Gear Timeline
One night in 1969, at three o’clock in the morning, Bonnie Raitt paid $120 for a Fender Stratocaster. The body was from 1965; the neck came from sometime after. It was a hybrid, assembled from mismatched parts, not a collector’s pristine example of anything specific. She named it “Brownie.” She has played it, in open A tuning, for fifty-five years. It is her primary slide guitar. It is the instrument on which she developed the slide approach that B.B. King called “the best damn slide playing working today.” It cost $120 at three in the morning in 1969, and it is irreplaceable.
The Journey
Bonnie Lynn Raitt was born on November 8, 1949, in Burbank, California, the daughter of Broadway star John Raitt. She began playing guitar at eight, discovered slide guitar at thirteen or fourteen when she found a Vanguard record called Blues at Newport ’63, combed through the liner notes, and set about learning every blues slide guitarist whose name she could find. She attended Harvard/Radcliffe studying social relations and African studies, played coffee houses between classes, dropped out before graduating, and became one of the most celebrated blues and rock guitarists of the last fifty years. She has won thirteen Grammy Awards. She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2000. She was the first female artist to have a signature Fender Stratocaster. Her work in the 1990s — Nick of Time (1989), Luck of the Draw (1991), Longing in Their Hearts (1994) — produced some of the most commercially successful American guitar-based music of the decade. And through all of it, the three-o’clock-in-the-morning Stratocaster, in open A tuning, has been the foundation.
Her slide playing has a specific quality that distinguishes it from every other slide guitarist in this series: she plays the slide on her second (middle) finger, enabling her to fret normally with her first finger while the slide is in place. Most slide guitarists use the third or fourth finger, which gives the slide more stability but limits the ability to play fretted notes simultaneously with the slide. Raitt’s second-finger approach — learned in her room without instruction, because she didn’t see anyone play slide and had to figure it out herself — gives her the ability to switch between slide and standard fretted playing within a single phrase, enabling a fluidity and expressiveness that the standard slide positions don’t allow. “I didn’t see anybody play slide, so I just figured it out in my room — and I put the bottleneck on the wrong finger!” The wrong finger turned out to be the right choice.
Background: From Cambridge Folk Clubs to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
The specific musical formation that produced Bonnie Raitt was a combination of the Broadway musical world she grew up in (John Raitt’s career gave the family a specific engagement with performed popular song that was different from a rock background), the folk revival of the early 1960s that was reaching Harvard-age audiences through Pete Seeger and Peter, Paul & Mary, and the Delta blues tradition she discovered on that Newport record in her early teens. These three streams — the performed Broadway vocal tradition, the folk revival’s social and musical community, and the raw Delta blues — produced a musician with a unique combination: the vocal expressiveness and emotional clarity of the performer, the folk community’s values around authenticity and social engagement, and the blues guitarist’s specific approach to the guitar as a voice.
She was driving Son House and Skip James to folk festivals as a teenager — a biographical detail that deserves emphasis. Son House (1902-1988) was a founding figure of Delta blues, the musician who taught Robert Johnson and who influenced Muddy Waters. Skip James (1902-1969) was one of the most distinctive and most idiosyncratic of the Delta blues masters, whose specific harmonic language and falsetto voice remain unlike anything before or since. Raitt drove them to festivals. She spent time with them. She absorbed the tradition directly from two of its most significant original figures at precisely the age when such absorption leaves the deepest marks. This is musical education that cannot be replicated by records alone.
Her early career — the Warner Bros. albums from the early 1970s — established her as a critically respected blues and rock artist without achieving the commercial breakthrough that her talent warranted. The struggle to be taken seriously as a woman in rock guitar — the specific challenge of establishing guitar authority in a genre that consistently resisted female guitarists — characterized her first two decades. The commercial breakthrough came late: Nick of Time, released in 1989 at age thirty-nine, won four Grammy Awards including Album of the Year and established her as one of the most commercially successful guitarists in American music. The timing — the commercial vindication arriving after twenty years of critical recognition — made her story one of the more satisfying narratives in rock’s history of persistence rewarded.
