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Lively, musical variety featured

on April 25, 1980 No comments

Bonnie Raitt, Sippie Wallace and Steve NardellaRoyal Oak Music Theatre, Royal Oak, Michigan

By ERIC MOBEY

There was something for everybody Friday night at the Royal Oak Theatre. The featured artist, Bonnie Raitt, shared the bill with Steve Nardella and the sensational Sippie Wallace. A lesser artist would have been threatened by the lively sets of Nardella and Ms. Wallace, but the confident Bonnie Raitt was unwavered.

Ann Arborites Steve Nardella and his band started the show on a lively note. Their set featured an array of styles from Blues and Rockabilly to straightahead, vintage Rock and Roll. Their performance was admirable for an opening act and helped to set a good tone for the rest of the evening.

Eighty-one-year-old Sippie Wallace followed Nardella in a most memorable appearance. Blueslady Wallace charmed the crowd with her Depression-era ragtime blues.
Sippie is a favorite of Bonnie Raitts’ and she gave her ample room to steal the hearts of the receptive audience. Backed by the tuxedoed Easy Street Jazz Band, Sippie worked her way through 11 songs.

Ms. Wallace suffered a stroke five years ago and was confined to a wheelchair. However, you can’t keep a good woman like Sippie down for long and she has recouperated to where she can stand on stage once again.

SIPPIES’ HUMOROUS song introductions and down-right assertiveness added to her still-strong vocals. She received appreciative applause every time she queried the audience with “how am I doin’?” Everytime she was ready to deliver a song, she would nod to her keyboardist with a demonstrative “Maestro, if you please” or “okay, maestro.”

Bonnie Raitt joined Sippie and the Easy Street Jazz Band for the last two songs, closing the set with a roof-raising version of “Women Be Wise.” This song showcased the fine band with solos from all members. Sippie had let her fellow Detroiters know that this lady can still sing the blues.

Finally, after a brief intermission, Ms. Raitt took the stage and proceeded to rock the socks off all those in attendance. Her raw energy and strong vocals are not for the meek or laid-back. Unlike other female vocalists, who sometimes appear fragile alongside their all-male bands, Raitt steps right in and plays along.

HER ABILITY ON electric guitar adds greatly to the performance. Not one to play into the helpless female role, Railt moves and plays in a style that would appear contrived by most female rock singers. Yet Raitt does not come off like the women in Sippies “Hard Boiled Mama.”

Ms. Raitt seemed especially pleased to have Sippie Wallace along on this outing. Her admiration for Sippie was verbalized throughout the evening. While other teen-agers of her generation were influenced by pop music of the day, Raitt was sampling Sippie’s old records. This seems odd when you consider her father is Broadway slnger-actor John Raitt. Personally, I’m glad she didn’t get in, say, “Oaklahoma.”

The concert was a good mix of several styles from Sam and Dave’s “And I Thank You” to a different version of Del Shannon’s “Runaway.” She was particularly striking on ‘Three-Time Loser” with low-down blues vocal that was punctuated with a great saxophone solo.

In fact, horns were predominant throughout the evening. This fine musicianship lifted both Sippie and Bonnies’ performance. On “Give It Up,” Bonnies’ band was joined by two members of the Easy Street Jazz Band. The combined force of trombone, two clarinettes and Freebo’s tuba augmented Bonnies’ vocal tremendously.

One seldom sees this abundance of talent and professionalism in one show. In these inflationary times performances seldom equal the hefty ticket prices.

I’m reminded of Sippie Wallaces song with the line: “You can make me do what you want me to, but you gotta know how to do it.” I don’t know what this show did to get Nardella, Sippie and Bonnie to do what they did, but they did know how to do it.


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The Blues Have Changed Her Life

on April 3, 1980 No comments
By Michael Kilgore – Tribune Staff Writer

Bonnie Raitt, who turned from folk to blues when she discovered the genre, says she’s ready to move toward Southern sounds, away from the Los Angeles music scene.

