until 15 years old. It was fun being in LA because there was a lot of other kids at my school who were the children of people in show business. My folks were Quakers … and not flashy. They were deep. They were politically involved with the ban the bomb movement and the civil rights movement and then save the redwoods, and taught us a real ethic of fairness and social justice early on. My mom was my dad’ s music director and pianist, and he would rehearse for his concerts and for his shows downstairs. It was just fantastic. I knew all the words to the shows. It was a thrill being part of that behind-the-scenes Broadway road life. He took the shows out to the people, and that ' s what I ' m doing. I couldn ' t care less if I had a hit record, and he couldn ' t care less if he had a hit Broadway show. He just wanted to take the music out to people.
Anastasia: You must have been exposed to a lot of music storytelling when you grew up.
Bonnie: Yes, those Rodgers and Hammerstein story songs that are in Carousel and Oklahoma!, in particular. Hearing the stories about what it was like to go through the Depression and go through the Second World War, and then the early days on Broadway for my folks who were raised in a religious background, to suddenly be part of this Broadway scene. They were riding across the country on trains, and there were swear words in Oklahoma!, and all that. It was pretty fun to hear their eye-opening stories about hanging out with Ella Fitzgerald and Tony Bennett and Frank Sinatra, and to hear the stories about the early days of the peace movement. Those social activism stories were just as interesting to me as the show business ones. My greatest education came from hanging out with the blues artists I opened for when I left college. I ended up striking it lucky and was offered a record deal on my own terms when I was 21 years old. To travel with Muddy Waters and Sippie Wallace and Mississippi Fred McDowell and " Big Boy " Arthur Crudup, and to hear the stories about what it was like with racism and growing up on plantations, or, in Sippie’ s case, the vaudeville circuit and the classic blues circuit. That was an invaluable background, just
like listening to my folks talk about the early days of their careers. It was fantastic.
Anastasia: What is it about the blues that moves you so much?
Bonnie: It’ s the music for me. When I was eight or nine years old, I really could tell the difference between Chuck Berry and Fats Domino. Little Richard was killing me and The Isley Brothers. The Beatles and The Stones fell in love with American R & B and covered a lot of those songs and turned America onto our own blues tradition. I would have never heard about Slim Harpo and Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters if it wasn ' t for both the folk music revival of those blues artists at Newport and the recordings of them, and also the British invasion. They turned us on to tons of R & B records that we didn ' t get to hear on our pop charts. So, it was kind of a cross-pollination. I fell in love with it and couldn ' t get it out of my system.
Anastasia: There’ s no way a person can describe you in one genre of music. I recently talked with Sonny Rollins, and he quoted Duke Ellington as saying,“ There ' s only two kinds of music, good or bad.” Do you agree?
Bonnie: I love that quote. I wasn ' t expecting a career in music. I was just a fan. Aretha Frankin and Ray Charles and Tony Bennett and my dad, they were singing all kinds of different songs from different writers, and it was Dylan and then later
Raitt at Americana Honors & Awards in 2016.
James Taylor and Jackson Browne and Joni Mitchell who broke into the singer-songwriter realm, where people actually performed mostly their own songs. That was something that I admired so much. But I found for myself that the tradition I come out of is mixing it up. What ' s a great song? It’ s so subjective. What ' s the right song for me to do? It could be“ Dimming of the Day” by Richard Thompson or“ Angel from Montgomery” from John Prine, right next to some great Big Mama Thornton cover or some R & B covers that I ' ve done, or rock and roll songs. It ' s the mixture of songs that I really love. That ' s what keeps me interested.
Anastasia: I was watching a clip of you when you were in your 20s, and I thought how incredibly poised you were, and how totally comfortable in your skin you were.
Bonnie: Oh, thank you! I had the blessing of having been raised in show business and watching people not have control over where they worked or what they got paid, or the quality of the things that they signed up for when they just needed a job. I always said, if I was going to do this for a living, I would not have anybody tell me what to record or with whom, or how often, or what to wear, or“ We want you to have a commercial hit or we’ re not backing you.” I just would have stopped and gone back to being a college student and an activist. I was pretty savvy. In my personal life, I was a lot more vulnerable and not as confident as I was
ERIKA GOLDRING
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