Fascinated by seedy characters on society’s edge, Ray Bonneville has never played blues by the rules
As a youngster, blues artist Ray Bonneville was out of sorts. Born in French-speaking Quebec, he moved with his family to Boston when he was 12 and found himself in a new town, with a new culture and an unfamiliar language. It wasn’t until his mother bought him a used guitar that he started feeling at home. He fell in love with the sound of the guitar, and played the E chord until his parents asked him to please learn some more chords.
“Playing guitar kind of saved me,” Bonneville says. “It took me away from the challenge of the language barrier, and gave me a thing to hang on to.”
Bonneville took one or two guitar lessons, but says he really learned to play “from everything and everyone he could.” In high school, he joined a band that covered songs by Roy Orbison, Elvis Presley, the Zombies and other British bands.
Playing music gave him something of his own, but it didn’t keep him out of trouble. Bonneville started having run-ins with the law, and eventually got expelled from school. His dad, who Bonneville describes as authoritarian and very religious, didn’t want him hanging around being a bad influence on his eight siblings, and challenged the teenager to join the military. Bonneville joined the Marines, and in 1967, went to Vietnam.
On his return, Bonneville once again found himself feeling lost. Once again, it was music that gave him direction. He was driving a cab, wondering what he was going to do with his life when he was turned on to the great blues harmonica players like Little Walter, James Cotton, Sonny Boy Williamson, and Paul Butterfield. Bonneville took a shine to the instrument and practiced it between cab fares. When he combined playing harmonica with playing his guitar, a new musical chapter opened for Bonneville, but he was 40 years old before he started writing his own songs.
“For 20 years, I had been playing other people’s music, but never the way I heard it,” he says. “I always changed it a bit to suit me and my style. When I started writing, I had a guitar style that was already there from doing that.”
When asked why he waited so long to start writing his own songs, Bonneville says he’s not sure, but maybe it was a matter of confidence.
“It could have taken me all that time to get comfortable with the English language,” he says.
Once he did start writing, Bonneville was drawn to dark characters, criminals, and lost souls. Part of his attraction to these characters is that they provide a way for people to live another life vicariously, and also because he can relate to them.
“I have a bit of a criminal mind myself,” Bonneville says. “I like to break rules, and I like to go my own way. I think criminals and people who live at the edge of society have something to say, and something to teach the rest of us.”
In the spirit of the blues, Bonneville takes hard-luck tales and turns them into toe-tapping, swinging tunes—something he has a well-established reputation for doing. He attributes his ability to create a nice groove to time spent in New Orleans, where he learned to take his time. He wonders if the languid pace in the town—and the music—is because it’s so hot there in the summertime.
“Being in New Orleans taught me to relax,” he says. “The music has its own groove. It’s as much about what you don’t say as what you do say.” He adds, “The listener can be coaxed into imagining things that aren’t even there if you just give them the space to do it.”
On his latest album, Easy Gone, Bonneville does what he does best—tell stories of fringe dwellers, criminals and the broken-hearted. Songs include “Where Has My Easy Gone,” “Love is Wicked,” “Lone Freighter’s Wail,” and a cover of the Hank Williams tune “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.”
Despite his proclivity for dark subject matter, and a history that includes more than a few bumps, Bonneville counts himself among the lucky.
“No matter how crooked my path has been,” he says, “I feel really, really fortunate to have found what it is I’m here to do on the earth.”
Ray Bonneville performs at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, May 15 at the Corralitos Cultural Center, 127 Hames Road, Corralitos. $15-$20. 254-2669.