The discovery of slide guitar at thirteen or fourteen via that Vanguard Newport record is a specific biographical moment worth dwelling on. Most guitarists find the blues through electric rock records — through Cream, through the Stones, through the British blues revival that made American blues accessible to white audiences in the 1960s. Raitt found it through a folk festival documentary record, which meant she found it in its acoustic, pre-electric, most traditional form. She then went backward from there — finding Son House and Skip James, the foundational figures, and forward into electric slide — rather than the more common path of starting with the electrified British version and working back to the acoustic original. This direction of discovery — acoustic Delta blues first, electric blues second — shaped her specific understanding of the slide tradition in ways that are audible in her playing fifty years later: the acoustic folk musician’s sensitivity to dynamics and texture is always present beneath the electric slide’s expression.
Her political activism — she co-founded Musicians United for Safe Energy (MUSE) in 1979, has been a consistent environmental and social justice advocate, supported Greenpeace and other organizations throughout her career — has been as consistent a part of her identity as her music. This is not incidental to understanding her guitar playing: an artist who drives Son House to folk festivals, who uses her musical platform for political advocacy, who approaches the blues tradition with genuine historical respect, brings a specific set of values to every guitar performance that shapes what she plays and how she plays it.
The “wrong finger” origin story of her slide technique is one of the more important accident-as-innovation stories in guitar history. Had she seen another slide guitarist before developing her own technique, she would have placed the slide on the third or fourth finger, as convention dictates. Having learned in isolation, she chose the second finger, which turned out to provide capabilities unavailable from the conventional position — the ability to fret normally with the first finger while the slide is present. Her “mistake” was the discovery of a superior technique for her specific musical goals. This is the same principle that produced Chet Atkins’ four-finger Travis picking (trying to imitate Travis without seeing his hands), that produced Joni Mitchell’s fifty-one tunings (developing alternate tunings because standard technique was difficult for her polio-weakened left hand). Limitation and accident produce innovation more reliably than deliberate technique development, because they force approaches that conventional wisdom wouldn’t suggest.
The Rig: Bonnie Raitt’s Guitars, Amps, and Effects
Guitars
“My brown Strat — the body is a ’65 and the neck is from some time after that. It’s kind of a hybrid that I got for $120 at 3 o’clock in the morning in 1969.” Brownie is Raitt’s primary electric slide guitar and the instrument most closely associated with her sound. The 1965 body is an alder Stratocaster body in sunburst or brown finish from the pre-CBS or transitional CBS era; the later neck adds a rosewood fretboard from Fender’s post-1959 design. Both components are solid American vintage-era Stratocaster parts, and their combination produces the specific resonance and playability that Raitt has played in open A tuning for fifty-five years. The guitar is kept permanently tuned to open A (E A E A C# E, a whole step down from the standard open E E B E G# B E) — open A being her primary slide key, with a capo used to change keys while maintaining the open string relationships.
The Premier Guitar 2021 rig rundown confirms Brownie’s status and configuration in current use: “Brownie Strat with 1965 body (tuned to open A).” The guitar’s irreplaceable character — the specific resonance of a 1965 Strat body played consistently for fifty-five years, with decades of playing having allowed the wood to settle into its final resonant state — is what makes Brownie the instrument that Raitt returns to for her most important slide work.
In addition to Brownie, Raitt travels with three Fender Bonnie Raitt signature Stratocaster prototypes, each set up for a different tuning: one in open G, one in open A (backup for Brownie), and one in standard tuning. The Fender Bonnie Raitt signature Stratocaster — produced between 1995 and 2001, making Raitt the first female artist to have a signature Fender Stratocaster — is a specific production model based on her preferences, with the tonal and playability specifications she developed over decades of playing. The three prototypes provide the tuning variety that her live set requires without the constant retuning that changing between open G, open A, and standard would otherwise demand.
Alongside the Stratocasters, Raitt’s documented rig includes a Gibson ES-175 with a P-90 pickup — the same jazz archtop guitar that Pat Metheny used for his entire early career, here equipped with the single-coil P-90 rather than a humbucker for a brighter, more cutting character. The ES-175’s semi-hollow warmth and the P-90’s articulate single-coil character give this guitar a distinct tonal identity from the Stratocasters’ bright, clear output. It appeared in her playing alongside the Stratocaster as early as her 1977 Guitar Player profile.
