Perspective is a funny thing.
Take Bonnie Bramlett, for instance. To millions of passionate classic rock and R&B fans, the singer is a familiar, integral component of the music of the late '60s and early '70s. In addition to the hits she made for legendary Stax Records with her former husband in Delaney & Bonnie and Friends, Bramlett is widely known for her work as songwriter and vocalist with such luminaries as Eric Clapton, George Harrison, and The Allman Brothers. She's the only "Allman Sister," a former member of Ike and Tina Turner's Ikettes who co-wrote the Carpenters mega-hit "Superstar" with Leon Russell.
To many, many millions more, however, she's that lady who was Bonnie Watkins on Roseanne for a while.
"Way more people recognize me from Roseanne than as Bonnie Bramlett," says the 60-year-old with a throaty laugh. "More people saw one episode of Roseanne than probably know about anything else in my entire career — that's how powerful that medium is."
Weird, huh?
After all, Bramlett spent three or four seasons playing a peripheral character on the long-running sitcom, compared to her three decades of music making. Her career is peppered with accomplishments both interesting (Delaney & Bonnie are generally remembered as the first white act signed to Stax, not counting the Caucasian members of superlative house band Booker T. & The MGs) and moment-defining (she sang on Carly Simon's '72 runaway hit album No Secrets), and she's played with more famous-to-legendary names than would fit on this page.
"It might be easier to name the ones that I didn't work with," she jokes.
Bramlett speaks with an endearing drawl reminiscent of both her native St. Louis — where she sang in church and, scandalously underage, in local bars before her status as an Ikette landed her in Los Angeles — and Nashville, her adopted hometown. But she didn't grow up on the thick Southern blues and boogie with which she has become so intimately associated.
Bramlett cut her teeth on the grittier, groovier, more danceable R&B of East St. Louis' nightclub scene; it was Delaney Bramlett, whom she married five days after meeting him in L.A., who introduced her to the stolen sounds of the Delta, and the musicians incorporating them into a different, more roots-reverent kind of rock 'n' roll.
"People made me listen to white blues, Southern music," she says. "I was from city blues, not those Mississippi mud blues. I didn't know that, couldn't understand it. That's how come Delaney and I complemented each other so much. I brought this urban blues, and he had that muddy blues, Mississippi, from the gut. Both were raw and real.
"And we both had gospel backgrounds, and that's the same with the Southern rock. It was that coming together of the black and white expression, and the spiritual and the secular. But I don't like to use that word, it means 'without God,' and around here, we don't do nothin' without God."
The subsequent 15-or-so years of Bramlett's life are well documented, and read like a who's-who of British and American classic and Southern rock. Between '69 and their breakup in '72, Delaney & Bonnie and Friends recorded a handful of albums and toured with featured players like Russell, Harrison, Dave Mason and Clapton, who met them when they toured with Blind Faith and collaborated with them after leaving that band. (It was with other Friends that Clapton formed Derek & The Dominos, the group responsible, along with the late Duane Allman, for the classic Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs.)
After the Bramlett's divorce, Bonnie's songwriting talent and strong, soulful voice remained in demand with a number of artists. She also released several solo albums up until the early '80s. After touring stints with Stephen Stills and the Allmans, she took some time away from music and did some acting, taking on a small role in Oliver Stone's The Doors as well as her recurring Roseanne role.
Looking back at the flurry of music-scene activity that had so completely enveloped her, Bramlett finds it hard to see that heady time as so many music fans do. For hobbyists, historians and obsessives, it was a near-mythological era, an age of singer-songwriters and guitar gods. For her, it was a life.
"We were all kids together … my daughter sat on Eric Clapton's knee," she says. "Where we impressed each other was in performance. When it came to performance, we had to give everybody their props. But when it came to everyday life, we were all just everyday people."
Two-thousand-two saw Bramlett return to recording with I'm Still The Same, a stylish, subtly jazz-informed collection of some of her favorite tunes — her own and others'. The passage of time has had no discernible effect on her powerful, expressive pipes, and the disc exudes the confidence and satisfaction of a project undertaken for its own sake.
"A totally self-absorbed piece of work," Bramlett says with a chuckle. "If somebody asked what I would do if I could do whatever I wanted, well, that's what I did."
These days, she's organizing a workshop for aspiring performers, and making select appearances with a rising young Nashville jam/boogie combo called Old Union. She's found kindred spirits in the members of the band, who look farther back than last year's popular sounds for inspiration. And both endeavors afford her the opportunity to contribute even further to the continued prosperity of heartfelt musical expression.
"You know, bebop almost disappeared," she muses. "[Seminal American music] is capable of doing that … but something else will come along and it will be wonderful, I'm sure. There will always be a Beatles or a Jeff Beck."
Then she laughs again.
"If that time ever does come, if the music does go away, it won't be because I didn't leave any behind me. We all leave it here, you just have to search for it. But it'll be a treasure if you find it."
scott.harrell@weeklyplanet.com
This article appears in Jan 12-18, 2005.