Bonnie Raitt Road

This has been around as a bootleg for some time, a great radio broadcast from February 1972 featuring mainly Bonnie with Freebo on bass but also T. J. Tindle on lead guitar and John Davis playing harp on a couple of tracks. The sound quality isn't perfect but it's pretty good and it captures Bonnie doing material from her first two albums as well as some songs that have never been officially released - Steve Winwood's 'Can't Find My Way Home', John Hurt's 'Richland Woman Blues' and her own song 'Blender Blues'. Although Bonnie sounds young (she was only 22) she also sounds very confident and relaxed, her voice is perfectly controlled and her guitar playing is particularly good on blues like Robert Johnson's 'Walking blues' and 'Richland Woman Blues'.

Listening through Dig in Deep, Bonnie Raitt's 20th album, the entire arc of her career becomes clear. In the early '70s she insisted on recording live in the studio with her road band. Later, various producers – from Jerry Ragovoy to Peter Asher, from Don Was to T-Bone Burnett – assisted in shaping her sound, often with great commercial success: she's sold nearly 20 million records. She's learned from them all. There have been downs, but each was balanced by a rise. In 2012 she ended a seven-year silence with the poignant, powerful Slipstream, co-produced with Joe Henry and released on Redwing, her own label.