“I’ve had the same Guild F-50 big jumbo body for many, many years; I’ve had it since 1975.” The Guild F-50 is a large jumbo-body acoustic guitar with a spruce top and either maple or rosewood back and sides — a powerful, projecting instrument designed for the kind of strummed accompaniment that Raitt’s folk-influenced acoustic singing requires. She uses it for acoustic songs like “Love Me Like a Man” and “Angel from Montgomery” in live performance and television appearances. The Guild’s specific character — warmer and slightly rounder than a Martin of similar specifications, with Guild’s specific American acoustic voice — has suited her acoustic requirements for fifty years of consistent use.
Among the three Guild acoustics documented in her Premier Guitar rig rundown is one set up with higher action specifically for slide work. Slide guitar on acoustic requires higher action than standard fretted playing — the slide needs clearance above the frets to move freely without buzzing, and the strings need tension enough to sustain under the slide’s weight and pressure. This higher-action Guild provides the specific setup for acoustic slide that her standard-action Guild F-50 doesn’t accommodate.
A “purple Pogreba Guitars resonator” appears in the Premier Guitar rig rundown — a custom resonator guitar from Pogreba, a luthier whose instruments combine vintage resonator design with modern construction quality. The resonator’s specific metallic, projecting tone — different from both the archtop’s warm complexity and the Stratocaster’s bright single-coil character — suits specific acoustic slide applications where the resonator’s volume and presence are needed.
Raitt uses Dunlop bottleneck slides on her second (middle) finger — a glass bottleneck, providing the smooth, warm tone that glass slide produces versus the crisper character of metal. She plays with custom Jim Dunlop molded-plastic fingerpicks on her right hand, using a combination of pick and finger approach that suits her alternating between slide and standard fretted playing. This combination — bottleneck on the left hand’s second finger (allowing fretted notes with the first finger), plastic fingerpicks on the right hand — is the specific physical setup that enables her distinctive combination of slide expression and fretted melodic playing within the same performance.
Raitt uses GHS Boomers custom electric sets with an unusual heavy gauge: .013, .017, .020w, .032, .042, .052 — significantly heavier than standard light or medium electric strings. The heavy gauge is essential for slide playing: heavier strings have greater mass and tension, which produces better sustain under the slide, more consistent intonation as the slide moves across the strings, and the “heft” of response that slide technique requires to produce its characteristic long, singing notes. On acoustic, she uses GHS Phosphor-Bronze sets at .012, .016, .020, .036, .046, .056 — also heavier than standard, for the same reasons.
Amps
Raitt’s primary current amplifier is the Bad Cat Black Cat 30R 1×12 combo, and her specific use of it is telling: she uses only the EF86-driven channel 2. The EF86 pentode tube — which Bad Cat incorporated into the Black Cat’s second channel — produces a specific tonal character distinct from the more common 12AX7 preamp tubes used in most guitar amplifiers: more sensitive, with a particular harmonic quality that some players describe as “silky” or “sweet,” and an immediate dynamic response to touch variation. Raitt’s discovery that this specific channel of this specific amplifier suits her needs is characteristic of the serious player’s relationship with gear: not accepting a good-sounding amp but finding the specific configuration within that amp that produces exactly the right result.
In her earlier career, Raitt used Fender amplifiers — Twin Reverbs and other Fender tube combos — providing the clean, American headroom that suits slide guitar. The Fender’s specific clean character allows the slide’s natural harmonic content to be transmitted accurately without the coloration of overdrive, and the Twin Reverb’s spring reverb adds the spatial depth that slide notes benefit from.
Effects
The most important piece of advice Bonnie Raitt ever received about slide guitar came not from a blues legend but from Lowell George of Little Feat. In 1972, she asked him how he got the tone to last so long. The answer: “He showed me his MXR compressor. I’d asked him how he got the tone to last so long — whether it’s a ferocious kind of dirty sound, or a beautiful clean sound on a ballad, the compressor really squishes the sound and makes it last longer.” The MXR compressor has been central to her slide sound ever since — and her description of how she uses it is one of the most poetic and accurate explanations of what a compressor does for slide guitar: “Now I use a compressor when I play slide, and with that you can sustain a note as long as your emotions will hold. It’s like surfing — you can ride that wave of emotional intensity and taper it off and build it up, depending on how you work your volume knob. It’s really an exciting way to express yourself.” Boss CS-2 Compression Sustainer appears in the Premier Guitar rig rundown for her more recent setup.
