MANN MUSIC ROOM: VAULT

Blog Entry by Jack McCarthy, Historian, The Mann Center for the Performing Arts

The Mann Center traces its history to the Robin Hood Dell, which opened in 1930 in East Fairmount Park as a summer home for The Philadelphia Orchestra. In 1976 the organization moved to a new venue in West Fairmount Park. Originally called Robin Hood Dell West, it was later renamed the Mann Music Center in honor of its longtime director and benefactor Fredric Mann, and subsequently renamed the Mann Center for the Performing Arts.

The Mann Center recently announced that it will be hosting Bonnie Raitt in concert on June 15, 2022. A frequent performer at the Mann over the years—the 2022 show will be her tenth appearance at the venue—Raitt actually started her professional career in Philadelphia in the late 1960s and has been a local fan favorite ever since.

Bonnie Raitt was born in Burbank, California, in 1949 and was attending Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the late 1960s when she dropped out and moved to Philadelphia, where she became active in the city’s folk music scene. The folk music revival of the 1950s and 1960s brought some notoriety to the original rural folk blues tradition of southern African American bluesmen, many of whom played folk clubs in and around Philadelphia in the late 1960s, such as the 2nd Fret and Main Point, and made appearances at the annual Philadelphia Folk Festival. It was at such venues that Bonnie Raitt began to perform professionally in 1969, while also having the opportunity to befriend, play with, and learn from original bluesmen, who helped to shape her own emerging blues-based style. 

By the time her first album, self-titled Bonnie Raitt, was released in 1971 Raitt had moved on from Philadelphia, but she returned to play often in the area. Her popularity in the region was enhanced significantly by a live acoustic show she did in 1972 from famed Philadelphia recording studio Sigma Sound, with backing by local musicians she knew from her time living in the city.  The show was broadcast on radio station WMMR, which replayed selections from it many times over the years, cultivating an enduring fanbase for Raitt in Philadelphia.  Performing regularly in the area throughout the 1970s, most of her outdoor summer shows were at the Temple Ambler Music Festival just outside the city, with occasional appearances at the Philadelphia Folk Festival and other local folk and blues festivals. 

Bonnie Raitt’s first appearance at the Mann Music Center was on September 2, 1981, a show she headlined with opening acts John Hall, a singer-songwriter who would later form the pop-rock group Orleans (and still later serve as a US congressman), and the blues-roots group The Nighthawks. She headlined at the Mann again the following year, with opening act Clarence Clemmons & the Red Bank Rockers, led by Bruce Springsteen’s beloved saxophonist. Most of Raitt’s summer appearances in the area in the 1980s were not at the Mann, however, but at the Valley Forge Music Fair in suburban Devon, Chester County, a 2,900-seat venue (as opposed to the Mann’s 14,000-seat capacity, of which 4,700 were under roof).

While Bonnie Raitt was highly acclaimed by critics and had a loyal fanbase, particularly in Philadelphia, she did not enjoy significant commercial success in the 1970s and 1980s. Her style of blues and roots-based rock, folk, and popular music simply did not generate major record sales. That all changed with her breakthrough 1989 album Nick of Time, which garnered her three Grammy awards and eventually sold over five million copies. Her next two albums in 1991 and 1994 were multi-million sellers as well. Enjoying major commercial success in the early 1990s,  Raitt headlined shows at the Mann in 1990, 1994, and 1995, and returned several times in the 2000s. Her last show at the Mann was August 26, 2016, with opening act the Richard Thompson Trio, led by the English folk-rock veteran and guitar virtuoso.

No doubt when Bonnie Raitt returns to the Mann on June 15, 2022, with opening act singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams, another critically acclaimed artist in the roots-rock tradition, many of the thousands of fans she has cultivated over 50+ years of performing in Philadelphia will be in attendance.