Bonnie Raitt's genre-blending repertoire – and by extension, her guitar playing – has captivated audiences for over five decades. The emotive interplay between her guitar and vocals is further amplified by her slide mastery, transforming the technique into a quasi-second voice that once prompted B.B. King to call her the “best damn slide player working today”.
“That feel is something you can’t teach – it’s something where I just listened and listened,” she tells The Guardian when asked about how to get her beautifully smooth slide tone.
“I taught myself guitar when I was nine, looking at the fingers of the people at my summer camp. I just played by ear, mimicking what I heard on the radio and on records. I then fell in love with slide guitar, which I first heard when I was about 14.”
It wasn't until college, however, that she finally felt like she had developed her own style. “I switched to a Stratocaster – I got a really good deal in the middle of the night for $120 – and then a few years later, in 1972, Lowell George [of Little Feat] showed me his MXR compressor [pedal],” she explains.
“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 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. I was trying to make it as close to the human voice as I could.”
Putting the slide “on the wrong finger” also served her tone well. By bucking convention and wearing her guitar slide on her middle finger, Raitt manages to easily switch between slide and rhythm playing, further cementing her versatility.
“You can play more if you have it on your ring finger,” she stated in a 2022 Guitar World interview. “Fred McDowell used his little finger, but by then I was already down the road with it on my middle finger. I heard Robert Johnson and just tried to make myself sound exactly like whatever he was doing.”
No wonder Prince was so invested in picking her brain on her technique – he even invited her over to Paisley Park and sampled her slide playing on the 1991 release Cream.
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