The First Lady of Rock

There are certain quotes that in their pithiness tell you everything you need to know about their subject. Fitzgerald’s description of Gatsby’s smile is one: “It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.” In this esteemed echelon of description also sits the country icon and long-time marijuana enthusiast Willie Nelson, who once noted that “there are two kinds of men in this world: those who have a crush on Linda Ronstadt and those who have never heard of her”.

This writer’s Linda awakening came in 1977, with the release of the song Blue Bayou. I didn’t know what a bayou was, let alone the fact that they came in different colours. But three notes in, I too felt an indescribable melancholy for the place and a yearning to “go back some day”. Then I saw the album cover and felt something else entirely.

How to describe that voice? A mille-feuille of honeyed bourbon with the plaintive clarity of a prairie mission bell and a dozen lifetimes of heartbreak. Any lyric or melody fortunate to pass over those vocal chords was instantly elevated and enhanced.

The doe-eyed cowgirl of your dreams with a ten-gallon mop of mahogany hair that wisped around the face just so grew up on a ranch outside Tucson, Arizona. Steeped in her Mexican heritage and her family’s Roman Catholic faith, she would later say, “I don’t record [any type of music genre] that I didn’t hear in my family’s living room by the time I was 10. It is my rule that I don’t break because... I can’t do it authentically. I really think that you’re just hardwiring [synapses] in your brain until the age of maybe 12 or 10, and there are certain things you can’t learn in an authentic way after that.”

Rarely, then, has a listening public been more grateful for an artist’s musical upbringing, as Ronstadt was able to flit from rock to country to light opera to Latin and the Great American Songbook, all the while retaining her sonorous calling cards. “If I didn’t hear it on the radio, or if my dad wasn’t playing it on the piano, or if my brother wasn’t playing it on the guitar or singing it in his boys’ choir, or my mother and sister weren’t practising a Broadway tune or a Gilbert and Sullivan song, then I can’t do it today. It’s as simple as that. All of my influences and my authenticity are a direct result of the music played in that Tucson living room.”

Over the course of 29 studio albums and 37 compilations, she received 11 Grammys, three American Music Awards, an Emmy, and nominations for a Tony award and a Golden Globe. She was the first female singer who could be relied upon to fill arenas, and in those early years, on the road with The Doors, Neil Young and Jackson Browne, she glowed with a singular incandescence.

Amid the accolades was a ribald sense of self-deprecation. In 1992 The Simpsons came calling, and she sang the jingle to a television ad for The Plow King, Barney Gumble’s rival business to Homer’s Mr. Plow. Later in the episode, she reveals she’s working on a Spanish version. This was no mere throwaway line. Ronstadt taught an entire generation of music fans to habla a little Español with albums such as 1987’s mariachi-drenched Canciones de Mi Padre and 1991’s Mas Canciones.

There are myriad dimensions to Ronstadt’s legacy, but in bridging the gap between Spanish music and white mainstream America, she was as much a pioneer as Motown had been in bringing soul to the pale masses.

Part of her success undoubtedly lay in the breadth of her influences, and her inspiration in this regard was Maria Callas. “There’s no one in her league. That’s it. Period,” Ronstadt said. “I learn more... about singing rock ’n’ roll from listening to Maria Callas records than I ever would from listening to pop music for a month of Sundays. She’s the greatest chick singer ever.”

On a financial level, the figures might beg to differ. In 1978 alone, Ronstadt made more than $58m in today’s money. And a few years before that she’d helped a little-known outfit that used her backing band by lending her pipes to a new tune. The song was Desperado, and the band was The Eagles.

There were six Rolling Stone covers along the way, with one each for Time and Newsweek. She also blitzed Broadway and received a Tony nomination for The Pirates of Penzance in 1980 before she teamed up with the long-time Sinatra collaborator Nelson Riddle for three albums of standards. Which were anything but by the time Linda had finished with them. Both these projects were initially viewed with scepticism, suspicion and a fair whack of side-eye by the rock ’n’ roll establishment. To which Linda said, ‘Hold my margarita’, then showed them what a crossover really looked like.

Away from the stage, Ronstadt dated the California governor Jerry Brown, comedian Jim Carrey and filmmaker George Lucas. She later adopted two children, and today divides her time between Tucson and San Fran. Politically, she lands where you might expect her to, and has lent her voice to gay rights, against punitive immigration laws in her native Arizona, and was Team Kamala in last year’s U.S. election.

By the turn of the millennium, however, Ronstadt’s vocal range — a several-octave powerhouse from contralto to soprano — had begun to diminish, and an initial diagnosis of Parkinson’s was later amended to progressive supranuclear palsy. Her last live performance came in 2009, but her fingerprints remain on half a century of popular song.

Thanks to her prolific output — “I could sing through a 105 fever or a root canal, or anything you could throw at me” — and the omnivorous digitisation of back catalogues, her voice is, at least in a sense, forever preserved. As is Willy Nelson’s undeniable truth: “There are two kinds of men in this world: those who have a crush on Linda Ronstadt and those who have never heard of her.”