How Bonnie Raitt fell in love with Sandy Denny
It’s impossible to divorce artists from their initial musical inspirations. While there may be other musicians who captivate them later on, nothing diminishes the impact of the first encounter that ignites the desire to play an instrument or comprehend the potency of music. For Bonnie Raitt, who continues the legacy of blues songsmiths, there was always a particular resonance when she listened to Sandy Denny perform.
For the first half of rock’s first movement, though, hardly any female artists got the attention their male counterparts received. Although session musicians like Carol Kaye kept the good times rolling on songs like ‘Good Vibrations’ by The Beach Boys, only a handful of women were plastered on music magazines and heralded as musical gods of their time.
Whereas most of the first female artists were taking cues from balladeers that came before them, Raitt was more interested in making her stamp on the world of blues. Throughout the first half of her career, Raitt was more concerned with the kind of music that could make your heart ache when you heard it, studying the best names in blues like Buddy Guy when putting her first tunes together.
Operating right alongside the blues movement was the ongoing trend of folk music happening around the same time. For all of the people who wanted to be the next answer to The Rolling Stones, there were just as many aspiring musicians with an acoustic guitar slung across their backs, looking to make songs that would become anthems for future generations of rock stars.
One such act was Fairport Convention, featuring the amazing vocal chops of Sandy Denny. While there had been an influx of new female-fronted bands coming to the forefront in the wake of Janis Joplin, Denny was more concerned with making tracks that spoke to the audience on a visceral level rather than hitting them over the head every time you heard them.
When listening to the song ‘Who Knows Where The Times Goes’ for the first time, Raitt was mesmerised by what Denny could pull off with just her voice and a simple melody, telling Red Bull, “I loved finding out about my heritage as a young woman learning folk songs from Joan Baez’s album and Judy Collins, and I fell in love with Fairport Convention and Sandy Denny and her incredibly evocative, beautiful voice”.
Combing the back catalogue of Denny’s career, it’s easy to see where Raitt got a lot of her ideas from. As much as she could sing rock and roll, her voice is better suited to soaring above the rest of the band below her, like when she started working with Led Zeppelin to play the town crier on the song ‘The Battle of Evermore’.
From there, it’s easy to paint a huge throughline to what Raitt did on some of her ballads like ‘I Can’t Make You Love Me’, stretching out the words to get as much emotion out of them as possible. Denny may have been taken from this world way too soon in 1978, but beyond her musical contributions to the world, she helped teach Raitt that was important for people to hear the person behind the song rather than the performer singing a song.
