Dropped by her label, sober and nearly forgotten, Bonnie Raitt won Album of the Year
In 1983 Warner Brothers dropped Bonnie Raitt the day after she finished mastering an album, then shelved it. She was fighting alcohol and drugs and touring on her savings. Six years later, clean and working with producer Don Was, she released Nick of Time, which went to number one and won the top Grammy.
Raitt was born in Burbank on November 8, 1949, to a pianist mother and John Raitt, a Broadway star who created the leads in Carousel and The Pajama Game. Daunted by her mother's piano playing, she switched to a Stella guitar she got for Christmas in 1957, at eight, and taught herself from the folk revival records of the day. At summer camp in the Adirondacks, counsellors had her perform for other kids, and as a teenager self-conscious about her freckles she retreated to her room with the guitar.
Music was supposed to be a hobby. She studied social relations and African studies at Radcliffe from 1967 and planned to work in Tanzania. Then in 1970 she played the Philadelphia Folk Festival with the bluesman Mississippi Fred McDowell, a Newsweek reporter spread the word, and Warner Bros. released her debut in 1971. Critics loved her records through the decade; buyers mostly did not. B.B. King called her the best slide guitarist working, and her 1977 cover of Runaway, panned by critics, finally sold.
The 1980s were lean. After she was dropped, Warner later let her recut half the shelved album, which appeared in 1986 as Nine Lives and flopped. She kept up her activism, joining the anti-apartheid Sun City record and a Soviet-American peace concert in Moscow in 1987. That year she also sang backup for Roy Orbison's television special, and by then she had quit drinking and drugs.
A Disney tribute session, singing Baby Mine from Dumbo, introduced her to Was. Nick of Time followed in 1989 and is now in the National Recording Registry, and Luck of the Draw and Longing in Their Hearts sold millions. She has since won 13 competitive Grammys, entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2000, and received a Kennedy Center Honor in 2024.
Source: Bonnie Raitt
