The 1998 song where Linda Ronstadt set a family’s history to music
While Linda Ronstadt wasn’t exactly well known for writing the songs that she performed herself, what she always had an innate ability to do was make the listener believe in the lyrics she was singing through the sheer power of her captivating performances.
Whether singing tales of love or heartbreak, you’d be immediately invested as a result of Ronstadt’s abilities as a vocalist, and you could immerse yourself in the world that she’s inhabiting and feel every emotion that she’s going through. This ability to convey feeling so effortlessly was ultimately what made her such a prominent figure in the world of popular music for such a long time, and until her retirement in 2011, she continued to flaunt this ability to an impeccable standard.
However, there have been moments where you don’t have to do all that much imagining of a situation when listening to the lyrics of a song, because the words that are coming out of her mouth are steeped in truth and biographical storytelling provided to her. On these occasions where she was just the conduit for telling said story in an engrossing manner, she did an equally impressive job of hooking the listener in, and her 1998 song ‘Dreams of the San Joaquin’ is a prime example of this.
Written by Randy Sharp and Jack Wesley Routh, the primary inspiration for the subject matter came courtesy of Sharp’s own family history, using the story of their migration from Oklahoma to California during the Dust Bowl years in the 1930s, where ecological disaster halted growth in certain regions. Looking to escape the epicentre of the drought, his family upped sticks and came to the West Coast, and this is exactly the sort of hardship that Ronstadt is singing about in the song.
“It’s two generations ago, but there’s remnants of that mentality,” Sharp later recounted in an interview with Songfacts. “There’s a lot of Sharps still in California that are descendants of those people, and my parents still talk about it, they were children during a lot of that.”
The story may not have been personal to Ronstadt herself, having grown up in Arizona in the 1940s and ‘50s before moving out to California herself, but the way in which she delivers it is packed with plenty of emotion as though she feels for the hardships that the Sharps and other displaced families went through.
“We tried to tell a story of both how desperate it was, and how these people lost everything, and tried to get to California because there was supposed to be work here,” Sharp continued to explain. “Then they got here and discovered that there were already thousands of families needing work.”
California is often depicted in works of art and fiction as a land of opportunity where the weather is always beautiful, and there is plenty for people to indulge in, but the reality that Sharp tells and Ronstadt delivers is quite the opposite, choosing to acknowledge the gorgeousness while also identifying the gravity of the situation.
“Jack Routh and I spent a long time trying to tell both those stories of the paradise, and the fact that it was just an incredibly difficult life once they got here,” Sharp concluded. “We were just trying to paint a picture of these two things; the beauty of the place coupled with the difficulty of the work.”
It’s a fascinating yet heartbreaking tale of desperation and destitution, but it’s one that Ronstadt managed to convey superbly through her innate ability to tell a story. Those stories may not always be her own, but what she’s always been able to do is deliver them with justice.
