Customer Reviews
The Bonnie Raitt Collection 
2007-11-30
I like this collection of Bonnie's songs. She can hold her own against some of the best. Her blues oriented songs are so soulful and true to heart. She's an ideal songstress to listen to on a long road trip. Go Bonnie!!
Love the old blues songs... 
2007-11-20
Bonnie, I love the old blues songs that you sing!!! There are a few of them on this album, very FUN.
great 2007-09-16
This cd showcases Bonnie Raitt's older songs and some of her most beloved popular radio songs. I bought it for the older blues like "Love Me Like a Man" and "Give it Up of Let Me Go". There are 20 songs on this cd and it's a great listen.
Awesome! 2007-09-07
There are few women in the blues genre that can break the male mold... I love her!
First Raitt 2005-04-09
The problem with "best of" collections is that fans will get into endless squabbles over what SHOULD have been included. Bonnie Raitt fans are no exception apparently. A cursory look at the fan reviews below attests as much. I understand how they feel, but folks, you know it's all good, and you gotta draw the line somewhere. After Raitt's extraordinary late 80s success on Capitol, a Warners retrospective was inevitable. They had lost a good thing in Bonnie and wised up just a little late. But graciously, Bonnie assisted in the selection of the songs and provided commentary. No hard feelings, boys.
A solid, consistent performer who has evolved but never felt compelled to constantly "reinvent" herself, Bonnie Raitt is not an easy artist to sum up, let alone encapsulate in a twenty song retrospective. But a twenty song sampler at least gives the new listener a broad enough overview. Die hard fans will buy it for the "live" versions of staples "Women Be Wise" (sung as a duet with originator Sippie Wallace) and "Angel From Montgomery" (here a duet with composer John Prine).
It's hard to imagine that a newcomer to Bonnie Raitt's oeuvre would want to stop here and not check out the individual releases (all available as of this writing). The earliest records with their rootsy feel have a special charm, as evidenced by the tracks included here: "Finest Lovin' Man" and "Give It Up." But even in those days, Bonnie was demonstrating her flair for contemporary material, as evidenced by her rocking take on Jackson Browne's "Under the Falling Sky." And although the Warners albums also included tracks penned by such staples of the So-Cal rock scene as Joni Mitchell and Stephen Stills, she also had a flair for finding material from less obvious sources. Paul Siebel's "Louise" isn't half bad--in fact, it's darn good. And she captures the essence of Chris Smither's "I Feel the Same" like no one else could (save the songwriter himself). Like her contemporaries, Tracy Nelson and Linda Ronstadt, she was discovering a virtual treasure trove in the works of Eric Kaz. Lots of folks find Bonnie's version of "Love Has No Pride" to be "definitive." I'm learning to throw that word out of my vocabulary, since my tastes can change from day to day. But of all the women--and men--who have assayed that song, Bonnie Raitt was able to bring something unique to it. Hers is a dignified reading, with more than a hint of vulnerability. Nelson's take on it, from the recently re-released eponymous Atlantic album, is also an interesting one, so strong and proud that it virtually belies the song's title. I can't decide which version I prefer, so instead I decided, hey, I don't have to.
Interesting that Bonnie Raitt emerged in '71, a year after Janis Joplin's tragic demise. Like Nelson, Raitt offered an alternate version of the white blues mama. Both brought a little more restraint and discipline to their art. Some found Raitt a little earnest in her politics and in her almost studious approach to the blues. But au contraire, mes amis, Bonnie had class and discipline--and she loved a good liberal cause as much as anyone else--but she was also as sassy and sly as you could want. And she sang like a husky voiced angel from Los Angeles. And played a mean slide guitar to boot.
Who could have asked for more? Eat your hearts out (17 years after the fact), Warners execs!
The early years, 1971 to 1986 2005-02-21
When Bonnie Raitt collected four Grammies for her 1989 multiplatinum breakthrough
Nick of Time, it offered sweet justification for fans that had followed her through years of great recordings but plenty of hard luck in terms of commercial success.
The Bonnie Raitt Collection shows why those fans were right all along. From the early blues-mama stylings of "Give It Up or Let Me Go" and "Love Me Like a Man" to the increased pop sophistication she brought to songs like her funky reworking of Del Shannon's "Runaway" and Bryan Adams's straight-ahead rocker "No Way to Treat a Lady," the set offers a worthwhile sampling of the decade and a half she spent recording for the Warner Bros. label. Of special note are a pair of live recordings; a previously unreleased version of "Women Be Wise," featuring one of Raitt's primary mentors, Sippie Wallace; and a duet with John Prine on "Angel from Montgomery" that first appeared on the Grammy-winning
Tribute to Steve Goodman. If you only recently discovered Raitt, this collection will help you decide which of her earlier works to sample next.