The Boss CS-2 Compression Sustainer is the specific compressor documented in Raitt’s Premier Guitar 2021 rig rundown — replacing or supplementing the original MXR unit that Lowell George introduced her to in 1972. The CS-2’s characteristic compression — smooth, musical, with Attack and Sustain controls that provide significant dynamic shaping capability — suits slide playing’s specific compression requirements: sustaining notes well beyond their natural decay while responding dynamically to picking force variations.
The Pro Co RAT distortion pedal appears in Raitt’s documented effects, confirmed by Premier Guitar’s rig rundown. The RAT provides the drive for her harder-rocking electric material — a mid-forward, aggressive distortion that suits blues-rock slide in contexts where the compressor and amp alone don’t provide sufficient saturation for the material. Nuno Bettencourt uses the RAT as a preamp coloring device; Raitt uses it as a conventional distortion source for specific songs.
Guitar tech Matt Straw (Robert Plant’s guitar tech, brought in for Raitt’s tours) confirmed: “I’ve got her using a Whirlwind Bomb pedal on all her solo boosts and she loves it!” The Whirlwind Bomb is a clean boost pedal that raises the signal level without adding tonal coloration, giving her lead passages additional presence in the mix during solos without changing the fundamental tonal character of the guitar and amp combination.
Like Joni Mitchell, Raitt’s most important “effect” is not electronic but harmonic: her system of open tunings, primarily open A on Brownie, open G on one of the signature Strats, and standard tuning on a third. Open A (E A E A C# E) provides the specific chord voicings that suit her primary slide repertoire. A capo changes the key while maintaining the open string relationships. The combination — open tuning for the specific chord shapes, capo for key flexibility — gives her the same harmonic versatility that more complex retuning would provide without requiring mid-set guitar swaps for every key change.
Playing Style & Tone Philosophy
Bonnie Raitt’s playing style is built on the specific combination of Delta blues slide technique and the folk guitar tradition she absorbed at Harvard. The blues vocabulary — the bent notes, the vibrato, the emotional directness, the phrasing that treats the guitar as a human voice — is the foundation. The folk guitar’s sensitivity to dynamics and texture, its awareness of the accompaniment role, its balance between solo expression and song support — these give her blues playing a control and awareness that pure blues players sometimes lack.
The second-finger slide technique is the most distinctive technical element. By placing the slide on the middle finger, she retains the use of the index finger for fretted notes — the ability to play standard chord shapes and single notes alongside slide phrases without removing the bottleneck. This enables the fluid switching between slide and standard playing that characterizes her most expressive performances: a slide phrase that transitions into a fretted melodic run and back into slide, all within the same measure, using the same hand without any physical interruption. She discovered this technique independently because she had no teacher to show her the conventional approach: “I didn’t see anybody play slide, so I just figured it out in my room — and I put the bottleneck on the wrong finger!”
The compressor’s role in her playing is philosophically important. The compressor transforms the slide’s natural decay — the way a note gradually fades after the slide has moved on — into a sustained, continuous tone that can be shaped dynamically by the volume knob. “It’s like surfing — you can ride that wave of emotional intensity and taper it off and build it up, depending on how you work your volume knob.” This is the specific physical experience of great slide playing: the note sustains under the compressor’s influence; the volume knob controls its dynamic arc; the player’s emotional state determines how the arc develops. The equipment serves the emotion. The emotion generates the music.
Her tone philosophy is as explicitly emotional as any in this series. She does not talk about specific frequency response or harmonic content or gain structure; she talks about emotional intensity and the guitar’s ability to sustain it. “The rest of it is just imitating something that you love until you feel like you’ve got it; just playing with all your heart and soul every time you pick up the guitar.” This is the folk and blues tradition’s understanding of what guitar playing is: not a technical achievement but an emotional transmission, and the technique is the means by which the emotion reaches the listener. The $120 Stratocaster bought at three in the morning was the right guitar because it carries the emotion correctly. The compressor sustains the emotion as long as it needs to last. Everything serves the feeling.
