The astounding thing about Bonnie Raitt's blues album isn't that it's the work of a preternaturally gifted blues woman, it's that Raitt doesn't choose to stick to the blues. She's decided to blend her love of classic folk blues with folk music, including new folk-rock tunes, along with a slight R&B, New Orleans, and jazz bent and a mellow Californian vibe. Surely, Bonnie Raitt is a record of its times, as much as Jackson Browne's first album is, but with this, she not only sketches out the blueprint for her future recordings, but for the roots music that would later be labeled as Americana. The reason that Bonnie Raitt works is that she is such a warm, subtle singer. She never oversells these songs, she lays back and sings them with heart and wonderfully textured reading. Her singing is complemented by her band, who is equally as warm, relaxed, and engaging. This is music that goes down so easy, it's only on the subsequent plays that you realize how fully realized and textured it is. A terrific debut that has only grown in stature since its release. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide
Career Highlights: Saturday Night Live: Robert Klein, Heart Condition, Bridge to Havana
First Major Screen Credit: Saturday Night Live: Robert Klein (1978)
Biography
Best known as a bluesy singer/songwriter and slide guitarist, Bonnie Raitt has also appeared in a few movies, usually in cameos as herself. Her father, John Raitt, is a famed Broadway performer. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
Bonnie Raitt is the self-titled debut album by Bonnie Raitt, released in 1971 (see 1971 in music). A straight-blues affair, it was recorded at an empty summer camp on Enchanted Island, about 30 miles west of Minneapolis on Lake Minnetonka. "We recorded live on four tracks because we wanted a more spontaneous and natural feeling in the music," Raitt wrote in the album's liner notes, "a feeling often sacrificed when the musicians know they can overdub their part on a separate track until it's perfect."
Though album sales were modest, Bonnie Raitt was warmly received by rock critics. "Raitt is a folkie by history but not by aesthetic," wrote Robert Christgau in his Consumer Guide column. "She includes songs from Steve Stills, the Marvelettes, and a classic feminist blues singer named Sippie Wallace because she knows the world doesn't end with acoustic song-poems and Fred McDowell. An adult repertoire that rocks with a steady roll, and she's all of twenty-one years old."