--Daniel Durchholz
Made Me a Fan for Life!!!! 2004-10-20
At the tender age of 18, I stumbled upon a strong, intelligent, passionate yet vulnerable female voice in Amercian music that served as a mentor to me. I was a young motherless woman searching for my identity and when I heard Bonnie sing of heartache, love and respect, I found the woman I wanted to be. Having worn out my first Raitt album, the bestselling, grammy winning , Nick of Time, I went looking for more from this rare talent and found The Collection which became my musical bible for the next five years. Though, I have enjoyed all of Bonnie's later work, it is her earlier work that remains my favorite. From the raw sexuality of "Leave Home" to the heartwrenching despair of "The Glow", The Collection highlights the enormous musical and emotional range of this gifted performer. This album is the perfect introduction to an artist who has become nothing short of a national treasure! And for those fans who feel they need no introduction, let me just say, if you haven't heard early Bonnie, you haven't heard Bonnie!
A mediocre collection 
2003-08-13
Featuring songs culled from her 1971-1986 releases, and encompassing classic blues, blues-rock, New Orleans-styled R&B and even quasi-reggae, "The Bonnie Raitt Collection" obviously doesn't include every good song from her first nine albums, and some selections are certainly debatable (a few more up-tempo songs would have been nice, too).
But there is still some really good stuff here:
Junior Wells guests on the excellent original "Finest Lovin' Man", and Raitt demonstrates that she can also play some truly magnificent acoustic rhythm guitar on the superbly groovy "Love Me Like A Man". And there are other highlight as well, including the lovely country-rock ballads (!) "Love Has No Pride" and "Louise", a funky, bluesy rendition of Del Shannon's classic "Runaway", Frederic 'Toots' Hibbert's "True Love Is Hard To Find", and the catchy Bryan Adams-penned rocker "No Way To Treat A Lady".
So, 3 stars or there about - pretty good, but several of Bonnie Raitt's original albums, from which these songs are drawn, are much better. Strangely enough, since Raitt herself made these selections, but she somehow failed to make a truly representative compilation, and this album ends up being less than it could have been.
If I were you, I'd pick up her first two albums instead, they make a better introduction.
The minority vote: doesn't do justice to her earlier work 2003-03-03
I'm obviously in the minority here if everyone else gave this CD a five star review, but I just don't think it's a great compilation of her work with Warner Bros. Granted, Raitt supposedly compiled it herself, so it's very unlikely it was picked without care. However, this was the first disc I checked out after her trio of Don Was-produced albums for Capitol, and later one when I explored her Warner albums in their entirety, I felt like this CD shortchanged them.
A single disc compilation of her Warner work is ideal, though, because after three solid albums, it became wildly uneven. Furthermore, many songs were done far better live (check out "Write Me a Few of Your Lines/Kokomo Blues"; the version on the current Capitol live album is great, but so is her mid-70's live interpretations), so mixing it up would make it even better. To this CD's credit, it does just that, including two excellent live cuts. However, there are still some glaring omissions, and a handful of cuts here that don't reflect her best work. The cuts from "The Glow" show how mismatched she was with Asher's production (so mismatched, I would've considered excluding the album altogether; a better choice may have been to use live versions), and "No Way To Treat A Lady" feels too mechanical, too manufactured, something that plagued most of the other cuts from the same album. "Runaway" may have been her only 'hit' until "Nick Of Time," but it's not a good reinterpretation of a classic. Meanwhile, "Too Long At The Fair," "Cry Like A Rainstorm," "Write Me a Few of Your Lines/Kokomo Blues," "Run Like A Thief," and "River of Tears" are missing; all of these are GREAT recordings, not to mention great performances vocally, and have some excellent guitar work.
This CD isn't bad for what it is and has some great tracks, but as a whole, it doesn't showcase her best work with the label.
20 songs from the blues guitar queen's first 20 years. 2003-01-13
Hearing Bonnie Raitt's music, you'd swear her roots were somewhere in the Mississippi Delta - not, of all places, Southern California. And indeed, the red-haired, freckled daughter of Broadway star John Raitt ("Oklahoma!") fit in badly with the crowd of teenagers who listened to the Beach Boys and other representatives of the so-called "California music," went to the beach and learned how to surf; whereas Bonnie "didn't get tanned and ... lived in the canyon," as she recalls in her biography written by Mark Bego, "Just in the Nick of Time." But by that time, she had already found solace in music: "That was my saving grace. I just sat in my room and played my guitar," she remembers. One day she heard a Newport Folk Festival recording entitled "Blues at Newport '63," featuring John Lee Hooker, John Hammond, Brownie McGee, Mississippi John Hurt and other members of the blues's all-time elite. And Bonnie was hooked: "I tell you, once you get exposed to the blues, you can't get enough."
