07/22/2022
Bonnie Raitt: My hobby was playing music. So here I was hanging out with all these blues guys, my heroes, because of the man I met at Cambridge when I was a freshman who managed Son House and Mississippi John Hurt and Buddy Guy. We started hanging out, and I took a semester off, because I knew a lot of those guys were older and they weren’t going to live forever. This was an opportunity to hang out with my heroes, and I could always go back to school. In the beginning, to have this career drop in my lap because I happened to play pretty good blues guitar for a girl — which was kind of a joke at the time, but it’s what got my foot in the door. The fact I could play like I did and it was unusual.
When I was at the Philadelphia Folk Festival, which I had gone to as a fan — it was unbelievable to me. It would continue to be unbelievable until about my third album. I kept waiting for Warner Bros. to say, “OK, that was fun, but you’re not selling, so see you later.” But I signed with them because they didn’t care about selling. They said make whatever record you want and we’ll make our money from Deep Purple and Black Sabbath.
Bonnie Raitt poses for a portrait in August 1971 near Schwenksville, Pennsylvania. (Photo by David Gahr
