When Bonnie Raitt won a phenomenal four Grammys in 1990, it came as overdue recognition for an artist who had been breaking down barriers of gender and genre since the early Seventies. Her feel for the blues was evident on her first album, Bonnie Raitt (1971), and though she's explored different kinds of material over the years—including pop, rock and balladry—a serious rooting in the blues has remained evident in her work. Raised in Los Angeles by her actor father John and pianist mother Marjorie, Raitt took up guitar at age 12. While attending college in Boston, she gravitated to the Cambridge folk-blues scene of the late Sixties. She emerged as both a prodigy and anomaly: a young woman who sang blues with gritty passion and played slide guitar with authority, as if the genre's fundaments had been etched in her soul.