Thus, it was only natural that she would soon be found more frequently in the Cambridge, MA, blues and jazz clubs than in the hallowed halls of Radcliffe College, where she had enrolled to master in African studies. Before long she had an agent, and began to open for her idols Junior Wells, Arthur Crudup, Buddy Guy, John Lee Hooker and ultimately her mentor, Sippie Wallace, and met singer-songwriters and future soulmates Jackson Browne and James Taylor. In 1971 she was offered her first recording contract. And from her self-titled debut to 2002's "Silver Lining," her over three decades-long career is one of the most amazing examples of personal growth, combined with stellar musicianship and an active voice for society's victims and underprivileged and again and again, for women's rights; even if it would take the music industry until 1989's triple Grammies for the Capitol Records release "Nick of Time" to officially recognize Bonnie Raitt's achievements.
This collection, released shortly after her Grammy-winning album, chronicles all stages of her career until then, drawing on the nine albums she had released on Warner Records before changing labels. It features all-time classics such as "Give It Up or Let Me Go," "Love Me Like a Man," "Willya Wontcha," "Love Has No Pride" (one of her earliest signature songs), her intensely personal interpretation of Randy Newman's "Guilty" (which still cuts so close that she doesn't perform it live as regularly as other songs), the Tex-Mex ballad "Louise," her Al Green-inflected version of Jackson Browne's "Runaway," her hard-driving recording of Bryan Adams's "No Way to Treat a Lady" ("I sing a lot of songs for women who've 'had it,' and this is a powerful dose of that feeling," she comments on the album's liner notes), a rare 1976 live duet with Sippie Wallace on her mentor's "Women Be Wise," and an the Grammy-winning 1985 live duet with John Prine on "Angel From Montgomery," written by Prine but now a signature song for Bonnie Raitt as much as for him.
Much more than a "best of," this is a very personal collection of songs by the singer whose very first female role model was "Gunsmoke"'s red-headed, independent Miss Kitty (Amanda Blake); who learned to successfully compete with boys and men from early childhood on ("I just couldn't stand the way girls got the second best of everything," she recalls in "Nick of Time"), and who now donates the revenue from sales of her signature model Fender Strat to her own project for inner city girls. It amply showcases her feeling for the blues and her extraordinary talent as a guitar player: she is one of the few women who have mastered the bottleneck guitar, a feat she achieved even before her first recording contract, and her slide guitar skills are matched (if that) by only the best in the business.
Bonnie Raitt is rightfully considered part of the all-time elite of blues musicians, and recognized as a peer by the artists she once admired from afar. This album contains excellent examples of her cooperation with many of those artists, who appear on her records again and again - the list almost reads like a blues and rock music "who is who." There are, for example, Junior Wells (harp on "Finest Lovin' Man"), Freebo ([fretless] bass on almost every track and tuba on "Give It Up or Let Me Go"), A.C. Reed (sax on "Finest Lovin' Man"), John Payne (sax on "Give It Up or Let Me Go"), T.J. Tindall (e-guitar on "Under the Falling Sky"), Paul Butterfield (harp on "Under the Falling Sky"), Lowell George (slide guitar on "I Feel the Same" and "Guilty"), Bill Payne (keyboards on "I Feel the Same," "Guilty," "(Goin') Wild for You Baby" and "No Way to Treat a Lady"), Steve Gadd (drums on "What Is Success"), Will McFarlane (e-guitar on "My First Night Alone Without You," "Sugar Mama" and "Runaway"), John Hall (e-guitar on "My First Night Without You" and "Sugar Mama") Jai Winding (keyboards on "My First Night Alone Without You" and "Sugar Mama"), Joe and Jeff Porcaro (percussion on "Sugar Mama"), Norton Buffalo (harp on "Runaway"), Rosemary Butler (backing vocals on "Runaway" and "No Way to Treat a Lady") Waddy Wachtel (e-guitar on "(Goin') Wild for You Baby"), Bob Glaub (bass on "(Goin') Wild for You Baby"), Ricky Fataar (drums/percussion on "Willya Wontcha"), Michael Landau (guitar solo on "No Way to Treat a Lady"), Nathan East (bass on "No Way to Treat a Lady") and countless others.
Intimidated by her mother's skill as a pianist, Bonnie Raitt exchanged keys for steel strings when she was barely eight years old. She later did return to the piano, though, and even if she may not be Martha Argerich (or, for that matter, Marjorie Haydock Raitt), her true gift shines through even there. But even if she had never learned to play anything but guitar ... listening to this album, I doubt we would seriously be missing anything.
Also recommended:
Road Tested
Give It Up
Fundamental