If the blues hadn’t come along, Bonnie Raitt might well have ended up as another flower-power folkie like Judy Collins, rather than the gutsy purveyor of the styles of Fred McDowell and Mississippi John Hurt.

Raitt, the slide-guitar-playing daughter of Broadway star John Raitt, was a fan of Collins and Joan Baez until somebody gave her an album of blues at Newport when she was 13 or 14 years old.

It literally changed her life.

“It had Brownie and Sonny, John Lee Hooker, Dave Van Ronk,” Raitt said in a suprisingly bright voice. Blues players ought to talk like closing time in a bar, but Raitt has just a touch of rasp in her voice, and her sentences trail off into soft obilivion.

“We were in the middle of the so-called folk revival and the blues were getting a lot of attention … people like Son House, John Hurt, Fred McDowell … it just struck me like a gong.”

After listening to the album and others like it, she began playing blues instead of folk. She no longer wanted to be Judy Collins.

At 18 or 19, she ran into Son House and Arthur Crudup and others and received further education in the heritage that is the blues.

“A lot of people think I didn’t learn about the blues until I met them (in my late teens),” Raitt says. “But I listened to the albums. I still have that (Newport) record, as a matter of fact.”


Raitt may be the best-known white female interpreter of the blues, which for others would be a dubious distinction. For Raitt, who doesn’t particularly care for labels, it’s merely one description of what she does, and she considers her musical direction to be constantly changing.


“I’ve always liked soul music better than white rock… a couple of purists think that I’m selling out if I don’t stick to a strict country-blues style … to my so-called roots … But you can only do so many shuffles in E before they get to be tiring.”

She says her musical direction may be changing even now.

“I’d like to move toward the South and away from Los Angeles,” she says. “I’m a real big fan of (Texas r&b’er) Delbert McClinton. I’m trying to get away from the same circle of friends in California. It’s getting very limiting anyway with everybody — Linda, Emmylou, Jennifer Warnes, Karla — all drawing from the same circle of songwriters. The way to get around that is to emphasize the things that are different.”

She says she’s particularly fond of the music from Tulsa and Fort Worth, so maybe you’ll soon hear Raitt singing “A Mess of Blues,” a song off McClinton’s last album.

Finding material is an important part of the creative process when you write as little as Raitt does. She admits her talent is not primarily as a songwriter.

But she helped find fledgling talent like Jackson Browne and Eric (“Love Has No Pride”) Kaz when they were unknown songwriters.

“On the last album, I wrote one song” she says, perhaps a touch defensively. “If I find, a subject I wanna talk about, I write … Jackson and I have a real good connection because he seems to say what I would say — if I could write better.”

Raitt has a rough sweetness about her, certainly not a woman to be trifled with, but not cold and unapproachable, either. No L.A. angel, Raitt has spunk, fire and, yes, earthy sexiness to her. Enough so that a DJ recently asked her, to her dismay, “Hey, what’s it like to be a sex symbol?” She parodies that style with painful accuracy.

Raitt still shows a refreshing innocence, an endearing quality in light of her occasionally bawdy lyrics, particularly those on songs by her “sassy grandmother,” Sippie Wallace.

With Wallace, Raitt returned a small payment on her blues debt. Influenced by that Newport album, Raitt played a tribute to Fred McDowell at the Ann Arbor Jazz and Blues Festival in 1972, and joined Wallace on “Women Be Wise,” which Wallace wrote in 1929.

Wallace’s songs, and Raitt’s interpretations of those and others, go over just fine in an era of stronger women and the “revelations” that women have all the same emotions men have been singing about all these years, that is, lust and pride and hard-edged jealousy.

With unshy lyrics, Raitt says she might “give a hint on how to strike my flint” on “You Got To Know How,” and on another song her outside lover is so good he’s “About To Make Me Leave Home.”