How to Sound Like Bonnie Raitt
Getting Bonnie Raitt’s slide tone requires open A tuning and heavy strings — and then significant practice developing the second-finger slide technique, which is physically different from the more common third or fourth finger approach.
Guitar: A Fender Stratocaster with the three single-coil pickups and the specific Stratocaster neck-and-middle combination tone (which suits slide by providing a balanced frequency response without the brightness of bridge-only or the warmth of neck-only). Open A tuning (E A E A C# E). GHS Boomers or similar in heavy gauge (.013-.052) for proper slide sustain and intonation.
Amp: Bad Cat Black Cat 30R on channel 2 (EF86) for the authentic current tone. Alternatively: any clean, warm Fender-style tube amp (Twin Reverb, Deluxe Reverb) with the volume set for clean headroom — slide guitar requires the amp to be clean so the compressor and the slide’s natural harmonic content can work without competition from tube saturation.
Amp Settings (Bad Cat or Fender-style clean tube amp):
| Control | Setting (0–10) | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Volume | 4–6 | Clean — slide’s sustain comes from the compressor, not amp drive |
| Bass | 5–6 | Full — heavy strings have natural warmth |
| Mid | 5–6 | Present but not honky |
| Treble | 5–6 | Moderate — slide’s natural brightness doesn’t need boost |
| Reverb | 3–4 | Light-to-moderate — slide phrases benefit from spatial depth |
Compressor: Boss CS-2 or MXR Dyna Comp (the original Raitt-and-Lowell-George unit). Set the Attack moderate and the Sustain high — the goal is to sustain the slide note far beyond its natural decay, allowing the dynamic arc to be controlled by the volume knob as Raitt describes. Once the compressor is set, the volume knob becomes the primary expressive control for sustain shaping.
Slide technique: Begin with the slide on the third or fourth finger (the conventional approach) before attempting the second-finger approach. Learn proper left-hand muting — the fingers behind the slide must mute the strings it has passed over, preventing the unwanted sympathetic vibrations that make sloppy slide sound messy. Practice moving the slide to the exact pitch of each note — intonation is the slide guitarist’s fundamental challenge, and it requires much more conscious control than fretted intonation. Only once these fundamentals are established consider experimenting with the second-finger position that Raitt uses.
Influence & Legacy
Bonnie Raitt’s influence on guitar playing operates through her sustained demonstration that slide guitar — a technique primarily associated with male Delta blues masters and white rock slide specialists — could be expressed by a woman with equal authority and greater emotional directness. Her slide playing, validated by B.B. King (“the best damn slide player working today”) and by fifty years of public performance, expanded the cultural imagination of who could play slide guitar and why.
Her influence on subsequent female guitarists specifically is significant and specific: she was there, doing it at the highest level, winning Grammys and being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, long before the current generation of female guitarists — Samantha Fish, Larkin Poe, Ally Venable — arrived. Fish and others have cited Raitt directly as a primary influence on their decision to play slide guitar and their understanding of what emotional slide expression sounds like when it’s done correctly.
Her role as the first female Fender Stratocaster signature artist — a commercial milestone that expanded the category of who Fender considered worth building signature guitars for — is a specific measurable cultural contribution. The Bonnie Raitt signature Stratocaster, produced between 1995 and 2001, was the first. Everything that followed — every female artist’s signature instrument from any major manufacturer — happened after Raitt’s Fender established the precedent.
For context on where Raitt fits in the slide guitar tradition, the comparison with Duane Allman’s approach to electric slide guitar at #16 is the most instructive parallel — both players using the bottleneck slide as their primary emotional voice, both drawing from the Delta blues tradition while operating in rock-adjacent contexts. The tonal approaches differ: Allman’s thick, Les Paul-and-Marshall slide versus Raitt’s singing, Stratocaster-and-compressor slide. Both are essential to understanding the full range of what slide guitar can express.
