She developed her singular eclecticism, in part, as a way of coping with a music industry that would have kept her in a stadium-sized box - she hated playing those big venues, ripping up her voice in front of anonymous-feeling hordes - and turned to theater music and standards as a way of reclaiming her right to be a subtle interpreter. It now includes everything from George Gershwin and Cole Porter to early rock 'n' roll, the Nashville sound, Mexican canciones, Laurel Canyon balladry, Cajun two-steps, and the punkish sounds of New Wave. When the multi-platinum success of her fifth album, Heart Like a Wheel, sent Ronstadt into the arena-rock stratosphere, she became the premium interpreter of an American songbook that she’s continued to redefine throughout her career. She was that woman who, like so many others, did the real power lifting within a scene dominated by self-styled heroic men. At the same time, she continued championing her own peers, who played on her most successful albums. In 1971, when she was 25, she told a reporter that she didn’t have the voice to do soul music by 1974, she’d developed her own style of testifying that made her funky reinterpretation of Dee Dee Warwick’s 1963 shouter “You’re No Good” into a number one hit, one she’d follow up by reinvigorating songs by Martha and the Vandellas, Chuck Berry, Roy Orbison, and the Everly Brothers, among others. She grew up in public through her recordings. She was an everywoman who, instead of building a world through songwriting, did so by taking on others’ words and melodies and reshaping them with intelligence and boundless energy. From her teenage days in the folk trio the Stone Poneys, Ronstadt developed a persona that spoke profoundly to women waking up to the way many men had condescended to them throughout the early years of the supposed sexual revolution. Those who underestimate Ronstadt as a pretty face and voice who rose to fame on the power of others’ songwriting and production talents - and there have been far too many in that camp - are ignorant. Album titles like Hand Sown…Home Grown, Simple Dreams, and Hasten Down the Wind celebrated a naturalness that was complemented by a meticulous attention to musical detail and one of the greatest ears of the rock era. Raised on country and the ranchera music that echoed through her Tuscon, Arizona, neighborhood, Ronstadt sang with a verve and directness that eradicated the pretentiousness that could sometimes afflict the children of the counterculture.
“She is offering us something very valuable for the '70s: not a fantasy figure, but a reality figure,” wrote the rock scribe Tom Nolan in 1974. In a time of fading utopian hopes, she emerged as an emissary able to connect old musical ways with the new consciousness of her own maverick generation. Her voice didn’t seem just to come from the house, but out of the earth, over the water into the rickety little town and the scrubland and forest beyond it.”īeginning in the 1970s, Linda Ronstadt’s singing has had that kind of geological effect throughout popular music: steadying, seemingly able to erase time and trends within one flow of feeling that goes below the surface and the deeper strata of American consciousness. “Gene was glad it was Linda Ronstadt, not someone soppy or sickly sweet,” Wakefield wrote. In Home Free, his 1977 novel of faded denim hippie dreams, Dan Wakefield described his wandering anti-hero Gene Barrett overhearing a song on a nearby record player as he dozes in a hammock in Maine - Linda Ronstadt singing her folkish country ballad “Long Long Time” in the alto that wafted through many a window in those imperfect, exploratory days.
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