odd from the outside, but for the inside, most of the people that were in love with blues were white middle-class kids that were just going to folk festivals and going around the South with tape recorders.
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
And, of course, the British interest in the blues and Big Bill Brunzi and Lead Belly, and that led to so many of these records being exposed to groups that became the Rolling Stones and the Animals and the Beatles even. The rhythm and blues music was on the radio at that time. Not delta blues, but rhythm and blues was on the radio right next to the Beatles and all the white groups.
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
So it wasn't as segregated and it didn't seem as culturally odd to me at the time. I just knew that I'd lucked into something.
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
Well, his particular, you know, my style's obviously a little different, and of course the key's different, because I sing in a woman's key.
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
There were some chords that he used, you know, certain positions on the guitar that I wouldn't have been able to figure out until I watched him do it, but the basic way you learn guitar for me, because I didn't take lessons, was just listening and mimicking, and... And his soulfulness and just his abandon, the way he got into it.
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
And when he played electric guitar, which he did a lot of the time in later years because it cut through more to clubs where kids were noisy. And, you know, that's what led me to the electric guitar was the way that the note would sustain and just sing and the way you could just... It's so funky when you get these...
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
you know, cheap amps and, you know, it's just, you know, that's the stuff that makes David Lindley and Ry Cooder, Jackson Browne's slide plan so great because they just use these really incredible amplification that duplicates the old, really inexpensive amps. And people want to know how to get that funky sound. Well, get a $25 guitar and the cheapest amp you can find.
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
When you get home, baby, write me a few of your lines. When you get home, little baby, write me a few of your lines. That'll be consolation, Lord, honey, on my worried mind.
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
No, I just heard it. It's not that difficult to play. Whenever you're learning a song from somebody else, you don't really have to see it unless you're playing some kind of amazing Jimi Hendrix thing, which I probably wouldn't even be able to tackle. These things that I play are really stuff that I can manage.
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
It's the finesse of it and the soul that you put into it that makes him different from me probably, and hopefully one day I'll get to be as funky as he is.
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
singing blues tunes. It just sounded the fruitiest, you know, whitest voice I'd ever heard, which I didn't mind singing Joan Baez songs. But, you know, I really did think that if I just lived that, you know, I went from being pretty much not a rebel rouser as a teenager. I was a really good student. I went away to a Quaker school and went right to college.
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
And I don't even think I partied at all until I was about 20. And the drinking age in Massachusetts wasn't even until 21. So I started hanging out with these hardcore guys and You know, like any kid sitting at the feet of the masters, you know, I also got to go on tour hanging out with Buddy and Junior's band on the Rolling Stones tour of Europe. So that was some professional hound dogs there.
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
So, you know, those first few years, it was very difficult to be as light sounding as I was. And so I kind of made up for it by bravado and kind of swaggering around thinking I could be, you know, like Etta James in a minute.
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
Yeah, that was an interesting position to be in. I'm sorry I cut you off, Terry. Go ahead.
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
Oh, that was just, yeah, there was one blues festival where it was kind of my job to, because there was a lot of different bluesmen in one backstage area, all of whom had not only different tastes in what to drink, but could handle it differently. For example, Son House, if he had a couple of shots of vodka, he could remember all of his songs, and if he had too much, he couldn't remember them.
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
So if he didn't have any at all, he usually didn't even want to play. So it was just one of these chemistry experiments that was...
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
Kind of a funny anecdote for a young college student hanging out with these blues guys because it was kind of my job to help road manage, and I had to be sure not to let somebody just pass a pint bottle to somebody that I knew was just going to get totally toasted, and he didn't play until four hours from now.
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
You're getting old guys that have been farmers and Pullman Porters for 25 years, and suddenly everybody wants to give them anything they want in whatever quantity. And it did a lot of them in. You have to be really careful. Otherwise, it's not helping anybody to give somebody who has a propensity to alcoholism too much alcohol. And we've all seen that in every lifestyle in rock and roll.
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
Well, this particular album, which has now been re-released on Alligator Records, it's from an album called, I think it's Sippy Sings the Blues, if they left the name the same. And I picked it up when I was 18. I spent the summer my freshman year in on a college charter flight and traveled around Europe with a couple of girlfriends.
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
Went into the famous Dobell's record store in London and found this incredible record. picture of this woman in these rhinestone cat glasses, and it said Sippy Wallace, and I recognized the name from my old classic blues collection records, you know, compilations, and I'd always really liked Sippy's music because she really didn't take any...
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
She didn't cut anybody any slack in terms of men at the time. She wasn't a victim. She was, you know, you can make me do what you want to do, but you've got to know how. So I had bought the record, fell in love with her, had no idea she was still alive. And at that point, the record was only two or three years old, I think.
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
Well, you know by that I must have had them walking through.
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
And I'd recorded a couple of her songs, three actually, over my first two albums. And when I was invited to come to the Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival in 1972 to perform, I, at that point, had found out that that's where she was living in Detroit and invited her to come out on stage.
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
She said she would only do gospel because she was recovering from a stroke and had given up the blues and was playing in the church. And... So I started playing Women Be Wise in the little trailer backstage, and she started kind of sashing back and forth, and she said, well, maybe I'll just do one blues.
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
And the rest is kind of history, because after that, she was the big hit of the festival, our duet of this song, and we went on to record it together in her subsequent album, Sippy, on Atlantic Records. And we toured together for the next 15 years until she passed away at 86.
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
Man, oh man. That's a wonderful recording. That's really, really great.
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
Well, I'd say those lyrics, for starters. I mean, both You Got to Know How and Women Be Wise and Mighty Type Woman. All these tunes that she writes are real lessons. I learned a lot about what kind of songs appeal to me by what she chose to write about.
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
And, yeah, I mean, just in terms of her love of family and her independence from men, I mean, she lost her husband many years previous to when I met her and seemed to have a very full life not being somebody's wife. I'm sure she would have, you know, she missed her husband. He was the love of her life. And she really had no desire to get connected again.
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
And that was a very strong lesson to me as a young girl. Because I did grow up in a feminist era. And to have a blues woman or someone like Ruth Brown or Aretha Franklin as my role models, as well as Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell, you know, these are women that just stood up for themselves and demanded respect.