The 1974 album that crushed Linda Ronstadt’s dream: “I’m sure they’d be hits”
Even though the work of Linda Ronstadt has spanned almost every genre imaginable, there is still a lot to learn about her.
You could discuss at length the lineage of her family history and what led her to the point of being perhaps the world’s most peripatetic musician, but within this, there was a cultural legacy that extended far beyond just the outback of Arizona. Ronstadt has always been a proud American, yes, but a piece of her heart also belongs in Mexico.
Her deep-rooted connection to the country began in earnest long before she was even born, with her paternal great-grandfather emigrating to the country from Germany during the 1800s. And despite the fact that, in time, the family crossed the border into the States, that memory was very much kept alive among all of the Ronstadts.
With the sound of the Mexican music she would hear around the house as a child still ringing in her ears, this aspect of her cultural heritage was something Ronstadt was keen to bring to the table in her career. Yet the reality was that convincing the harsh bigwigs of the industry world that this would be a good idea would prove a mountain to climb.
And then, after all that, someone else had the audacity to nick her idea. Well, kind of: Ronstadt had been pleading so long to make Spanish songs and being told no that eventually, another artist managed to get in there before her, much to her eternal dismay. The pain of that was something she never let go of.
Recalling the tribulations she went through with the record companies during an interview in 2020, she said: “I told them, ‘I’ve got all these songs in Spanish, and I’m sure they’d be hits.’ One of them was ‘La Bamba’, and one was ‘La Negra’. I said, ‘If ‘La Bamba’ was a hit, I can make ‘La Negra’ a hit.’”
However, as it turned out, Joan Baez had already beaten her to it. In 1974, she recorded a Spanish-language album, Gracias a la Vida, on the very same record label that Ronstadt was on, and thus brought all her dreams crashing down in flames as the powers that be did not want to repeat what had likely been seen as a one-trick pony shot.
As such, Ronstadt was somewhat left to sit on her hands for a while. But she watched. And she waited. And she plotted. Eventually, the best part of a decade later, she was able to strike while the iron was hot once more and created the 1987 album Canciones de Mi Padre, aptly translated to ‘Songs of My Father’.
Despite her saying that the record label were initially “horrified”, they were soon eating their words as the album became the best-selling non-English record of all time. For Ronstadt, it was an ode to home and the history she had always known. But she summed it up best: “I had to sing those songs, or I was going to die.”
