Bonnie Raitt

📍Burbank, CA, USA

“Bonnie Lynn Raitt was born in Burbank, California, in November 1949, the daughter of John Raitt, the Broadway star of Carousel and The Pajama Game, and Marjorie Haydock, a pianist. The family were Quakers, and lived in the Los Angeles area as part of show business without being of it, valuing simplicity, conscience and service. Her father was often away performing, and Bonnie missed him, while her mother ran the household. Music was everywhere at home. For Christmas when she was eight, Bonnie was given a Stella guitar, and, encouraged by her grandfather, a guitarist, she taught herself to play, including Hawaiian slide. She spent summers at a Quaker camp in the Adirondack Mountains, where she learned folk songs and protest songs around the campfire. In her teens she discovered the blues through the album Blues at Newport 1963, and was captivated by the slide guitar of Mississippi Fred McDowell and the music of Robert Johnson and Son House. The family moved to Los Angeles in 1957, and she went to a Quaker boarding school in New York. In 1967 she went to Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to study social relations and African studies, but she was drawn to the folk and blues clubs of Boston, where she met the blues promoter Dick Waterman and played with Son House, Mississippi Fred McDowell and Sippie Wallace. She left college to perform, signing with Warner Bros. in 1971. Her album Nick of Time won the Grammy for album of the year in 1990, and she has won thirteen Grammys and become one of the finest slide guitarists in the world, devoted to social causes.”

Sources: bigtrainblues.com Wikipedia: Bonnie Raitt