In 1983, Warner Bros. dropped Bonnie Raitt the day after she finished mastering her album Tongue and Groove, then shelved the record entirely. She was in her thirties, battling alcohol and drug addiction, and touring on her own savings. Six years later, Nick of Time hit number one, swept the Grammys including Album of the Year, and sold more than five million copies in the United States. This episode traces how the daughter of Broadway star John Raitt and a skilled pianist mother taught herself guitar on a Stella she received at age eight and fell for the blues after hearing a Newport Folk Festival record at 14.

We follow her from Radcliffe College, where she majored in social relations and African studies and planned to work in Tanzania, to the Philadelphia blues scene with promoter Dick Waterman, her 1971 Warner Bros. debut, and a decade of critical acclaim that never translated into sales. The episode explores the 1987 turning point when watching Stevie Ray Vaughan play brilliantly while sober shattered her belief that the party lifestyle fueled the music, and the partnership with producer Don Was at Capitol Records that produced her first fully sober album.

• What bottleneck slide guitar requires mechanically and why it was so rare for a woman to be recognized for the technique in the 1970s
• The 1977 hit cover of Runaway that sparked a bidding war between Warner Bros. and Columbia
• Brownie, the unpainted 1965 Fender Stratocaster she bought in 1969 for about $120 at three in the morning, and her 1996 Fender signature model, the first for a female musician
• Her funding of headstones for blues pioneers Fred McDowell and Memphis Minnie, and her founding role in Musicians United for Safe Energy
• Luck of the Draw, Longing in Their Hearts, and her 2023 Grammy for Song of the Year for Just Like That