Raitt is still working on her film about Wallace, trying to raise the money independently. Just before her last trip to Tampa in December 1977, she took Wallace to Baton Rouge and the Kingfish Club for some filming.

Bonnie Raitt made a special effort to form powerful relationships with many blues legends including Sippie Wallace as pictured here – 1979 © Thomas Weschler

“I feel a great responsiblity to spread what these people were doing instead of just getting it through me. Eighty-two (Wallace’s age) is not a time you should be waiting around for something like that….”

Raitt pays tribute to her mentors in other ways, too, including touring with blues masters like Muddy Waters. But, recently, Raitt has become depressed when she realizes how many original bluesmen are no longer around.

“I’ve watched six, seven of my dear friends die,” she says. “It’s so depressing to me… Someday I’m gonna have to lecture at black high schools on what kind of style Fred McDowell had.”

That’s not the kind of tribute Raitt would prefer to pay. She’d much rather audiences turned on to the original blues artists, but she knows that’s getting harder and harder, that age and ill health have taken their toll on the roster of blues greats.

Once Raitt starts talking about Hurt and McDowell and Waters, she abandons her casual conversational tone, and begins talking in a concerned rush. Then she pauses and laughs a little at herself.

“I’m sorry, I got on a roll there,” she says, not taking any of the meaning back. “It’s just been a long time since I talked about any of this stuff….

“… Every single time you run through a town, somebody else has died….”

Someone in the background tells her there’s a sound check in 15 minutes.

Raitt is asked about her involvement with the all-star, Musicians United for Safe Energy (MUSE) concerts in New York and her own growing active anti-nuclear stance.

“It’s a real important part of my life,” she says. “I spend my afternoons doing interviews talking about it … It’s changed my lifestyle. You can’t devote as much time to your music … So, I would say it’s equally as important as my music.

“My life in general is more satisfying because it involves something I believe in.”

Despite that, Raitt has no plans to record a no-nukes song.

“I find it very hard to stomach the political music over the past 10 years … it seemed to turn off more people than it turned on … with the exception of John and Johanna’s Hall’s ‘Power.’

“I would like to say the (MUSE) film will be coming out in August. On April 2, I’ll be in New York for the final edit of the film. We’re all producing it together.

“We’ve picked a real important issue. We try to bait them (audiences) into the concerts, and maybe they’ll learn something besides. It would be great….”

Whatever she does, concerts or political statements, Raitt brings her particular style to it; she has the ability to raunch it up with the boys and not be vulgar. She maintains her class.

Before she goes to the sound check, Raitt again returns to the deaths of blues players.

“Don’t make it sound like I’m depressed all the time,” she says, “I just got started talking about that. I DO have a good time.”

Bonnie Raitt will be in concert tonight at 8 at the Tampa Jai Alai Fronton. Christopher Cross will open. Tickets are $6.50 and $7.50.


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Two Worlds Come Together at the Blues

on May 9, 1976 No comments
BY CARL ARRINGTON

The odyssey of Bonnie Raitt and Sippie Wallace is a tale of sisterhood wrought of redemption and songs of heartbreak. Together they comprise an odd but well-matched pair of singers who have walked down the same blues alley from different worlds.

Sippie is one of the few surviving foremothers of the blues, and Bonnie is perhaps the most popular current artist using that vintage musical format.

This Thursday, these two women from different blues eras will make a rare appearance together in Sippie’s hometown of Detroit. The concert is scheduled for 8 p.m. at the Showcase Theater, Van Dyke and Harper.

THOUGH BOTH ladies have careers cast in blue, the contrast of their lives is startling.

Sippie is a stout black woman who grew up poor and Baptist in Texas and became a widely known blues singer in the 1920s. Bonnie, who is white, red-haired and freckled, was born to a show biz family of Quakers in Burbank, Calif.

