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  ...