The incomparable Bonnie Raitt is getting the recognition she so richly deserves when she’ll be among the five-member Kennedy Center Honors class of 2024. Tomorrow evening’s ceremony will take place in the Center’s Opera House and will be broadcast nationally on December 23rd on CBS.

I first saw Raitt live sometime in the 1970s, and I’ve always been taken by her ability to select songs by other writers and make them her own, a voice that she has “hammered into submission” until it fits her music to a T, an ability to work with musicians from a wide range of genres, and a unique guitar sound that has been described as “the way bacon smells.”

Oh, she more than hits that mark.

Karen Heller’s thoughtful profile of Raitt in The Washington Post describes how important her parents were in shaping her worldview.

“Her late father, musical theater luminary John Raitt (‘Carousel,’ ‘Oklahoma,’ ‘The Pajama Game’), remains her Polaris. ‘My dad didn’t care if he had another Broadway show. He just wanted to take his music to the people,’ she says. ‘He knew that he would last a long time if every show was opening night. I grew up with that ethos and knew how much fun he had.’ He toured until his mid-80s, until his body would no longer let him.” 

Raitt is loyal to old friends, many of whom show up on her albums and in live shows; progressive in her politics*; frugal (“I’m Quaker and Scottish”); and “mum about her love life, invoking the Sippie Wallace mantra, ‘women be wise, keep your mouth shut, don’t advertise your man’.”

While the studio version of Women Be Wise that Raitt cut for her self-titled debut album in 1971 is a great interpretation of the Wallace classic, she also performed the song live in a wonderful version with the songwriter where they are clearly having too much fun.

To my mind, however, it is hard to beat Raitt’s performance from the 2009 New Orleans JazzFest, where she literally calls up the horn section in the middle of the tune and turns it over to these cats.

Raitt began by learning and playing the blues, but she’s always had a wide range of musical interests. I Can’t Make You Love Me, which Heller notes routinely leaves fans in tears, perfectly captures the excruciating pain of a broken heart.

Used to Rule the World, which opens her Grammy Award-winning album Slipstream, has a funky grove that fits the song and showcases her killer band.

Raitt is one of the great collaborators in music today, beginning back in the 1970s with her blues heroes.

Her 1990 duet with John Lee Hooker on the bluesman’s I’m In the Mood for Love won a Grammy Award.

For more contemporary duets, listen to Raitt go from the bluesiest Tennessee Waltz you’ll ever hear with the beautiful and talented Norah Jones to good ole gospel rock in Turn Me Around with the one and only Mavis Staples.

Raitt is best known for interpreting songs rather than writing her own. But many times, her interpretation becomes the definitive version. Thing Called Love is a great John Hiatt tune, but Raitt took it to another level, something Hiatt certainly appreciated, as seen in their live version together from 1990’s Farm Aid concert. B.B. King, one of Raitt’s many collaborators, “dubbed her ‘the best damn slide player working.’” Listen to her solo at the 2:35 mark, if you want to see her in action.

One of her most recent Grammy awards came in 2022 for the simple yet subtle story song Just Like That. As one observer said, this shows that there’s still a space for genuine music in an industry obsessed with pitch correction and over production. As Heller noted, this is one song that Raitt wrote herself.

“’Just Like That’ tells the story of a woman who causes a car accident that kills her son, then meets the transplant victim who received his heart, the latter inspired by a news story. Even after singing the song a few hundred times, Raitt cries recalling its genesis.

Songs like ‘Just Like That’ don’t come along very often,” Crow says. ‘It’s a perfect song, and if she never wrote a song before or after it, it wouldn’t matter. It is deep and meaningful, and I feel like it’s who she truly is. A thinker, an intellect. She shows up for the cause.’”

Somehow grace finds us.

The one tune that has become her signature—closing every show—is the John Prine classic Angel from Montgomery. The song is a master class in songwriting. Prine, as a 23-year-old man, inhabits this character of a tired middle-age Southern housewife in a broken-down marriage. He ends with ‘To believe in this living is just a hard way to go”—the line that Tim Bousquet in the Halifax Examiner described as the best single lyrical line describing existential despair. It all makes Angel from Montgomery 3 minutes and 43 seconds of astonishing songcraft. And Bonnie Raitt nails it.

I love her interpretation so much that I couldn’t choose just one to share. Ruthie Foster joins Raitt in a live performance complete with strings that is as wonderful as it is spontaneous (as Foster never practiced the tune before walking on stage).

I’ll end with Bonnie and Jackson Browne—a longtime Raitt friend and collaborator—in a 2022 performance. I first saw Raitt live in the 1970s when she was opening for a young Jackson Browne in Nashville. It was magical then, and this performance, some fifty years later, brings all that magic back, only leavened and deepened with the voices of experience.

Bonnie Raitt: a national treasure.

More to come . . .

DJB

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*A note on her social justice work:

Bonnie’s Quaker roots and family ties to the American Friends Service Committee inspire her commitment to social justice, equality, compassion for the suffering and protection of the air we breathe and the water we drink. She has participated in hundreds of benefit concerts and continues to use her voice to raise awareness and support for a myriad of causes she holds dear.

BonnieRaitt.com

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Slipstream publicity photo of Bonnie Raitt by Marina Chavez (from BonnieRaitt.com)