The 1977 song Linda Ronstadt always hated singing: “I’ll have to sing it the rest of my life”
With a back catalogue as massive as that of Linda Ronstadt, there’s inevitably going to be some bumps along the way.
Indeed, voicing her own opinions is something that, for better or worse, the singer has made a steadfast point of never shying away from. Whether that’s her outspokenness on the current state of the US government, her refusal to apologise after performing in South Africa during apartheid, or her infamous Michael Moore casino incident in Vegas, she is not one to back down from a fight.
In this sense, it has always been easy for her tenacity to extend into the vast scores of her songbook, with Ronstadt having created more than enough songs in her time that she can ultimately turn her nose up at. But in her case, rather than this being some dusty old relic she has long since forgotten about, it’s actually her biggest hit.
Some might say that her 1977 version of ‘Blue Bayou’, a reimagined cover of the song originally written by Roy Orbison, would be her signature class. As it turns out, Ronstadt herself doesn’t think much like this, possibly because it wasn’t her song to begin with, but also because she has now absolutely sung it to death.
A suggestion during a 2014 interview that the song is somehow “underrated” was met with consternation from the singer, as she flatly replied: “It was my biggest hit.” Yet by the same token, despite being appreciative of the acclaim it must have brought her, there was more than a bit of bridled resentment over that song being the chosen one.
“It was my biggest hit, so it wasn’t particularly underappreciated,” Ronstadt seemingly begrudgingly expanded. “I would curse every night I sang it because it was such a wide range, too low and too high. Why did I pick this song… I’ll have to sing it the rest of my life,” she sighed, before forcing herself to admit the reality, despite her pretensions.
“It’s a good song,” she confessed. “What I really thought was it reminded me of a Mexican song, and it was before I began to record in Spanish. I asked my record company if they would pay for me to record it in Spanish, and I asked my dad to translate it. I took the words down on the phone as he translated it. I made some grammar errors. I came out like a hermaphrodite in a time machine.”
While that probably wasn’t the expression anyone would have expected her to use, that sense of being all things and everywhere all at once has remained a staple of Ronstadt’s career. That example, the Spanish translation of ‘Blue Bayou’ that came out as ‘Lago Azul’, spoke to a much wider condition where the musician really did try to cater to every kind of audience.
Yet the problem remains ever thus: it was too difficult for her to sing, and she therefore began to build up some level of hatred and resentment towards ‘Blue Bayou’. It’s a classic case of sod’s law, in which the most convoluted song has to follow you around for the rest of time. Ronstadt would have to get in training for vocal gymnastics because for that tune, she had to come out swinging.