Sippie Is rather proper and still very devoted to her church while Bonnie lives the freewheeling life of a traveling rock minstrel. Bonnie is 26, Sippie is exactly thrice that age.

While most of Bonnie’s performances these days are in sold-out arenas, Sippie plays to packed chapels every Sunday. While Bonnie’s work leans on a foundation of folk and rock, Sippie’s entire style is deeply rooted in gospel.

Yet these two women are linked by the soul experience of the blues. Their relationship is reminiscent of other female apprenticeships: Gertrude (Ma) Rainey trained Bessie Smith, who was in turn post-humously idolized by the late Janis Joplin.

Both Sippie and Bonnie have been active in promoting the cause of women. Sippie was among the first to talk to women frankly through the lyrics of her songs about their relationships with men. Bonnie does the same thing for the women of the 1970s.

The greatest similarity between the two singers is their disarming, gregarious friendliness. Any visitor to Sippie’s very humble home in downtown Detroit is likely to be treated to a performance of rare tunes like “Adam and Eve Had the Blues” or “The Special Delivery Blues.” Similarly, Bonnie avoids the pretentions of stardom.

Bonnie has spent a considerable amount of effort trying to win deserved recognition for such blues artists as Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and Mississippi Fred McDowell. “Soon Taj Mahal (another blues performer) and I will be the only ones left who really knew our musical ancestors,” Bonnie said recently.

However, Bonnie’s favorite cause is Sippie Wallace-the woman she considers her prime mentor and affectionately refers to as “my sassy grandmother.”

SIPPIE WAS of the generation of Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Chippie Hill, Margaret Johnson, Hociel Thomas (Sippie’s niece) and Mamie Smith.

She was born Beulah Thomas in Houston, Texas, in 1898. Her parents, Fanny and George Thomas, with eight girls and five boys of their own, took in five orphans as well.

Beulah eventually gave way to “Sippie,” a nickname given because her teeth were late in coming in and thus she had to sip everything she ate.

Sippie’s parents were devout members of the Shiloh Baptist Church-her father was an elder deacon and her mother was head of the women’s auxiliary.

Friends and singers Bonnie Raitt and Detroiter Sippie Wallace. When Bonnie first heard Sippie, “I just couldn’t believe it. . . the best thing I had ever heard, so raw and sassy.” © Michael Dobo

As in the life of most blues singers, the church played a vital part in the development of Sippie’s talent. There she learned voice, harmony and how to play the keyboards. “For me there ain’t no difference between blues and gospel except for the words. And besides,” laughs Sippie, “I put the BE-BOP in everything I do anyway!”

Sippie had her first hit in 1923 when she recorded “Up the Country” and “Shorty George” for the Okeh label.

According to Ron Harwood, who has researched the sales figures, Sippie sold hundreds of thousands of records during the 1920s.

Musicians on Sippie’s records included Louis Armstrong, Johnny Dodds, Eddie Heywood, Buddy Christian and Clarence Williams.

IN 1927, Sippie moved to Detroit, but Sippie’s career, along with those of millions, came to an abrupt halt in 1929 with the Depression.

After that, with the exception of a few revivals, Sippie disappeared from the music scene until the late 1960s. She is reluctant to talk about the years in between when she had two daughters, lost her husband and buried most of her brothers and sisters.

Sippie was rediscovered in 1965 in Detroit by a couple of young, white jazz enthusiasts, Sam Stark and Ron Harwood. Stark had read, in an article by Victoria Spivey (another blues veteran) in an obscure journal called Record Research, that Sippie was still living in Detroit.

In October 1965, Sippie invited Harwood and Stark to her home. There they taped her singing. “We were just amazed,” said Harwood.

When asked what she thought about singing the blues after so many years she replied, “I can understand the blues after so many years. I can sing them now-I know what they are. I know what’s goin’ on.”

Shortly thereafter Sippie’s discoverers arranged for her to play a few dates with the Kweskin Jug Band-a group which at one time included Otis Spann, Geoff Muldaur and Maria Muldaur.