The comparison with Ry Cooder’s approach to slide and world music guitar at #77 illuminates a parallel relationship with the blues and American roots tradition — two California musicians who both approached the Delta blues with genuine scholarly respect and developed their own specific voices from deep engagement with the tradition. Cooder’s is more ethnomusicological in orientation, Raitt’s more emotionally direct, but both demonstrate that the deepest engagement with tradition produces the most individual voices.
And the comparison with Derek Trucks’ approach to slide guitar as meditative expression at #33 shows how the same fundamental technique — the glass bottleneck, the open tuning, the sustained note — produces completely different aesthetic outcomes in different hands. Trucks’ is more meditative, more jazz and Indian-classical influenced; Raitt’s is more directly blues and rock, more emotionally charged in the specific sense of the blues tradition. Both are among the finest slide guitarists of their generations. Both learned from the same tradition. Both found genuinely different things in it.
Bonnie Raitt is seventy-five years old in 2026. Brownie — the $120 hybrid Stratocaster bought at three in the morning in 1969 — is still in open A tuning, still her primary slide guitar. The Boss CS-2 compressor is still on the board, still doing what Lowell George showed her an MXR compressor could do in 1972. The Bad Cat Black Cat 30 is still running on channel 2, the EF86-driven channel, the one that sounds right. And somewhere in the guitar case beside the stage, there are GHS Boomers in .013-.052 gauge, because slide guitar needs heavy strings, and the emotion that Bonnie Raitt brings to slide playing needs the sustain that heavy strings and a compressor provide. The note lasts as long as the emotion holds. The emotion has been holding for fifty years.
Her Grammy recognition deserves its context. Thirteen Grammys across a career that spanned from 1971 to the present, the bulk of them arriving in the commercial breakthrough period of the early 1990s, represents both the formal industry acknowledgment of genuine excellence and the specific timing of when that acknowledgment arrives. She made records of equal quality in the 1970s and 1980s that did not receive equivalent Grammy recognition — the industry’s tendency to reward commercial success rather than artistic quality means that Nick of Time’s four Grammys in 1990 document the specific moment the record industry caught up to what audiences and critics had been saying for twenty years. The Grammys are not wrong in their assessment; they are simply slow. The music was always that good. The awards arrived when the sales confirmed it to the Recording Academy’s satisfaction.
The social activism dimension of her career is not incidental to the guitar playing. An artist who drives Son House and Skip James to folk festivals, who co-founds a musicians’ organization opposing nuclear power, who uses her concert and television platform to advocate for environmental and social causes, brings a specific set of values to every guitar performance: the understanding that music is not merely entertainment but a form of human communication with ethical dimensions. This understanding — present in the Delta blues tradition from its origins, explicit in the folk revival’s political commitments — is audible in her guitar playing in the form of the complete emotional commitment she brings to each performance. The blues is not technically difficult. The blues is emotionally demanding. Raitt brings the full emotional demand to every performance, and the result is what B.B. King recognized as the best slide playing he had heard.
The specific physical detail of how she holds the slide is worth one more mention, because it is the foundation of everything: the Dunlop glass bottleneck on the middle finger of the left hand; the custom molded-plastic fingerpicks on the right hand’s fingers; the heavy gauge strings (.013-.052 on electric, .012-.056 on acoustic); the open A tuning that provides the specific interval relationships of her primary slide vocabulary. Each of these choices is functional — each serves the specific musical requirement of playing slide at the emotional and technical level that Raitt’s performances require. The fingerpicks give her right hand’s attacks the definition and clarity that bare fingertips wouldn’t provide at performance volumes. The heavy strings give the slide the sustain and intonation stability that lighter strings can’t maintain. The open A tuning gives her the specific chord voicings that suit her slide repertoire. And the middle finger — the “wrong finger,” the one no teacher would have suggested — gives her the freedom to move between slide and fretted playing within a single phrase, the freedom that makes her slide playing specifically hers and unlike anyone else’s. Everything serves the feeling. The feeling is always there. Brownie, bought at three in the morning for $120, carries it faithfully.
Frequently Asked Questions: Bonnie Raitt Guitars & Gear
What guitar does Bonnie Raitt play?
