The Beauty of Song, Part Seven: Linda Ronstadt

Linda Ronstadt was such a huge part of my musical experience growing up, I didn't have to consult her Web site or her Wikipedia page very much. She was easily one of the most ubiquitous female singers in the 1970s, making records that fit nicely into both Top Forty AM and album-rock FM playlists.

She grew up in Tucson learning to sing, and her father, a Mexican of German descent, especially loved music, including the canciones of Mexico.  As a young singer, Ms. Ronstadt had her first taste of stardom when her band, the Stone Poneys, scored a hit single with their 1967 release "Different Drum," a tune written by Michael Nesmith of the Monkees.   She had a problem with the use of strings on the record, but that's what made it a hit. 

The Stone Poneys didn't last long, but it led to a solo career for Ms. Ronstadt, who released her first album,  Hand Sown . . . Home Grown in 1969.  Her follow-up, 1970's Silk Purse, featured her first big solo hit "Long Long Time," which fit the vibe of the laid-back Southern California sound that would soon be known as "country rock."

Ms. Ronstadt toiled in obscurity for the first half of the 1970s, but her persistence paid off, and she scored big in 1974 with her LP Heart Like a Wheel, which went double platinum and featured two chart-topping singles, a cover of Betty Everett's "You're No Good" and the Everly Brothers' "When Will I Be Loved."  This set a pattern for Ms. Ronstadt for the rest of the decade, during which she established herself as an interpreter of rock and roll and rhythm and blues standards.  Her hits read like a history of popular music from 1955 to 1970 - covers of Martha and the Vandellas' "Heat Wave," "Buddy Holly's "That'll Be the Day"and "It's So Easy," Roy Orbison's "Blue Bayou," and Smokey Robinson's "Ooh Baby Baby," among others.

Although one wouldn't think so, her penchant for fifties and sixties covers made her one of the most controversial singers in seventies rock.  Critics who knew and revered the original recordings of the songs she performed declared that she brought nothing new to them, rendering inferior versions of these songs to show off her voice but not necessarily use it to say anything.  The critics could only watch the record-buying public not care, as Ms. Ronstadt sold millions of copies of her many releases.   

Not all of Linda Ronstadt's songs were covers of oldies.  For her 1976 album Hasten Down the Wind, she recorded two songs she had a hand in writing and she also debuted two songs from an unknown songwriter - Karla Bonoff, an earlier nominee on this blog.  The two songs in particular were "Someone To Lay Down Beside Me" and "If He's Ever Near" - a year before Ms. Bonoff recorded them herself. And she covered her contemporaries - Warren Zevon and Elvis Costello were among the singer-songwriters whose work made it onto a Linda Ronstadt record.  And a certain governor of California, Jerry Brown, made it into Linda Ronstadt's personal life, prompting LA rockers not already politically active to suddenly take an interest in politics.

She began the 1980s with her New Wave-inspired album Mad Love and ended it with duets with Aaron Neville that appeared on her Cry Like a Rainstorm, Howl Like the Wind LP.  She did everything else in between.  She put out three albums of big-band standards arranged by Nelson Riddle, What's New (1983), Lush Life (1984), and For Sentimental Reasons (1986), recorded a Spanish-language album of Mexican folk songs, and recorded a country LP with Emmylou Harris and Dolly Parton.  Oh yeah, and she found time to star with Kevin Kline and Estelle Parsons in a Broadway production of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance.  Her standards triptych, though, was particualrly influential; it's unlikely that Rod Stewart would have recorded a series of pop standards without Ms. Ronstadt's influence.   Her album of Mexican songs also helped spur other performers to delve into their own ethnicity for inspiration.  (A record playing up her own Mexican heritage, incidentally,would have been unthinkable in the 1970s, just as it was unthinkable that Paul McCartney's 1977 Scotch-Irish ballad "Mull of Kintyre" could have been a hit in America; the seventies were a time of average white bands.)

Ms. Ronstadt's career slowed down in the 1990s and 2000s, though the period did include her well-received 1993 album Winter Light and her 1995 album Feels Like Home, as well as a reunion with Emmylou Harris and Dolly Parton.  She ultimately retired in 2009 owing to Parkinson's disease.  Once as reviled by the press as she was revered by the public - rock critic Dave Marsh made her the only woman or person of color on an otherwise exclusively white male list of the ten worst rock-era performers ever - Ms. Ronstadt has seen the stock in her legacy rise as more people, including this blogger, come to realize with a gifted and versatile performer she is.