While playing at the Newport Jazz and Blues Festival in 1966, Sippie met Dick Waterman, who is perhaps the single most important and knowledgeable blues promoter in the world.

Waterman invited her to join the American Folk Blues Festival which toured Europe in the latter part of 1966 with such artists as Junior Wells, Roosevelt Sykes and Little Brother Montgomery.

While in Copenhagen they recorded an album on the Storyville label-a company whose records rarely made it across the Atlantic to the U.S.A. It was that album that later brought Bonnie and Sippie together.

After that tour, Sippie started having some health problems with arthritis and later had a stroke.

MEANTIME, Bonnie had grown from a rather reserved childhood into an energetic, peaceable renegade. She was born in 1949 to Marge and John Raitt. It was about the same time Sippie became the full-time organist for the Leland Baptist Church in Detroit.

Bonnie’s father was a noted actor who starred in Broadway hits like “Pajama Game,” “Carousel” and “Oklahoma!”

Bonnie’s parents were as devoted to their peaceful Quaker traditions as Sippie’s folks were to the hallelujah salvation of the Baptists.

In 1958, Bonnie’s parents and grandparents chipped in to buy her a $25 guitar for Christmas. Even then her musical tastes were somewhat different that those of her peers. No Frankie Avalon or surf stuff for her-R&B was the sound that moved Bonnie.

For college, Bonnie chose Radcliffe, the queen of the Seven Sister colleges and as well a center of the counterculture movement.

While there, Bonnie played in folkie bars and eventually met Waterman, the blues promoter. However, at the time blues was still riding in the back of the bus while psychedelic music was the craze.

In the summer of 1968, Bonnie went with two girlfriends to Europe. In London Bonnie ran across a blues anthology album. Among the artists was Sippie Wallace.

“When I listened to it I just couldn’t believe it. Sippie was the best thing I had ever heard,” recalls Bonnie. “It was so raw and sassy-even more so than Bessie Smith.”

IT WASN’T until four years later that Bonnie finally met Sippie. It was in 1972 at the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival. Waterman, who was managing Bonnie at the time, remembers, “I reminded Bonnie that Sippie lived only 40 miles away from the festival and we decided to make her contract for the event hinge on giving some stage time to Sippie.”

There, in the shadow of the performers’ tent, Sippie and Bonnie met for the first time. Even though Sippie was still recovering from her stroke, Waterman recalls that it was gleeful occasion.

Bonnie Raitt performs during the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival at Otis Spann Memorial Field in Ann Arbor on September 10, 1972
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Ann Arbor Blues Festival (Ann Arbor, Michigan) 1972
Ann Arbor Blues Festival (Ann Arbor, Michigan) 1972

At that time Bonnie was relatively unknown. However, after the show, she instructed Waterman to turn over a certain portion of their meager earnings to Sippie. Later in the day Sippie pulled Bonnie into a corner and tried to give her the money back.

In the past two years, Sippie and Bonnie have traded songs and letters and performed together on a few occasions in places like Boston and Washington, D.C.

When they play together, their mutual affection and admiration is apparent. Sippie usually begins by singing some of her favorite blues, then plays a little gospel and then is joined by Bonnie and her group for some songs like “Mighty Tight Woman” and “Women Be Wise.” Sippie leads the way on gospel tunes like “Amazing Grace.” Bonnie’s tender pleading and bottleneck-guitar playing compliment Sippie’s spirited, rough voice.

The last time they played together was in Ann Arbor last November. It was Sippie’s birthday. After Sippie unveiled her “Bonnie, You’re So Wonderful,” a song written in tribute to her young friend, Bonnie led the packed house at Hill Auditorium in a rousing rendition of “Happy Birthday.”

As they stood arm in arm clutching each other they reflected the sweet, tortured gleam of the blues.

About The Author

Detroit Free Press – May 9, 1976
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