Bonnie Raitt’s primary electric guitar is “Brownie” — a Fender Stratocaster with a 1965 body and a later-period neck, acquired for $120 at three in the morning in 1969. It’s kept permanently in open A tuning (E A E A C# E) and is her primary slide guitar. She also tours with three Fender Bonnie Raitt signature Stratocaster prototypes (one in open G, one in open A as a backup for Brownie, one in standard tuning). Her electric collection includes a Gibson ES-175 with a P-90 pickup. Acoustic guitars include a Guild F-50 jumbo owned since 1975 (used for “Love Me Like a Man” and “Angel from Montgomery”), additional Guilds set up for acoustic slide work, and a purple Pogreba Guitars custom resonator. She was the first female artist to have a signature Fender Stratocaster, produced between 1995 and 2001.
What is Bonnie Raitt’s slide technique?
Bonnie Raitt plays slide on her second (middle) finger rather than the more conventional third or fourth finger. This unorthodox position — discovered independently because she had no teacher to show her the conventional approach — allows her to retain the use of her first finger for standard fretted notes while the slide is in place. This enables her to switch fluidly between slide phrases and fretted playing within the same musical passage. She uses a Dunlop glass bottleneck slide and plays primarily in open A tuning, using a capo to change keys. She uses custom Jim Dunlop molded-plastic fingerpicks on her right hand. B.B. King called her “the best damn slide player working today.”
What amps does Bonnie Raitt use?
Bonnie Raitt’s current primary amplifier is the Bad Cat Black Cat 30R 1×12 combo, but specifically only its EF86-driven channel 2 — the tube type in that channel produces a specific tonal character distinct from standard 12AX7-preamp amplifiers. In earlier career periods, she used Fender amplifiers including the Twin Reverb. Her amp preference consistently favors clean, warm tube amplification — slide guitar requires the amp to stay clean so the compressor and slide’s natural harmonic content can work without competition from preamp saturation.
How did Bonnie Raitt learn to use a compressor for slide?
Bonnie Raitt learned about compressors from Lowell George of Little Feat in 1972. She had asked him how he sustained his slide notes for so long. George showed her his MXR compressor. She adopted the technique immediately and has used compression for slide ever since. Her description of the compressor’s role is one of the most poetic explanations available: “Now I use a compressor when I play slide, and with that you can sustain a note as long as your emotions will hold. It’s like surfing — you can ride that wave of emotional intensity and taper it off and build it up, depending on how you work your volume knob.” She currently uses a Boss CS-2 Compression Sustainer.
What is Bonnie Raitt’s open A tuning?
Open A tuning is a guitar tuning in which all six strings form an A major chord when strummed open, without any fretted notes. The specific configuration: E A E A C# E (from low string to high). This is a whole step lower than open E (E B E G# B E) but produces the same open string chord relationship. Open A is Bonnie Raitt’s primary slide tuning — she keeps Brownie permanently tuned to open A and uses a capo to change keys while maintaining the open string relationships. In open A, a slide placed at the fifth fret produces a D major chord, at the seventh fret produces an E major chord, and so on, allowing chord-based slide playing with simple, one-fret-at-a-time movable chord shapes.
What was Bonnie Raitt’s connection to Son House and Skip James?
As a teenager, Bonnie Raitt drove Son House and Skip James to folk festivals — providing transportation for two of the foundational figures of Delta blues guitar. Son House (1902-1988) was one of the most important Delta blues musicians of all time, influencing Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, and the entire Delta blues tradition. Skip James (1902-1969) was one of the most distinctive and harmonically unusual of the Delta blues masters, whose falsetto vocals and minor-key songs are among the strangest and most beautiful in the blues canon. Spending time with these musicians in her formative years gave Raitt direct access to the Delta blues tradition at a level that records alone could not have provided.
Is Bonnie Raitt in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?
Yes. Bonnie Raitt was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2000. She has won thirteen Grammy Awards, including four at the 1990 ceremony for Nick of Time (Album of the Year, Pop Vocal Female, Rock Vocal Female, and Rock Album). She was the first female artist to have a signature Fender Stratocaster (produced 1995-2001). She was named one of the 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time by Rolling Stone. She co-founded Musicians United for Safe Energy (MUSE) in 1979 and has been a consistent advocate for environmental and social justice causes throughout her career.