The one vocalist Linda Ronstadt called her “favourite” female singer of all time
What Linda Ronstadt did for the entire world of rock and roll can’t really be denied.
There had certainly been plenty of female singers before her, but whereas someone like Janis Joplin wasn’t afraid to get gritty whenever she sang her bluesy tunes, Ronstadt proved that there was a middle ground between the shouting songs and tunes that had a little more nuance in their delivery like ‘Heart Like A Wheel’. While there were more innovators that came after her, nothing could stop her from going back to her old favourites.
But listening to a lot of the early music Ronstadt made back in the day, what made it so interesting was how refreshing it was compared to everything else. No one was blending country music in this way on the charts yet, much less with a female voice, and it wasn’t being done in the same way that someone like Dolly Parton might do it. No, Ronstadt had that same sense of grit that people like Neil Young had, and she was never afraid to take a risk every now and again.
I mean, no one in their right mind would have put their career on the line and left the rockstar life to do Broadway, but Ronstadt was truly fearless in every step she made. She knew that nothing was going to get in her way of doing whatever the hell she wanted to, and if that meant upsetting a handful of people along the way, that was their problem.
Granted, it’s not like her music was going to be the most accommodating to the masses or anything. Most people listening to country-rock weren’t suddenly going to get on the bandwagon of Mexican music when Ronstadt changed languages on a few of her albums, but it was always about getting the right tunes out of her system. She knew that she needed to satisfy herself before anyone else, and that kind of music had been ingrained in her since she was a child.
Keep in mind that Ronstadt wasn’t born to strictly sing about the California sunshine. She had grown up in Tucson, Arizona, and before she had even heard about rock and roll, she was tuning in to the Mexican music happening across the airwaves, and for her, Lola Beltran was everything that a female singer should have been when she was first growing up.
That music wasn’t readily accepted by the masses, but Ronstadt was going to do everything she could to shout the praises of Patron, saying, “Mexican ranchero music is the equivalent of American country music. There’s a singer named Lola Beltran; she’s my favourite chick singer in the world. She’s so good. The rhythms are more like Greek music…it’s sort of like 6/8 time. But it’s very hard driving and very intense.”
And when you listen to the records, that intensity is what drove Ronstadt to start making rock and roll in the first place. She was more at home singing the kind of songs that she had grown up with, but even compared to the biggest names in rock and roll at the time, there’s a good chance that some of the biggest ranchero musicians could put people like The Rolling Stones to shame whenever they played.
But that only further goes on to prove why Ronstadt never saw the parameters that most other people did when it came to music. She had a healthy respect for rock and roll, but there was never much of a difference between hearing a great solo and the kind of electrifying singing that she heard back when she was only dreaming of being a singer.
