Bonnie Raitt's 8 tips for guitarists

"Early on, I knew if I could keep my act together, not die from taking drugs or drinking too much, then I might have some hope of a long career. All the people I looked up to, like Muddy [Waters] or jazz players, they’d all been in it for the long haul – that’s what I wanted."

Now in her fifth decade of performing, Bonnie Raitt’s wish has certainly become a self-fulfilling prophecy. And like fine wine, she just goes on getting better. When you watch Bonnie gliding around on stage, a lithe, diminutive figure pulling out slide lines on her battered Fender Strat ‘Brownie’, she plays with the kind of fire that might fool you into thinking she’d only just got the hang of the thing.

Bonnie was raised on a diet of Mississippi Fred McDowell and Jack Daniels, but has managed to juggle her passion for gutbucket blues alongside Californian schmaltzy ballads such as I Can’t Make You Love Me, a song recorded by Adele and still a staple of any Bonnie Raitt live set.

Her last album, 2012’s Slipstream, was her first release in seven years, but now Bonnie’s been in the studio again, and her new album, Dig In Deep, once again delivers the familiar Raitt magic – a bucketload of rock, R&B and blues, all topped off with slide guitar guaranteed to raise the goosebumps.

"I was voraciously interested in all kinds of music, and still am.

"I grew up listening to Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, and even loved Gilbert and Sullivan. But it was the early days of rock ’n’ roll that really grabbed me – Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry and Fats Domino on my radio – and the folk music revival, catapulting people like Pete Seeger and Peter, Paul & Mary into the charts. Folk and blues were just offshoots of all this musical excitement.

"I met Son House when I moved to study at Harvard, through Dick Waterman who was acting as his manager. Son had been living for years in total obscurity, in Rochester, New York.

"But he was great and playing really well. Like a lot of older musicians, there’s a point where you wonder if they’re going to be able to remember their lyrics.

"At the age of eight or nine, I was a huge Joan Baez fan – I just wanted to be her [laughs], and sat in my room for hours learning guitar.

"Then, because Vanguard was Joan Baez’s label, I somehow managed to get hold of that [Blues At Newport] record. Mississippi John Hurt, Reverend Gary Davis, John Lee Hooker and John Hammond, were all on it, and I fell in love with John Hurt the moment I heard his fingerpicking style.

"I got the chance to travel a lot with Sleepy John Estes, Johnny Shines, Hammie Nixon, Furry Lewis. There were all these festivals happening, and although I wasn’t playing, I was a fly on the wall and got to hang out.

"I still pinch myself when I think about it and realise how lucky I was. I took a break from college, intending to go back in a year, but after I opened up a show for Fred McDowell, I got offered a record deal and never went back to school.

"Right after I heard Blues At Newport and heard that John Hammond played what he called ‘bottleneck guitar’, I did a little bit of research on the back of albums and saw it also said ‘bottleneck’.

"As my folks didn’t drink, I took it literally and soaked the label off a Coricidin cold medication bottle, and put it on my middle finger. When I was younger my grandfather, who was a Methodist minister, had taught me to play some hymns on a Hawaiian lap-steel guitar, using a tuning. But I didn’t make the connection with Delta blues until a lot later – I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is the same instrument, just held differently.’

"I think I realised quite early on that there wasn’t going to be any future for me as a full-time blues singer – the audience just wasn’t there.

"Finding songs that I feel I can do justice to has always been something of a nightmare for me, though. I see myself as being a kind of musical sieve, so that when I come back off tour, I’ll just sit down with all this material and sift through it all to see what I can come up with.

"When I met Lowell [George], we were both blown away by Ry Cooder and his work on a Randy Newman album, but I knew there was no way I was going to sound like any of the people I loved.

"Lowell showed me how I could make the strings sustain longer, and gave me an MXR red box Compressor; that was the secret of his sound and I love his phrasing. I still have the pedal but take [another] MXR out on the road, because I don’t want it to break."

"In 1969, I found a Stratocaster for $120 at three o’clock in the morning! It had no paint on it, but the price was right and the pickups sounded great.

"I raised the action a little bit, and I’ve always loved that Stratocaster ergonomically and for the feel.